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Woz Cites "Scary" Prius Acceleration Software Problem
theodp writes "Speaking at Discovery Forum 2010, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak went off topic and spoke about a 'very scary' problem with his 2010 Toyota Prius. 'I don't get upset and teed off at things in life, except computers that don't work right,' said Woz, who went on to explain he'd been trying to get through to Toyota and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration for three months, but could not get anyone to explore an alleged software-related acceleration problem. 'I have a new model that didn't get recalled,' Steve said. 'This new model has an accelerator that goes wild but only under certain conditions of cruise control. And I can repeat it over and over and over again — safely.' Toyota said it investigates all complaints. 'We're in the business of investigating complaints, assessing problems and finding remedies,' said Toyota's John Hanson. 'After man-years of exhaustive testing we have not found any evidence of an electronic [software] problem that would have led to unwanted acceleration.'"
We recently discussed other problems Toyota has had with electronic acceleration systems.
Businesses lose the opportunity to obtain knowledgeable input, because their call centers are staffed by low labor-cost morons. The need to identify technically savvy callers and hand-off those calls to comparably competent staff members.
Just like with Windows, you got a bug, report it to Microsoft, but until they get zillions of complaints, they won't put a dime in solving the bug.
Someone hacked Toyota and inserted a bit of dodgy software in the engine management system.
It must have been China or T'rrists or Iran or whoever we want to blame this week.
just put a PID controller in there. that'll fix it.
They exist between developers/engineers and end users.
You have call center workers that log this stuff in and then someone else that reads thru it and decides what gets passed on.
The only time it actually makes it up the chain is when it hits CNN because someone died, or in the case of someone famous that says something to the media.
Only now will they hear of it and investigate it.
The guy says he can reproduce it, and it's Woz.... if he say it's there I believe him.
It's too bad that most bugs go unfixed because of the barriers put in place.
Um, fact check. 134hp, that's engine + synergy drive. 0-60 is about eight weeks (well, 9.8 seconds but what's the difference?)). Under no circumstance whatsoever short of driving off a cliff will a stock Prius accelerate wildly. Sorry Woz! ;)
(Uh, I'm kidding. Obviously.)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Why certain critical vehicle systems would ever be allowed to be electronic without NASA level testing. Safety critical systems like steering, brakes and acceleration should never require electronics to controlled properly.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
... he peed in the iPad when it happened for the first time.
The whole Toyota recall thing doesn't make sense. Toyota describes sticking accelerators but, the reports from the consumers indicate unexpected self acceleration. Two very different problems with two very different causes.
Sadly, the ambulance chasing lawyers have now all gizzed with excitement over Toyota's mishandling of this and, with the law suits flying, we'll likely not get a truthful and accurate description of the problem and cause for a very long while.
Sorry, but that's his own fault, he was using the "iWoz cruising" system.
I have no great love for Wert and the Jalopniks, finding them to consistently side with the GOP on social issues and sidestep into political discourse way too much for a blog on cars.
/. If he calls bullshit on software design, it will get attention. Worse off, as Jalopnik shows on the bit on the Today show appearance by the Toyota CEO - they seem willing and ready to lie through their teeth about what was known, when it was known, and what their responses to the NTSB have been. Matt Lauer is sitting there with a copy of the NTSB report on his lap, saying they knew humidity was causing pedals to stick in 2007, and there is the Toyota CEO lying his ass off, saying only in October of 2009 was it brought to their attention. Toyota is recalling a shitload of Camrys and Corollas, and now Woz drops this bomb about Prius software design on them. It's time for the Hedge fund managers to make more money and short the hell out of Toyota.
However, they have been frontrunning this story and trying to lead the charge to push it up to the MSM.
Woz is Woz, he needs no introduction on
Note, in NTSB reports - many of these cars have had the brake pads TOTALLY burned through, indicating that once these cars took off on people, they COULD NOT stop. In the fatality cases, if the driver had forced the car into neutral (the linkage would have resisted, you would have needed to really muscle it) they could have saved themselves. Instead they rode the brake into an obstacle.
This is PR nightmare time for Toyota. It will make the Ford-Firestone debacle look like simple times.
Posting video of the problem, demonstrating its repeatability, should get the attention of the vendor and of regulators.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
"lower gear"? Clearly you've never driven a Prius. A Prius don't have gears.
I guess they didn't realize they are not only a car company but also a computer manufacture and application developer? So apparently they never created a bug reporting process, like every other app developer and hardware vendor?
It all starts at 0
If Woz can reproduce the problem, then I'll believe him.
I'm willing to give Woz the benefit of the doubt on this until his complaint is actually heard, tested and responded to by Toyota. He's generally a smart guy (if a little wacky sometimes.) And he's got a lot of time on his hands, and no obvious motive for smearing Toyota.
Sounds like Woz's stint on "Dancing with the Stars."
A Toyota PR executive has gone on record, on camera, saying this isn't an Electronics issue. Woz stating uncategorically that not only is it tied to Cruise COntrol (an electronic component) but that it is reproduceable at will on the newest version that isn't covered by the planned recalls, underscores that it most certainly IS an electrical issue. Personally, if I owned ANY model of the vehicles currently targeted for recall, I would drive to my nearest dealer, demand in writing that they tell me I will NEVER have the accelerator issue and offer them the chance to take my vehicle and let me drive a vehicle that they will tell me will never have the issue until mine has been repaired. I would record the conversation and tell them in no uncertain terms that should my life be endangered by their product, I will expect the resultant lawsuit to make me a majority owner in whatever remains of their company. An electronics related issue for Toyota is VERY bad since the majority of their vehicles share common electronics components, one of their trademarked solutions for efficient production and manufacturning cost savings. Now for the troll: For all you poor schmucks with your regal attitude for buying non-American vehicles because Toyota has "so much higher quality" I would like to thank you in advance for thinning your end of the gene pool. Especially all you Apple Fan Boyz who bought a Prius to be "just like Woz".
Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N
[quote]Any car will 'accelerate wildly' under cruise control, given the right conditions, i.e. you are going up a hill and it can't maintain speed in the current gear. [/quote] The condition you describe, in a car with an automatic transmission, will cause the auto to down-shift, not "accelerate wildly".... I am glad for this thread though, there was a discussion on fark about the vapid Toyota fanboy-appologist crowd, and how they just might be "the Apple of cars".. It looks think that circle is now closed..
woz said he could reproduce safely .. I bet it is the same isssue as : This poster op
"I can nudge my cruise control speed lever and my speed barely goes up, say from 80 to 81.I nudge at again and again, up to 83. Then I nudge it again and the car takes off, no speed limit. Nudging the cruise speed control lever down has no effect until I've done it about 10 times or more. By then my Prius is doing 97. It's scary because it's so wrong and so out of your normal control. I tested this over and over the night I observed it."
First, of course get your car serviced if it's part of the official recall. That's a gimme.
More importantly, if your car starts accelerating uncontrollably as if the throttle is stuck all the way open, for the love of god grab the key and TURN OFF THE ENGINE. Yes, you will lose power steering and brakes -- this is still preferable to attempting to drive the car at 100MPH until it runs out of gas. This didn't seem too difficult to me, but apparently a State Trooper in CA decided to call 911 before taking this rather obvious step.
The 911 call came at 6:35 p.m. on Aug. 28 from a car that was speeding out of control on Highway 125 near San Diego. The caller, a male voice, was panic-stricken: "We're in a Lexus ... we're going north on 125 and our accelerator is stuck ... we're in trouble ... there's no brakes ... we're approaching the intersection ... hold on ... hold on and pray ... pray ..." The call ended with the sound of a crash.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/business/01toyota.html?hp=&pagewanted=all
I know it's not kind to speak ill of the dead, and I understand that it wasn't their fault that their car was fatally defective (and Toyota is completely at fault) but it's hard for me to comprehend how someone could fail to deduce the rather straightforward solution to their problem -- car is going too fast => stop the engine. This has really been boggling my mind for the past week as these incidents pile up -- if someone can explain this to me, I'll be eternally grateful.
'After man-years of exhaustive testing...'
I think i'll believe THE computer guy.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Well, if testing was perfect there would be no bugs out in the field. Hmmmm...
I learned a long time ago that when I say my product "shouldn't" do something that's not the same as it "doesn't" do something. When I have a user come to me and tell me that's it doing something I don't think it "should" be doing, I start by believing that they are seeing the issue they tell me they're seeing. Often it turns out that they are not seeing what they think they're seeing, but some times it turns out that what I think the product should do is not reality.
Here we have someone who claims to have a reproducible test case. That's gold when you're trying to track down a problem. It may turn out to be some manufacturing defect peculiar to his car, it could be that what he thinks is a bug is really a feature, but it's definitely worth looking into, especially when your company (Toyota) is losing millions of dollars ever day because of the possibility of this bug being real.
To play devil's advocate...
Woz's problem might be specific to his own car.
I had an issue with my Cadillac's throttle assembly 3 months after buying the car (new). It was a bad sensor.
At the time I didn't know what it was (throttle, fuel line, transmission, etc). I searched through the big forum where EVERYONE reports their CTS problems and I only found 1 guy with a similar (yet different) issue. There was no tech bulletin about it, no forum posts, etc. There were other common issues out there which I managed to avoid, but this one was my particular piece that was the issue.
In short: until the car's engine temp reached equilibrium, pressing the accelerator more than 1/2 way caused the engine to buck wildly. It was like I was alternating between flooring the gas pedal and taking my foot off every second. This made merging and and stop signs quite unsafe, and I was able to replicate it 100% of the time so long as the car was cooled down first.
I had to take it to the shop 3 flippin' times before they addressed it. The first few times they said "no problem, drive it until it's worse." I had to sit in the car with a tester and finally told him "xxxx it, just floor it." He flipped out and what the car did and called a tech from corporate to look at it.
So, it's possible he has an issue that's related to the Recall but not part of the same batch of issues. It's a long shot, but still possible.
I got a speeding ticket last year while driving my mother-in-law's new Toyota Sienna for the first time. I was following a vehicle through a work-zone with the cruise control set at 50-mph (so I thought). The vehicle in front of me changed lanes and the van accelerated rapidly to 65-mph...right past a cop. I tried to explain to him that the van did it, but he didn't care.
I know now that the digital cruise control, in combination with the collision-avoidance "radar" in the Toyotas will regulate the vehicle speed, but what happens when the vehicle in front of you moves or accelerates is sometimes erratic behavior. Could this be related to what's happening? Is it user error?
I can just see the iCar, which will only be able to accelerate only as much as Apple thinks you should accelerate and will only work with an iPod/iPhone and will only be able to use Apple approved fuel in it...
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
How can one accelerate and not be able to maintain speed at the same time? I think you may be confused on the definition of "accelerate".
Wouldn't normally be this pedantic, but when you start a thread out by calling someone else an idiot...
I think Woz is right. Engineers have built the mechanical accelerators for almost a century. Everyone here knows how bugs can creep into computerized systems.
Darwinism...
I can imagine that woz explained specifically what the problem is (and how to reproduce it), but the article doesn't mention any specifics. Now I have nothing empirical to form an opinion off of.
Thanks a lot modern news media!
Wow. I never new that. So how does it move then? Happy thoughts?
The hushed recalls were the last piece of that puzzle.
Here's what you do: manually put the thing into a lower gear before it loses speed. Problem solved.
Every car I've ever driven turns off cruise control when gears are changed.
No gears?! What does it have, then? A continuously variable gear ratio? Are you from the future?
Do NOT Fuck with the WOZ!
Just DON'T
It is not prudent.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
I think that Woz's point about software glitches is a good one, but it may be just a red herring in this case. Toyota's got quality problems up the wazoo, both software and hardware (defective wazoos to be recalled later this quarter). IMHO (and the NSHO of many pundits lately) is that a focus on speed and growth, rather than planning and quality, is at the root of the problem. Sounds very much like the state of many corporate IT shops.
Check these out:
http://townhall-talk.edmunds.com/direct/view/.f0eb3fd
http://www.edmunds.com/toyota/sienna/2004/discussion.html
As someone who has written a program I was sure was bug-free after repeated testing, only to have somebody who doesn't know jack about programming find a bug, I have to disagree; Woz is probably right.
Especially remembering about the Pinto gas tank; ten bucks to fix a deadly problem they kept secret. How do you know the manufacturer found nothing? I trust a corporation about as far as I can throw their headquarters building. I would not be surprised if it came out that there is a problem, the manufacturer knows about it, but it will cost ten bucks per car for a recall. They'll weigh cost of the possible lawsuits against the surety of the cost of the recall, and if the suits are cheaper, they're not going to care about people dying.
Corporations do NOT care about your safety unless it is monetarily profitable to them or a government forces them to.
Free Martian Whores!
Umm, the dude is question is a world class tinkerer and computer INVENTOR. Yeah, he might know how to diagnose electronic control logic problems.
You do NOT turn off the car - this could lock your wheel, preventing you from steering altogether. Whats more, you'll lose power brakes - you know - the things that will stop your car quickly. Instead:
Put the car in NEUTRAL. The engine will disengage.
Hit the brake HARD. Do not pump.
Steer the car off the road, and once its stopped, you can PARK it and turn off the engine.
More importantly, if your car starts accelerating uncontrollably as if the throttle is stuck all the way open, for the love of god grab the key and TURN OFF THE ENGINE.
Many of the cars affected have push-button ignitions, and thus have no keys to turn. You have to press and hold the button for three seconds.
A car with a cruise control will only accelerate (i.e., increase its speed, which is *not* the same as increasing engine RPMs) if it's currently moving slower than the setpoint. When it reaches the setpoint, it stops accelerating. That's the whole point of cruise control. If it accelerates from the setpoint, then it's broken by definition.
I would hope that a fellow with the technical competence of The Woz would know the difference between a properly behaving cruise control and one that's broken.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Car and Driver tested overcoming the engine with the brakes. They found that while Toyota could do better the braking distance from 100mph under full throttle was only 100ft more. http://www.caranddriver.com/features/09q4/how_to_deal_with_unintended_acceleration-tech_dept
If you drive a Sidekick around a sharp right hand turn, and try to accellerate to join the traffic, the gearbox will downshift TWO gears, accellerate wildly to 7500 revs, hit the limiter protection, almost shut down the engine and then accellerate again. The net result is that at the moment when you need to accellerate, the car goes into a screaming fit and almost comes to a stand still instead. There is no fix for that one, except try not to do it. Long ago, my Volkswagen accellerator pedal broke off - because the floor rusted out - and there was no factory fix for that either. I had to weld in some sheet metal myself. I also had a Ford, a Chevy, a BMW and a Mitsubishi that had the accellerator pedal get stuck in the floor mat on occasion. This is a very common problem and the fix is super easy - pull the damn floor mat away from the pedal - duh... It seems to me that people are spoilt techno weenies and don't want to maintain their cars properly and then bitch and complain because things eventually wears out and break.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I don't know about this. My PT Cruiser, if it drops enough speed when going up a hill or overpass on cruise control, will rev up quite a bit to make up speed. I actually base my speed decisions on the inclines of the road.
"You're never ready, just less unprepared."
The vehicle was push button and pushing the button while driving doesn't do anything. Computer users may be inclined to hold the power button down for a few seconds but a computer illiterate person may not think of that. In the case of the push button start Lexus you have to hold the button down for like 3-5 seconds to force a shutdown while driving.
Also, the automatic is a weird looking gated one similiar to this http://pictures.topspeed.com/IMG/crop/200605/2006-lexus-is350-27_460x0w.jpg
There are two nutrals, one is clearly labeled and one is not. The problem is that the clearly labeled one is locked out while driving and the other one isn't clearly labeled... Combine that with a driver unfamiliar with his vehicle (this was a rental) and you have a recipe for disaster in a panic situation.
This topic has been thoroughly covered on the Internet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_(mechanics)
Carwinism!
Toyota apparently indicated that they investigate all complaints, and that they haven't come up with any electronic acceleration problems.
Franky, this is just a case of "he said, she said" - it isn't news until Woz publishes a reproducible test case for his problems. Anything else is just a Toyota vs Woz popularity contest.
...Woz not only reproduces the problem, he disassembles the firmware, finds the bug, and creates a patch. Which also makes the in-dash cell phone make calls for free, just for old time's sake.
If I were Toyota, I'd listen to Woz. Heck, I'd send out a rep to anyone who didn't sound insane and claimed he could reliably reproduce the problem. In Woz's case, I'd send out my head of engineering, though.
CVT
Publish a repeatable procedure and expected results. Ask for peer review.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
With an automatic Transmission and Cruise Control - and today's computers - that should not be an issue.
This is a 2010 Toyota Prius - as in, made VERY recently. How is it their auto transmission and cruise control can't keep a steady speed despite hills? I'd want some money back.
You do NOT turn off the car - this could lock your wheel, preventing you from steering altogether. Whats more, you'll lose power brakes - you know - the things that will stop your car quickly. Instead:
Put the car in NEUTRAL. The engine will disengage. Hit the brake HARD. Do not pump. Steer the car off the road, and once its stopped, you can PARK it and turn off the engine.
This is absolutely the correct reaction. A slightly more aggressive tact might be to drop the vehicle in low, which might blow the engine but would also severely limit your speed.
Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N
Look at the poster's name, that IS woz.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuously_variable_transmission
"A continuously variable transmission (CVT) is a transmission which can change steplessly through an infinite number of effective gear ratios between maximum and minimum values. This contrasts with other mechanical transmissions that only allow a few different distinct gear ratios to be selected. The flexibility of a CVT allows the driving shaft to maintain a constant angular velocity over a range of output velocities."
It then goes on to note that a Prius actually has something a bit different, since it derives power from both the motor and the engine, and not from a single source.
Also, about Woz's thing... I wonder if it doesn't have more to do with impatience than run-away acceleration. The Prius's cruise control accelerates gradually when you increase the threshhold, it doesn't lurch forward and immediately try to attain the new speed. But I believe if you keep pressing it, the threshhold eventually gets high enough above the current speed that it uses a lower gear ratio and will accelerate more quickly to what the CC is now set at.
I know my VW Golf will eventually downshift and leap forward if you increase the cruise control faster than the car can accelerate in whatever it's current gear is. Since you may, by then, have set the CC to like 20mph above where you're currently at, it may indeed seem like a runaway car.
Priuses electrical engines are directly connected to the four wheels. No gearbox needed. DUH.
i'm betting toyota is going to secretly fix the software the problems when the go in and put the shim into the pedal assembly, making the whole thing a bit of a decoy because they don't want people no not trust the computers in their cars.
Dashboard Widgets
Its, not it's. Curses!
While I agree with you in principle, I would advise against being pedantic unless you yourself know the exact definitions of the words involved.
Slowing down is acceleration; it just happens to be opposite to your direction of motion. We know this must be true, because in a different frame of reference you would in fact be speeding up.
Nope through continuous variable transmission http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=prius+transmission
"I always assume Psychology students are hiding in the bushes"
You can get off your high horse...did you forget the Ford Pinto and Mustang 2 where the gas tank could get ripped open if the car was rear-ended?
More recently, in 2009 ford recalled 4.5 million vehicles to replace the cruise control deactivation switch because under certain circumstances it could catch fire.
'We're in the business of investigating complaints, assessing problems and finding remedies,' said Toyota's John Hanson. 'After man-years of exhaustive testing we have not found any evidence of an electronic [software] problem that would have led to unwanted acceleration.'"
Didn't Hanson used to work for the Tobacco Industry - you know, "we found no linkage between tobacco use and cancer...." even though scientists and medical professionals knew all along.
If you're going 80, accelerating, and not controlling your car well enough that a sudden acceleration like that kills you, you would have died anyway. Even when legal, I don't think 85 is something you should leave on cruise control. The difference between cruising at 85 and cruising at 100 isn't really that significant from a safety standpoint. Both are not great ideas.
Just go 80. If you're the sort of person that cares enough about fuel efficiency to buy a Prius, you ought to care about the significant drops in fuel efficiency that appear when you start moving up past 75 or so.
Which only serves to reinforce the notion that it is, in fact, the same problem.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Do not just "turn off" the engine, make it clear to turn the ignition switch back ONE single position, commonly the accessory position. If you completely turn the key the whole way, your steering wheel will lock and you will be just as phucked.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
woz said he could reproduce safely .. I bet it is the same isssue as : This poster op
I'll bet it is too. I'm willing to bet a whole lot of money it is.
Read the EULA that comes with the "software" for your car.
It comes WITHOUT WARRANTY, or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, and often contains KNOWN DEFECTS.
It's a good thing simple programmers can not be held accountable for their little flaws, but the engineer who signs off on the design can.
Keep calling yourselves software-engineers while you can, this problem will only illustrate the vast knowledge gap and liability gap that exists between programmers and engineers.
If they had just said "we take all complaints seriously", that would be one thing.
They then go on to make excuses for why Woz's complaint hasn't gotten more attention. (Under no other interpretation would the "man-years of testing" in which they found no problem be at all relevant.)
Now, since they've essentially admitted that the first sentence is a lie, we can ignore it and focus on the "man-years of testing". Anyone who'se worked software testing either knows that's not good enough reason to dismiss a specific report of a specific error condition, or isn't good at software testing.
And as always, pay attention to what they didn't say. Nowhere do they say "we tested the conditions that were reported and couldn't find a problem under those conditions".
I have no idea if this is a serious problem or not, but I have no use for this kind of attitude that corporations pretty much habitually display.
Um, yeah, and those above your supervisor likely have an "open door policy", but good luck actually seeing them or even make an appointment. In other words, there's a difference between PR an reality. Just because Toyota SAY they investigate all complaints doesn't mean that they actually DO, nor does it mean they'll be able to do it in a reasonable timeframe even if they wanted to, given the current situation.
'After man-years of exhaustive testing we have not found any evidence of an electronic [software] problem that would have led to unwanted acceleration.'
Well, there's at least part of your problem. Did that include all possible inputs and, especially, all possible failure modes of the hardware which could misinterpret an input or feed back an incorrect value?
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
I'm surprised Woz hasn't pulled the chips, disassembled the code, written a patch (with comments) and uploaded it to the Internet already using nothing more than a bent pocket screwdriver and a wire-tie.
I mean, let's face it, the man's a God...
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
... out of my cold dead hands.
Probably cause the electronic/fluidic system failed, and I lost all steering.
Captcha: insanity
Reply to my own post.. I forgot that some cars, the steering wheel will not lock until the key is removed even if it is on the lock position. So I guess it is not that bad to turn it off, just don't pull out the keys ;)
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Mod parent up! Woz (apparently) posted how to reproduce this issue on Slashdot in the past.
That's hard for you to deduce? Really? You must not be too bright, then.
I'll help you out: when you are terrified for your life, you don't think in the same way you do when you're sitting at your desk. Your brain is in an entirely different state.
I could see you in charge of army training, though:
You say your mind has been boggling about this for a week? Are you mentally retarded? Have you any experience with humans, or any other animals, for that matter?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Why doesn't he just take the car to the dealership? He could be making a bigger deal out of this than is necessary.
It seems to be a bad habit people in high places have of trying to only deal with others in high places. His cruise control may have a problem. That doesn't mean he needs to call the CEO of Toyota directly to get the problem resolved. His dealer should be able to take care of it.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Doesn't sound like he's an idiot to me.
First, of course get your car serviced if it's part of the official recall. That's a gimme.
More importantly, if your car starts accelerating uncontrollably as if the throttle is stuck all the way open, for the love of god grab the key and TURN OFF THE ENGINE. Yes, you will lose power steering and brakes -- this is still preferable to attempting to drive the car at 100MPH until it runs out of gas. This didn't seem too difficult to me, but apparently a State Trooper in CA decided to call 911 before taking this rather obvious step.
Hi.
The Lexus which the driver had *rented*, and was therefore unfamiliar with, has a start-stop button. To stop the engine, you have to hold the button down for three seconds consistantly. I'll let you do the math on how far a WOT Lexus travels in 3 seconds; not to mention the particular mindset required to calmly count to three while your entire family hurtles down the freeway.
Further, the driver, who was a certified active-duty California Highway Patrol officer and presumably knows how to drive a car, said that he had tried to put the car in neutral, to no effect. There is rumored to be a software interrupt that stops the driver from being able to damage the engine that may or may not have affected the transmission.
Toyota is lying to everybody that there's no software problem.
Toyota don't need another reliability scandal any time soon. If this is an issue they need to address, they need to address is with all haste.
Like someone said above, the A x B x C = X scenario from Fight Club doesn't take into account bad publicity and consumer dissatisfaction. I can tell you right now that the words that come into my mind when someone says "Describe Toyota" aren't "reliability, peace of mind, value for money, safety." You may as well have tried to sell me Firestone tyres in 2001.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Some owners of recalled Toyotas are now saying they are afraid to drive them. “I live only a half mile from the office and I drive there,” said Elaine Byrnes, a Camry owner in Los Angeles. “If I had to go farther, I wouldn’t consider it.”
If she doesn't have mobility issues, driving a half mile is ridiculous.
-Xoltri
Or, to put it another way... it's not a bug, Mr. Wozniak, it's a *feature*.
I assume you're being sarcastic?
No, cars with cruise control going up hills will accelerate PAST the setpoint. Mine will go about 5mph over the setpoint going up the hill. Because, as soon as it upshifts, it loses speed again. Which is why you put it into a lower gear, otherwise it will drop 5-10mph under the set point and then 'accelerate wildldy.'
But you really shouldn't be using cruise control on hills anyhow.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
What if there is not key or readily accessible ignition switch? The article I read in the NYT cited a CA state trooper with a Toyota rental that only had a push button starter. Thus, your suggestion is not a fully valid solution to a problem with an unpredictable onset with perhaps too limited a time to attempt solutions. By the way all in the car were killed when they had a collision at a intersection.
Toyota tech is shouting: "Found it! Found it. I know what is causing the problem. The driver is named Woz"
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Really? Mine doesn't. If I hit a steep enough hill, it will lose about 5-10mph, then drop down a gear and 'accelerate wildly' until it is about 5mph over the setpoint. However, if I drop down a gear manually, it will maintain the correct speed.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that if Woz says he can reproduce it, then he's tried it in more than one Prius of the same model. I'm sure he knows that sometimes you get bad hardware. That goes for cars as well as computer.
Maybe this is different from the technology that BMW uses, but they've been using electronic throttle since 2004 (the year I have) and I haven't experienced any problems. I've always worried about the reliability of it, but I've noticed no issues. Looks like Toyota just screwed up on their code, but it's kinda par for the course for a company to ignore software issues mainly because the average car person understands the hardware, not software behind these things. And of course, with code like this, no one but Toyota can actually see that code to see that it's flawed -- you need to reproduce it under stress to prove the problem. And again, because no one can see the code, they can easily claim it's anything else but a flaw in the code.
Come on.
What's with the obsession with parsing words around here? Jesus. You guys are getting out of hand. I think it was clear the OP was not saying "at the same time". It was clear he was describing cause and effect over time. Apply a little intelligence the next time you read.
Camping on quad since 1996.
While this is true, it would only obviate the underlying issue (loss of direct vehicle control) if it happens only beyond 80. It has been stated that it is easily reproducible at high speed, but until the root cause of the issue is understood you kind of have to assume it could possibly happen at 55 as well.
Me: Doctor, doctor! Every time I drink coffee I get a horrible pain in my right eye!
Doctor: Have you considered removing the spoon?
Me: I drink my coffee black...
I guess it is too much to ask to just tap on the brake pedal to turn off the cruise control if the cruise control does something unexpected. Yes, it is a bug. Yes, Toyota needs to fix it. Not so sure cruise control is such a great idea at 80+ mph anyways if a driver is concerned about safety.
OK I'll concede the point that Woz should write something up - but Toyota should reach out to him and make it easy for him to express what he knows, or believes, on a matter that's pretty crucial to people's trust in the safety of an automobile that they're being invited to buy and put their families in. It's in Toyota's interest to investigate and respond to these kinds of claims. Also, I don't know that I could very easily specify the exact maneuvers I make in an auto for any specific instance (even, say, driving up my driveway) in a way that would be exactly reproducible. If it were me, I would have made an initial email to Toyota regarding what I'd found, and then, if nothing happened in pretty short order, I'd sell the car and buy something else. Woz has the luxury of a lot of excess time (and vehicles, probably) that most of the rest of us likely don't have.
Right, it drops down a gear, then accelerates wildly until at least 5mph over the setpoint, then upshifts, then loses speed, then accelerates... Which is why I downshift when going up a hill. It just maintains the correct speed, with no loss of speed and subsequent 'wild acceleration' to make up for it.
If Woz can reproduce this easily, like he claims, then this is the exact issue he is talking about, and all modern cars do it. Fixing it would require computerizing the automatic transmission rather than running it off of engine pressure. And that would cost money.
I thought everyone who used a cruise control knew about and knew how to deal with this issue. Evidently not.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Perhaps because if that code is encrypted he'd wind up in jail? Or maybe if he publishes any content of the code he'd wind up on the civil hook?
It could well be that he knows exactly what is wrong, but our wonderful legal system precludes his ever telling anyone or even admitting that he's researched it.
I love my Toyota, and am sick of all the Toyota bashing. I didn't know that Slashdot was a tool of the propaganda industry.
If it is 'easily reproducible' as Woz claims, it isn't the same issue Toyota has been talking about. Woz is just trying to get his face out there, he must be missing the spotlight (snicker) after he and Kathy Griffin broke up.
No, I'm convinced this is the decades old bog-standard problem with cruise control, automatic transmissions, and hills. Fixing it would require computerizing the automatic transmission which is more expensive than running it off of hydraulics powered by engine vacuum.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Car companies sell cars to people who buy them. Of course they do cost analysis. If they fixed all problems that had the slightest chance of hurting people, then their cars would cost a lot more. When you buy a Corolla over a Lexus IS, you yourself are making a choice of Money vs. Safety. The Lexus IS is certainly safer, but it also costs significantly more. You are trading off safety for cost savings. Why do you suddenly get bent out of shape when a corporation makes the exact same calculation? It's the world we live in. Toyota tries to make a car as safe as possible within a certain cost. If they were to fix all problems, the car would cost more and you would not buy it.
The car had a push button ignition, you had to hold the button 3.3 seconds to turn off the car while it is in motion. As this was a loaner car, he didn't know this. He should have, but he didn't.
Still, even without knowing that, he could have put the car into neutral and he failed to do that also.
Also, this Lexus isn't part of the pedal recall, it is only part of the floormat recall. Toyota doesn't think they have pedal problems with Japanese-built vehicles, and this (like all that I know of) Lexus is Japanese-built.
There were several ways Toyota could improve the car to overcome what happened in this case. First is, on many throttle-by-wire cars (like the Lexus ES 350 in this case), if you depress the brake, it cancels the gas. So if the gas is stuck, you brake normally and you're done. Audi has had this feature for 10 years. Another is that if you push the ignition button while moving, the car can put a message up saying "press and hold (or whatever) to turn off" instead of doing nothing. Also in a GM car for example, if you press the ignition button while moving twice within 5 seconds, the vehicle turns off. So in a panic case, you likely would press the button more than once and it would turn off.
So yeah, I believe this man could have saved his own life and failed to do so. He and the 3 others could be alive today. But Toyota has some steps they must take also to make the car more "fail-safe".
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Actually, no, I haven't. How is the CVT controlled? When and how does it decide when to trade off torque for speed? Is it computer controlled, or vacuum controlled like a regular automatic?
Anyway, if the Prius has a CVT, then I'm more than likely wrong about the specifics of the issue. I've seen it happen in many cars with cruise control, but they all have regular transmissions.
Still, it's likely a similar issue, where, basically, the throttle and the transmission don't coordinate their actions because they are separate systems controlled through different mechanisms.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Having hacked my Prius repeatedly (it has multiple dissimilar networks communicating over bridges, which is fun) and being something of an inventor and tinkerer myself, I think I can comment on that.
The car's a black box at certain levels. Because Toyota bought some of the technology from Hitachi and others they cannot release all the information - they are bound by contractual non-disclosure on some of the protocol details for CAN, for instance.
It's entirely possible that Woz's car has a unique problem. He isn't magically able to know how undocumented blocks of silicon are supposed to behave, he has to deduce from his system. If his system is broken his data is corrupt and his conclusions may not be correct.
The man deserves respect, but try not to tip over into worship.
I truly hope Woz figured it out. Best way to make the point and get people to listen?:
1. Have ABC come with him to any dealership
2. Pick out any Prius not on the recall list
3. Repeat the problem on camera
I bet THAT will get the attention of EVERYBODY.
significant drops in fuel efficiency that appear when you start moving up past 75 or so.
You're being too generous. Fuel mileage starts to drop off around 60 mph for most vehicles. See this link and the accompanying chart as well as this link from Wikipedia which shows a fuel mileage chart from various cars over the years. Note how all of them have reduced fuel mileage at 60 mph. For a more simplified version of the graph, see this link.
Even using the word 'significant' is a misnomer as you can lose 5 mpg going from 55 to 65 or nearly 10 mpg going from 60 to 70, depending on your vehicle.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Which I would say is a good reason for them to sweep it under the rug.
Free Martian Whores!
When an accelerator goes wild in an european car, the driver hits the coupling-pedal and the situation is solved.
The engine is still running, all your systems have full power and the Wheel does not lock.
But when an accelerator fails in the american pussy-automatics-car, you have a more serious problem...
Thats life, learn to handle a gearstick or get fucked in the next intersection!
And as always, pay attention to what they didn't say. Nowhere do they say "we tested the conditions that were reported and couldn't find a problem under those conditions".
Yes, but also pay attention to what Woz doesn't say:
Nowhere does the article mention what these repeatable conditions are. That's very strange; you'd think someone who found a problem in a car that can kill the unwary would report the conditions it's triggered under rather than just say that there's a problem. Furthermore, it makes it impossible to prove that the problem doesn't exist or is fixed. That latter part makes my FUD detector tingle.
I mean, really, if Woz wants to call attention to this problem, why doesn't he just give the steps to reproduce it so we can confirm it?
And neither does anyone else. That's what makes me suspicious.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
He did say (in my link) he could break. But from experience on a 2008 prius i can say that cruiscrontrol can seem to act strange because it gives no feedback until you feel it accelerates. I liked the cruise control on a renault more: it displays the speed you set into cruise control to and gave feedback more feedback. (And it has speed limiter option, useful to protect against 4 km/u too fast speeding tickicts)
By the way, the prius 2010 executive/tech (most expenisve model) has a rader controlled cruise control to match the speed of car in front of you. I wonder if this has something to do with it.
I'd be in favor of modifying this particular grammar rule. The fact is it simply makes no sense.
Why not a simple rule that we can use in every situation? E.g. ('s) is always used to indicate possessive. It would be used for 'it', and plurals, and names that end in the letter (s).
Would it look stupid? Sure. Would it require the reader to infer whether or not a contraction is used? You bet. Would it simplify the language greatly and allow us to communicate about the actual content of the message, rather than how the message is constructed?
I'll leave that last one for you to decide.
Personally, I find it disturbing that the shutdown procedure for a Toyota or Lexus is the same as for a Windows PC.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
The article wasn't clear on the cause. Glad he stopped by to clear things up.
I've seen this on occasion on other non-Prius cars, you nudge the cruise control up a few times and it just takes off. All the cars it happened with had electronic throttles, maybe that has something to do with it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You don't have to change speed to accelerate. A change in direction is also acceleration. If you drive around a curve, you are accelerating, even if you don't change speed.
In the case mentioned (Mark Saylor, California Highway Patrol, '09 Lexus crash), I've seen reports that it wasn't possible to turn the key to kill the car, because it uses a push-button ignition. It's apparently possible to kill the engine by holding the button in, but since it was a loaner car he wasn't that familiar with it. Apparently the vehicle in question also has push-button shifting, and may not allow a shift into neutral while the vehicle is in motion.
Heck, what percentage of the general population knows that there's a difference between pressing the power button (signal to OS) on a modern PC and holding the power button (tell the power supply to shut down) on a modern PC?
fencepost
just a little off
In most cases it will be difficult to put the vehicle into neutral for the reason that it is locked out to prevent the average dunderhead from blowing up the motor or worse yet, drifting downhill on idle to conserve fuel :P. Turning off the motor used to be the best method when the steering lock was an extra bit of a turn with a little key push to engage it but now with the steering locked on everything but start and run the best thing to do is to put the car in low and jump on the brakes while yanking on the e-brake and pointing towards something soft like a grassy hill or parked car.
Don't worry about hurting your car or empty ones, lawyers are cheap compared to funerals.
[Toyota's John Hanson is addressing the public]
John Hanson: ... And that's why we place customer satisfaction above all other values. We're in the business of investigating complaints, assessing problems and finding remedies.
[cut to him addressing boardroom] ... You see, gentleman, we're in the business of moving cars: and that means stonewalling complaints, assessing any threat they pose to sales, and nullifying that threat.
John Hanson:
Turning off the car WILL NEVER lock your steering wheel. Pulling the key out of the ignition may lock the wheel, but many cars don't lock if they are moving above a certain speed
oops, posting to remove accidental mod...
But what if both your gear shift and iginition push button are software controlled, and the software is the problem?
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Slowing down is acceleration; it just happens to be opposite to your direction of motion. We know this must be true, because in a different frame of reference you would in fact be speeding up.
Changing the context of terms from one vernacular to another is the worst of possible types of pendantry.
E.g. The 'accelerator pedal' on a car does not slow you down. When using the word 'accelerate' in a vehicle context, speeding up is assumed. The slowing down is referred to as 'braking'.
In a physics context this may not be the case. But unless we're going to start marshaling off specific words for exact purposes we'll just have to agree that their meaning can change based on the context of their use.
Why do you suddenly get bent out of shape when a corporation makes the exact same calculation?
Had Ford said outright "if you get rear-ended your car will probably explode" than you would have a point, but the fact is they are keeping important safety information from you for their bottom line. You don't have accurate enough information about a car's safety to make an informed decision.
Odd that you are OK with a corporation murdering human beings. Had a human done what Ford did he'd be in prison for negligent manslaughter.
Free Martian Whores!
The vehicle was push button and pushing the button while driving doesn't do anything. Computer users may be inclined to hold the power button down for a few seconds but a computer illiterate person may not think of that.
I've always wondered how many engine starter motors have burned out because people crank away for two minutes when the engine simply is not going to start (empty gas tank, etc).
Not being an idiot, its hard to predict what they do, but killing starter motors is some evidence they'll just keep on doing what doesn't work. Also see locking up brakes (pre ABS era), various poor driving judgment decisions especially relating to alcohol consumption, prayer, voting for either of the two major parties, most long term financial / educational / vocational decisions, etc.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
This is not the case with 'some' of the current cars. I have done this plenty in an 08 Audi A6 - Auto Trans.
The only effect of dropping down 1 gear, is dropping down 1 gear.
Cruise Control is unchanged.
All the tests that say brakes do stop a car with full throttle are in cases where the fly by wire electronics causes loss of control. Some reports (e.g., the police officer) were by folks who could not stop the car, and would certainly have hit brakes.
In an electronic control system, a bug could make brakes fail to work. If some other models have mechanical brake controls this would not apply.Sounds like some have electronics doing this. (One might add sudden uncommanded acceleration can be a startling event and cause problems by itself. If the driver is using cruise control, too, his foot might not be totally handy to the brake.)
What has been reported does not sound like a sticking pedal problem. That someone can't reproduce an electronic glitch in a lab does not mean none occurs, though. Anyone recall the stories about the F-111 in Vietnam where the controller would sometimes halt, leaving the pilot with no controls? Most times that happened 50 feet over trees the pilot did not survive. They tried to find that in labs too....took a very long time.
...I have the exact same problem as Woz with my 2007 Camry.
The ignition and transmission in a Prius are both controlled 100% electronically. Changing to neutral or turning off the car won't happen unless the car's software agrees with your intentions.
What key? There is just a button. While the normal human reaction to a panic situation (or even when you're in a hurry) is to press a button repeatedly and rapid fire, the button will only actually turn the car off at speed if you press and hold it, just like a modern PC.
Apparently the auto designers have never been in an elevator. Here we have an action that will only be taken in a panic situation when all sense of time is distorted to make a second seem like an eternity and the car is already not behaving normally and the designers are urging the driver to press the button and be patient!
So yeah, I believe this man could have saved his own life and failed to do so. He and the 3 others could be alive today.
With regards to the dead cop, look at the death by suicide rates for cops. I'm not implying anything about one specific instance, but the suicide rate is high enough that its a legitimate area of inquiry. Just saying that a lot of cops try to go out using tools from their job, like guns ... cars ...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1531634&cid=30974502
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'd rather he go on a spending spree that saves the economy (yes, it is working. look at the numbers.) than have him go the Bush route. Your deceptive number game not withstanding, it's clear that we finally have a President who cares more about the American people than the corporations that line his pockets.
You know what I'm talking about. Bush went on an epic killing spree that on top of needlessly ending thousands of innocent lives, wasn't paid for. Bush was so busy cutting taxes for every billionaire and outsource happy corporation that he couldn't be bothered to pay for his wars, even in normal economic times.
Barack Obama is cleaning up the mess that Republicans like yourself left us.
Show some gratitude, or at least have a bit of respect for your superiors.
Nah, the difference is the IS buyer loves it when the car takes off on its own. Watch the commercials where they are all doing donuts.
See Woz's original post here. And the explanation here. It could be argued that Toyota should change their cruise control interface so it doesn't keep increasing the "set" speed beyond a few mph above the actual speed. As long as you are aware of how it works, it does not pose a danger.
Most modern cars have engine RPM limiters; throw it into neutral with a stuck throttle and it may sound like it's going to blow up but it'll be fine. In automatic transmissions, selecting low is really only a suggestion and most automatics will freely ignore a manually selected downshift if it leads to an over-rev condition.
The only way to over-rev most cars these days is have a standard transmission and miss a shift coming down.
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
he meant "fixed" gears... Prius has a continuously variable transmission...
Re:Floor mat, really? (Score:5, Interesting)
by SteveWoz (152247) writes: Alter Relationship on 2009-11-04 0:12 (#29973870)
My old 1994 Chrysler New Yorker had a similar problem with cruise control but it wasn't as acute as was Steve describes. If I was going up any small hill on a highway and I hit the cruise control speed up button once, twice, three times the car would try to accelerate a little and then rev up like mad and try to speed up by almost +10 miles per hour until it was going much faster than I intended, making me hold the coast button for a while unit it slows down or by turning off cruise control all together with the Off button or by a light tap on the breaks.
Oh and I'm not trying to play down the problem with Toyota's accelerator pedal recall or now this cruise control issue, there is a real issue there that needs to be addressed and it appears like there is some cover-up and a lack of accountability and openness about these problems from Toyota's reactions.
I learned a long time ago that when I say my product "shouldn't" do something that's not the same as it "doesn't" do something. When I have a user come to me and tell me that's it doing something I don't think it "should" be doing, I start by believing that they are seeing the issue they tell me they're seeing. Often it turns out that they are not seeing what they think they're seeing, but some times it turns out that what I think the product should do is not reality.
That's a big key. The user is seeing SOMETHING they don't expect. There can be many reasons for that, some of which are user error and some which are not. Either way, it's the same, try to get them to tell you what they actually did (not what they intended to do) and what the response of the device was.
Odd that you are OK with a corporation murdering human beings. Had a human done what Ford did he'd be in prison for negligent manslaughter.
I was talking more about Toyota. That said, they are not murdering people. Your car is not bug free. It never will be. It may malfunction and you may die. If you are not OK with that, DO NOT BUY A CAR. They make a product that you choose to buy. I trust most car companies will make a best effort to keep their cars safe and disclose serious safety issues. Ford and the Pinto are a pretty extreme case and they really should have said something. But this is about Toyota's problem.
Now, negligent manslaughter? Please. This is not negligence. If you make a best effort to ensure the car is safe, then you were not negligent. As sad as it is, many children drown every year. Quite often this could've been prevented had an adult been around at just the right time. However, very few parents get charged with negligent manslaughter. Why? Because they did make a best effort to protect their child and, unfortunately, people, like cars, are not bug free. Sometimes are attention wavers and the unthinkable happens.
You seem to think that a corporation owes you a perfectly safe car. This CANNOT happen. Concessions will be made to fit your price point. We do not live in a perfectly safe world. Recalls are part of the price of a car. If a company always recalled everything that went wrong, the cost of cars would jump dramatically, as the cost would not include projected costs for all the recalls.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And he expresses an opinion.
Is he still wrong?
Well, according to this breakdown of a Prius motor and this diagram, a Prius does indeed have gears.
But what if both your gear shift and iginition push button are software controlled, and the software is the problem?
Thats a design error.
My daily driver has one computer for the transmission based on a 68hc11 design, and a completely separate system for the engine/ignition/fuel injectors using I believe a different microcontroller architecture.
If the transmission crashes, it'll need major hardware repair, but at least you'll have power brakes/steering/etc as you stop. If the engine crashes, you'll smoothly downshift, glide to a stop, and put it in park.
The general automotive trend has been to include more and more specialized microcontrollers, rather than just one big ole central processing unit. The back seat DVD player is almost certainly not sharing a processor with the ABS braking controller.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I don't disagree with you at all, but my point was just that the issue would be a lot easier to consider if we just knew what the test case was, as then it would be a simple matter of fact and not one of reputation.
One of the few early Apple people that came off as an actual talented engineer, not just some arrogant hippie wanting to make an assload of money. He's still about the only Machead that doesn't make me want to puke.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
As someone who has written a program I was sure was bug-free after repeated testing, only to have somebody who doesn't know jack about programming find a bug, I have to disagree; Woz is probably right.
It's actually quite common. When you test your own code, your test cases will have the same constraints you were considering when writing it, so you won't likely find the corner case. It takes someone who knows nothing about the code to stumble upon that corner case input.
Similar problem for proofreading. Proofread your own writing and the same thing that caused you to make the mistake causes you to overlook it later.
Note that the servo assisted brakes take their power from the pressure difference in the inlet manifold. At high engine RPM that pressure difference is LESS. When the engine revs wildly the brakes are less effective.
Thats what I thought, but we're both dicks overlooking a major point: It was a push button ignition.
I've never used push button ignitions before. Until this story, I didn't know that you had to hold the button for 3 seconds to turn the car off.
If I had to find that out while my car was doing >100mph, I might be dead too. Pretty easy to assume that all the electrical systems are unrespnsive once the accelerator is stuck and hitting the power button isnt doing anything.
Putting it in neutral still seems like an option, but I think that might be what toyota is trying to distract us from -- The shifter is all electronic too, and some are saying it was not responding.
I've had manual-transmission cars from two different companies that had cruise-related problems.
In both cases 5th gear could occasionally slip into neutral and the cruise would not disengage, revving the engine to max. Cruise should have a safety to disengage automatically when the gears change whether or not the clutch is used.
Fortunately it was only harmed the engine not the driver.
It was easy enough to press the clutch which turned off the cruise then shift back into gear and keep driving.
As to why the gear slipped, that's a separate issue
On a slope or a curve, you have to accelerate if you want to maintain speed. Speed is a measure of how far you move in a given amount of time. Acceleration is a change in velocity, which is a combination of speed and direction. So, in those cases your acceleration may be changing your direction while maintaining your speed.
However, maybe your acceleration is not sufficient to maintain your speed while also changing your direction. I used to have an old car that had no problem reaching 55mph on a flat road, but would rapidly drop to barely maintaining 35mph on a not-too-steep hill even with the gas pedal floored. Of course, my car had some engine problems. Also, it is quite common for big RVs to lose 5-10mph on even fairly small hills.
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
I'm not familiar with car software, but I know that the certification process for avionics is pretty severe. I about shot myself in the face doing Level A certification of some avoinics due to how thorough it is... I quit that job after a few months because I realized I was filing TPS reports and was coveting my neighbor's red swingline.
My questions are 2 fold. First, does the auto industry have this kind of software certification process and second, for others who have endured the certification, does it produce the safety gains it is supposed to?
That's all good and well if you own a Toyota, but what do I do if my Honda starts accelerating uncontrollably?
I'm with you on this one. Especially considering how alike automotive computers and old computers were. (It wasn't that long ago that most automotive computers still used some form of 6800 chip at it's core).
Back when "Fly by wire" for automobiles was a new thing, quite a few people and engineers alike wanted some sort of fallback or mechanical interlock to avoid this kind of issue (for an example the brake having an extra mechanism for closing the throttle mechanically), but this of course defeated the whole industries purpose of drive by wire, which was to get rid of the bulky mechanisms and make it so they could place the throttle body wherever they wanted despite weird positioning, which would make it cheaper in the long run... The prius has a different reason for needing drive by wire, and that stems from it's planetary gearset power "split" system, in which torque management is very important so you don't break anything and so you get the right movement to the right pieces.... When I saw the first reports of what happened back a while ago, my first thought was not the floor mats, but the potentiometer in the accelerator pedal, and if that checked out, then a possible "race" condition that existed because of either defective software or some deficiency of the hardware they failed to recognize and program around....
This sounds very like the same types of problems the famed old "Therac 25" experienced: A hardware safety/interlock replaced by a software one, the software failing because of some reason (it might not be coded wrong, but the hardware might interpret it wrong under certain conditions), and death resulting because an important piece of the device malfunctioned. It gets to be scarier when you think that it's not a long stretch to make cars transmissions without any fallback, ignition systems that are only state indicators to the computer, unable to do anything should that input be ignored, leaving you with an out of control drivetrain and powertrain without any way to safely power it down.
Yeah, let's blindly trust the corporation. You're a smart one.
There is no key to turn.
It was a loaner car. His car was serviced, so the dealer gave him this Lexus to drive.
The Lexus had push button start/stop. If parked, you press the button and the engine starts. If parked, and the engine is running, you press the button, and the engine stops. HOWEVER, if you are moving, you need to press and hold the button for 3 seconds before the engine is shut off. Nobody explained it to him.
The call was made by someone in the car, not the driver. Either the wife or one of the kids.
The more you know...
I live in San Diego where the CA State Trooper incident happened.
In this case, the car was a loaner Lexus with push button ignition he had just picked up from the dealership. He had never driven a car with this feature before, and was not aware that to turn the car off, the ignition had to be held down for 5 seconds - much like a computer power switch. It is completely understandable that he was not able to figure this out from the owners manual or by talking to the 911 operator while in a panic situation.
I'm not sure why he didn't put the car in neutral as other comments have suggested - the transmission may have had some type of interlock feature preventing this. The area where the incident happened is also a fairly steep downgrade, so with the brakes already shot, he may have done this but it didn't change the outcome.
You mean like THIS "reproducible test case"...that he posted on /. on Tuesday NOVEMBER 3, 2009?!?!
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1430048&cid=29973870
That's three months ago, just like the article says.
A wiki link to Therac-25 seems appropriate.
For those that don't know, the Therac-25 is one of the all-time worst human-machine interfaces ever built. I can't help but wonder, based on Woz's comments, if we have a similar situation with Toyota.
Issues like these can be difficult to track down so it would not surprise me at all if that is what we are dealing with here. Multi-years of pseudo-random symptoms and no obvious "solutions" have worked thus far. Not to trivialize it but -- it's a gas pedal. In other words, it should be a simple mechanism for putting fuel into the engine. Of course, we all know modern cars are not so simple. That is precisely why I ask if we have a human-machine interface issue here. ie: you are pushing a lever for the gas but that lever is a "software" lever so who knows what is actually going on in the car's computer.
The Prius's transmission ("Synergy Drive") is freaking *weird*, and well worth reading about if you're an engineering fan. It's not a traditional automatic, it's not a traditional CVT, it's totally different from anything else on the road today.
As for "throttle and transmission don't coordinate their actions", both power sources (electric motor and IC engine) and the linkage between them are under computer control, and the gas pedal is really just a user interface device: the driver can say "I want to go faster", but exactly how that happens is up to the computer.
Woz's point (and mine) is that the whole power system on a Prius is software-controlled, and problems with it are likely to be software bugs rather than simple mechanical limitations.
You do realize that the car in question didn't have a key right? It had a push button start/stop, and worse, it behaves differently when the car is parked than when it is moving. Furthermore it was a rental so the driver probably hadn't read through the manual either.
I bet you are also guilty of not being psychic enough, to not only do the "correct thing", but to intuitively know when, where, how, and why, in advance.
From a poster above you: "Note, in NTSB reports - many of these cars have had the brake pads TOTALLY burned through, indicating that once these cars took off on people, they COULD NOT stop"
If the brake pads were burned through then there is an accelerator problem.
Not only that but there's a brake problem too. Properly functioning brakes should be able to hold a car still even when the car is at W.O.T.
Extremely rare or not, it is a very significant problem with documented fatal consequences. You bet they should be taking it in the most serious way possible.
Toyota has been lying through their teeth, including their interview with the president on the issues. They've known about it for years, and have come up with the most ridiculous reasons for the problem. They absolutely deserve what they get, although I suspect the fallout won't be so great.
And their spotless reputation for quality? That's because a lot of it was suppressed. Finally everyone realizes Toyota is not god, and they have serious issues. Accelerator stuck is just one. Another one is frame rotting away in their 5-6 year old trucks (Tacoma, 4Runner). And there are many more. It's time to realize what's what, and I hope that the MSM helps average Joe to understand this. People have been blind for far too long.
His? Hers? Its. All pronouns skip the apostrophe.
grab the key and TURN OFF THE ENGINE
What key?
I was talking more about Toyota
I was using the Ford Pinto as an example of why you should not trust the Toyota Corporation to come clean about defects, and you started talking about cost analysis and why it was ok. The Pinto incident is NOT ok. Toyota didn't murder anyone (yet), but the Ford corporation certainly did. As I said, had a person done this they would be in prison for involuntary manslaughter.
I trust most car companies will make a best effort to keep their cars safe and disclose serious safety issues
After the Pinto (and two later incidents, the exploding Crown Vic and the SUV rollovers) I think that's a little naive of you.
This is not negligence. If you make a best effort to ensure the car is safe
IF is the biggest word in the English language. You have no way of knowing how much effort they put into safety. Trust must be earned, and I've learned from incident after incident NOT to trust my safety to ANY corporation any more than I have to; deadly greed happens over and over. The chicken plant fire with the fire doors chained shut; the Jack in the Box hamburgers that killed children, the Pinto, the cigarette manufacturers, the poison peanut products last year, the list goes on. Trusting your safety to ANY corporation is the height of foolishness. This is why we have OSHA and other regulators.
Why? Because they did make a best effort to protect their child and, unfortunately, people, like cars, are not bug free
Ford not only didn't make the effort, they hid the bug.
You seem to think that a corporation owes you a perfectly safe car.
No, there is no such thing. But if they know about a deadly defect they owe me a fix for it, or at least to let me know that it is, in fact, buggy.
If a company always recalled everything that went wrong, the cost of cars would jump dramatically
Yet they try to give the untrue impression that thay do in fact recall defective cars. This type of deceit is immoral and should be considered unethical, and should not be tolerated.
Free Martian Whores!
Alright, I just have to hand you mad props on that one. I thought of about 3 jokes for this situation, but none of them held a candle to your creativity in this matter. Brilliant.
Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
Woman on plane: Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?
Narrator: You wouldn't believe.
Woman on plane: Which car company do you work for?
Narrator: A major one.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
What you say may be correct for talking to the customer, but when one of the first level supporters (who presumably have at least a bit of experience) asks 2nd level to check server X, doing so might be smarter than to argue with the 1st level.
After all, the whole purpose of 1st level support is to solve simple stuff and escalate those things that are not obvious cases. If you treat 1st level like a potentially dumb customer, you end up with a $30/hour guy asking standard questions to a $8/hour guy. ;-)
Exactly what isolating 2nd level from the dumb customer was meant to avoid, only that you pay both guys for it
C - the footgun of programming languages
In fact, this is a safety feature on all motorcycles - it's called a kill switch. If your throttle sticks open, flick that switch and the engine DIES.
There was a blurb on NPR about this case this morning. The car had no ignition key, it was push button start where pressing the button in this situation does nothing. Also, it wasn't the driver who called 911, it was a passenger.
I should use some sort of punctuation that indicates humor.
Having separate microcontrollers (or full fledged processor boards) does not necessarily guarantee robustness or safe design when they are linked to perform a shared function.
To continue your example:
If software that executes on another computer orchestrates the operation of both fails. It could place both in a untested state where the engine accelerates and the gear shift is unresponsive. Worse, the third computer could keep overriding your actions, returning the other two computers to the state that it believes it needs to be in.
Toyota and most car manufactures test for this situation, but my point still stands that having a distributed computing environment doesn't necessarily mean safer. Especially when you consider that the more complex the design is - the more complex (and thorough) the testing needs to be.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Well, not hers. My bad. His and its.
Having been in this situation, with a 1999 Volkswagen Passat (the pedal was stuck to the mat, which I did not know until after I was stopped), I can say that you do not necessarily think of everything when you are in these situations.
Granted, I did turn off the car (seconds before I would have rear-ended the car in front of me), but when this happens, you do not get as much time to sit there and logically think things through. I am stunned that he had the time to call the police, and he was unable to come up with a solution in time, but I am sure that he was fearing for his family. Also, he may have a keyless entry model, which some people do not realize can be turned off by holding the button for 3 seconds.
Regardless, as a different replier responded: apparently I did not do the right thing (though I do not regret doing it, and I was fortunately able to muscle through the steering). Putting the car in neutral will most likely always work, on all cars, where as even the act of turning the car off is different depending on the car these days.
I'd be willing to sacrifice his's to end the grammar crudes, I guess. At least as optionally correct.
Again I find myself agreeing with your statements.
I had this problem quite recently and you are exactly right. I didn't think about putting it in neutral until the second after it happened. The same goes for the ebrake, if you don't have enough time, which in car situations you usually don't, you don't have enough time to go from irrational to rational though. It's like the urban legend about parachutist dieing because they don't remember to use their emergency shoot. Which is exactly why the military and the police forces train as close to real life as they can over and over again.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
Some of these cars have a push-button ignition switch. My dad has one. But I do not know what happens if you try to push the sbutton to switch off the engine while it's howling away at 5500 rpm. Will it shut off, or just ignore your suggestion to kill the ignition? Who knows.
Either way, unless a person is prepared to suddenly deal with the lack of power stering and brakes, and maybe locked steering (btw the stering wheel usually doesn't lock till you turn the key all the way to "off" and pull it out) your suggestion is not really a good idea.
Man, and this is from Steve Wozniak, who made and sold, for instance, MacOS 7, which kept crashing and freezing and spitting "an error has occurred" at a pace not even matched by BSODs? And all that because of a "design" (for lack of a better word) that was obsolete 20 years before (no memory protection, no preemptive multitasking, etc.)?
Steve, how about apologizing to the world for your shoddy designs before blaming others?
I think that was sort of his point: "Yes, it is a bug. Yes, Toyota needs to fix it." From TFS, he said he could reproduce it safely and consistently, but *wasn't getting a response* from Toyota about the issue.
+1 Disagree
I realize Woz really isn't heavily involved with Apple, but I think I need to trademark: iCrash and iFail
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
People complain why Apples are more expensive, and this is just one reason. If I have a problem with an Apple product, I can take it to an Apple store....
Which is, thankfully, also possible with cars.
Bringing us back on topic, since this is a brand-new, under-warranty car, why has Woz not taken it back to the dealer, grabbed a technician, and demonstrated this behavior with the tech in the car? Most dealers actually will do this, especially if the car is new. Most independent shops will, too.
Calling the 1-800 customer relations line will get you nowhere. Even if you're a millionaire and you're used to going "straight to the top." Demonstrating the problem is the way to go.
Toyota's smarter than that, they'll weigh the cost of the recall against lawsuits plus loss of good will decreasing future sales (relative to the good will that's a sunk cost either way).
My old 98 chevrolet does the same thing redlining a few times until I got a clue and stopped engaging cruise control going up a steep hill with a car full of passengers.
Its right up there with the priceless accounts of a clueless lady who wanted her car company to pay her speeding ticket as she was cought speeding while cruise control was engaged. Apparently her car failed to automatically apply breaks for her when going down a steep incline.
In other news I once had a "mechanic" drive my car and tell me I should always drive in third gear to prevent damage to the transmission because (after trying three times unsucessfully) he was able to intentionally fool the fuzzy logic controlling automatic gear shifting and make it do something stupid.
I don't understand the part about "no brakes". Some years ago, when the Audi 5000 (IIRC) was under fire for a similar problem, one of the car magazines (Car & Driver, IIRC) did a test where they compared the stopping distance from 60 mph at closed throttle (the normal case) to that at full throttle. They reported the stopping distances were identical -- the brakes were so much stronger than the engine that the engine's torque had no effect at all.
What could have happened in this case? Does anyone have any idea?
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
To be fair, if I had a Slashdot account named "PrezBarackObama" would you immediately believe that I was actually Barack Obama? I saw that same post the other day, and just assumed it was someone using Woz's name.
I mean, I know people on Slashdot are gullible, but I like to have at least a little more evidence before believing an account name of all things.
Comment of the year
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/starter-button-a-factor-in-runaway-lexus-es350/ - a very good summary of everything that went into causing the crash. Like most problems, there was not one simple contributing factor.
1. The car was a rental that the driver was not familiar with, and the odd layout of the manumatic in that car can make it challenging to get into neutral from higher gears.
2. The 2009 ES350 does not have a key, it utilizes a key fob and a push button starter. It's not as simple as turning a key, you need to hold the button down for 3sec. to stop the car, which is a lot longer than you think in a panic situation. Even if you do manage to turn it off, it's not as simple as turning a key one click and being sure the steering wheel won't lock.
3. At full throttle, the engine produces very little vaccum pressure to assist with modern power brakes.
I had that happen with a late '80s Buick when the mass airflow sensor went wonky. You'd basically get either zero power or 100% throttle. Made getting it to the shop... interesting.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
To be fair, if I had a Slashdot account named "PrezBarackObama" would you immediately believe that I was actually Barack Obama? I saw that same post the other day, and just assumed it was someone using Woz's name.
I mean, I know people on Slashdot are gullible, but I like to have at least a little more evidence before believing an account name of all things.
It's fairly common knowledge that woz posts on Slashdot under that name. With such a low UID, I'd expect you to know this.
There's a bunch of other people who are registered and post/used to post. Hans Reiser is one of them.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
Really, why? I use to run a restaurant with a smoking section. It was in a separate room, in the back, with its own ventilation system. People like you still bitched. What business is it of yours anyways? Instead of whining so they changed to law to make EVERY restaurant (and bar!) smoke-free, why you didn't you just go some place else, or fickin' stay the hell home! And that is coming from a non-smoker.
He mentioned in his post that he does not believe you can turn off the car with the keyless option. Supposedly, holding the button for 3 seconds turns it off.
Everything else is a bit disturbing, especially as I am looking at buying one. Guess I better wait a few months.
I call bullshit. Other than some GM vehicles that use hydraulic assist and an old centripetal design from Bently, most power brakes are vacuum assist. This is SPECIFICALLY FOR cases where the brake needs boost and the power failed for some reason. You can usually get ~2 pushes on the brake with full (then partial) assist before you lose power. The brake still work, just need to push harder.
Also, turning the key to "off" does not lock the wheel. Turning it to "Remove" locks the wheel. There are 3 positions for the key (plus starter).
Last (and less probable), depending on the car the acceleration of the engine may prevent the transmission from shifting if it if it has a manual connect or is electronically connected and the servo motor doesn't have the umph to shift in emergency situations. Also, if your ATF is overheating and boiling out the dipstick you may not have enough pressure to shift the tranny anyway.
- Sig
Good job mentioning the Therac-25, you can read my comments on it that are somewhere else in this thread..
but I need to just point out that your "gas pedal" analogy would be correct if we were talking about a diesel or a directly injected engine, but since we are talking about a port injected (that's before the intake valves in the cylinder head) gasoline engine, the "gas" pedal's function is to limit the air that comes into the engine, and the computer detects the air that comes into the engine c(using throttle position and/or air pressure and/or air mass sensor) and adds fuel to compensate for it. In a carburetor, the throttle plate did a similar thing, it limited the amount of air coming into the engine, it was the carburetor's job to be able to add proportionate amounts of fuel to the air that came in to give the intended effect... in this way fuel injection is actually way more simple, because the computer can compensate by just changing the pulse width of the injector, a carburetor had to rely on different air pressures (vacuum) created at or near the throttle plate to add gas via "circuits" that were cast in the metal (and could be clogged up easily), and each "circuit" handled a different condition the engine might be in at any time (for an example cruising needs different fuel mixtures as opposed to a hard acceleration, as opposed to highway speed passing acceleration.)
My current car has a CVT. It's REALLY weird to get used to city driving with it, you don't have the gear changes or engine sound as reference points for how fast you're going. You eventually get used to it, but it's certainly something where you don't notice what you're relying on for information until it's gone.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
I drive a Prius. It's a confusing enough vehicle when it's operating correctly. Throw in an unanticipated control response with a frightening haptic profile, and at least a few people are going to have trouble thinking beyond manipulating the last thing they frobbed.
The vehicle needs two things here, at least:
1. A fix to the cruise system that ensures there's no possibility of unexpected behavior (yes, with proper software design it's possible; I do that for a living).
2. A kill switch, such as that found on every(?) motorcycle made in the past N decades. Separate from the ignition switch (which used to be a kick-start lever) and the key switch, it's got a consistent and obvious location, color, and purpose. And you think it's an idiot-knob, until you need it.
The model the cop was driving has no key. It was a loaner, so he wasn't familiar with it. Apparently the only way to turn it off is to hold the button in for 3 seconds or so, not an intuitive act.
I don't know about putting it in neutral. Being trained, I would assume that'd be one of the first things to try. I don't know if the electronics would allow taking the shifter out of drive.
sr
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Steve Wozniak can quickly resolve this issue by going public and asking people to stop buying Toyotas until this is fixed properly. Bad PR will cause companies to change their comfortable MO quickly.
It's fairly common knowledge that woz posts on Slashdot under that name.
If you say so. I've read Slashdot for years, and I'd never seen him post before. Sorry I don't have your "common knowledge."
With such a low UID, I'd expect you to know this.
First of all, a low UID means exactly jack shit. It's a goddamned index in a database record, people treat it as if it's some shorthand for your IQ or something around here. For all you know, I signed up for an account once in 1999 then never visited the site again until yesterday. For all you know, I'm functionally retarded with only enough intelligence to get through Slashdot's registration process.
I wish this damned website wouldn't even know that to users, it's meaningless and (as a human being) I don't like being fucking numbered.
Secondly, I must have missed that in the extension Slashdot.org Users Guide and Manual that I was supposed to have read apparently before signing up for my account. Oh wait, there is none, you ass.
Thirdly, I'm guessing the entire point of your post was to say "I'm 1337er than you! I knew Woz had an account!" Whoop-de-shit.
All that aside, what I said was still good advice: don't automatically assign someone your admiration and respect because of their fucking screenname! (Or UID!)
Comment of the year
Would you like some cheese with that whine?
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
Yes, yes I would. I'd also like the world's smallest violin to play while I'm eating my cheese. And when it clogs my arteries, could you call the wahmbulance for me? Thanks.
Comment of the year
The problem is that depending on the problem, a long starting period sometimes works. Maybe it's because the half-compression warms the heads up enough to start, or the engine cycling gets enough air in the throttle body to relieve the flooding enough to start. Or maybe the clogged injectors need extra time to put enough fuel in the cylinder for it to ignite (since clogged may not be fully atmoized and thus not all pass out when the exhaust stroke occurs.
Whatever the reason, since starting for a long tome works _sometimes_, and it's the easiest solution to try, many people continue to practice it. It's not stupidity, it basic psychology. I read that if you reinforce something every time, then not reinforcing the behavior leads to rapid disconnection of the behavior to the reward. If you reward the behavior partially (but frequently enough to form a connection), the behavior is much more persistent across negative results.
- Sig
You are history's greatest monster.
Semantic relativism is not compatible with being pedantic about others' word usage. If GGP's "correction" is based on the existance of a lay usage of the term "accelerate", then he cannot at the same time exclude the validity of using the more precise definition.
I'm not sure why you think the names of the controls that cause different types of acceleration would have any bearing at all.
Perhaps you're one of the marketing weasles? If not you may have missed a calling, because that was pretty good manipulative use of language. Too bad not everyone's dumb enough to miss it...
"Nowhere does the article mention what these repeatable conditions are"
And the content of the article is Woz's fault?
"you'd think someone who found a problem in a car that can kill the unwary would report the conditions it's triggered under"
I'd think he would report the conditions when reporting the bug to the manufcaturer and regulator, and I see no reason to think he didn't.
I would not think he would include those details in a digression from a speech he was giving, which is what the article covers.
If his bug report had such a serious flaw as not reporting the failure conditions, I would think the Toyota press release would say so - but that's yet another thing they don't say.
Thanks for playing.
There's no feedback of requested speed; the feedback is the current speed of the car. You can request an increase of speed, but there is a finite time in which the car can respond to the requested increase. Given the variance in terrain it is quite possible that you are, after some time, requesting a speed that is significantly higher than the current speed resulting in sudden increase in acceleration toward an unknown target speed. This will seem as an unexpected reaction, as you are looking at the current speed as the target speed which isn't the case. Essentially, the feedback loop isn't closed correctly, and people cant do calculus that quickly in there head. I've complained about this for years.
Yeah, I'm used to my Ford cruise controls which generally will pick an appropriate point to downshift to keep the speed rather constant and will sense the top of the hill and shift back up. My wife's Mazda with the same engine on the same hill will rev the engine like crazy and crest the hill at about 75 in a 50 mph zone. I basically don't use cruise on her vehicle unless I'm on an interstate highway.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Uh, I've never owned a car that did that... I would consider such an action to be a bug instead of a feature.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Why doesn't Woz get his damn iPhone out and video the car exhibiting the behavior. If he describes what he's doing in the video to reproduce the bug and posts it to YouTube, Toyota will have a hard time denying it.
I'm just sayin...
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
I'm not sure why you think the names of the controls that cause different types of acceleration would have any bearing at all.
I'm pretty sure I stated it above, but perhaps you didn't have time to look it up...
Context
the parts of a discourse that surround a word or passage and can throw light on its meaning
I have a suspicion that every Toyota brought in for a new accelerator pedal* will also have new throttle / cruise control firmware surreptitiously installed without it being mentioned to the owners. No way this is all due to just extra friction in an accelerator assembly.
* - Anyone else pick up that everytime Toyota discusses the suspect accelerators, they just happen to mention the supplier is an American company? More BS nationalistic face-saving to distract from who designed said part.
PS: Tom Merritt from CNET has also mentioned the squirrely acceleration habits of his older Prius as well.
Not that he doesn't have a problem with his car, but Steve Wozniak apparently has been stopped going 100+MPH more than once by the CHP. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=wozniak+speeding+ticket
Someone mod this idiot -1 Offtopic.
Thanks.
As far as hardware issues, any idiot can replace a product, which is the "solution" for 99% of technical problems. Note that it's not actually a solution; it's just more economical than diagnosing the real problem.
That's not the whole story. If something Apple made is breaking in a way they haven't yet seen, they often want to have it so they can get really in-depth with the debugging and figure out exactly what the problem is. This isn't limited to Apple, either; I've heard of it happening at Dell and a couple of other places, too.
I'm not saying that was the case in this particular instance, just that replacement isn't purely to avoid having to diagnose the issue: it's also be able to diagnose the issue without depriving their customer of the product he bought.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
You're questioning the driving actions of a fucking STATE TROOPER while his FAMILY's life was in danger?! So, you're the resident expert on defensive and emergency driving, right?
I guess those Linux manuals really do teach you everything, huh?
Typical Slashdot arrogance. And being a smartass about not knowing why he didn't turn off the engine doesn't make your snide comments any less distasteful.
Fucking asshole.
I was using the Ford Pinto as an example of why you should not trust the Toyota Corporation to come clean about defects, and you started talking about cost analysis and why it was ok. The Pinto incident is NOT ok. Toyota didn't murder anyone (yet), but the Ford corporation certainly did. As I said, had a person done this they would be in prison for involuntary manslaughter.
I still think the Pinto was an extreme case, not the norm. That said, this accelerator problem was presumably the cause of an accident that killed a family.
After the Pinto (and two later incidents, the exploding Crown Vic and the SUV rollovers) I think that's a little naive of you.
Think what you want. While I won't implicitly trust a company, I will certainly look at its history as an example. Toyota does not have a long history of hiding killer defects. Ford quality in general is great right now and I won't hold the Pinto incident against them. I prefer to trust a little now and run the risk of disappointment later.
IF is the biggest word in the English language. You have no way of knowing how much effort they put into safety. Trust must be earned, and I've learned from incident after incident NOT to trust my safety to ANY corporation any more than I have to; deadly greed happens over and over. The chicken plant fire with the fire doors chained shut; the Jack in the Box hamburgers that killed children, the Pinto, the cigarette manufacturers, the poison peanut products last year, the list goes on. Trusting your safety to ANY corporation is the height of foolishness. This is why we have OSHA and other regulators.
How about the billions of burgers sold without incident? How about all those companies that put employee and customer safety as a top priority? For every bad example there are many more good examples. As I said, I'd prefer to trust a little and be disappointed, than live my life worrying about what I'm eating or driving. Yes, some precautions should be taken, but trust is an integral part of every aspect of our life, from relationships to politics to the economy.
Ford not only didn't make the effort, they hid the bug.
Companies and people can do bad things from time to time. However, I do not expect my neighbor to kill me, just because someone else's neighbor killed them. Similarly, I don't expect all companies to hide such fatal defects, just because Ford did.
No, there is no such thing. But if they know about a deadly defect they owe me a fix for it, or at least to let me know that it is, in fact, buggy.
As noted, fixing is expensive. Yes, I know, every life is priceless, but yet we still put a price on ours and our family's safety everyday and companies do the same. I think reasonable disclosure should be required. However, there comes a point where the risk is too remote to be worth the cost. In the Pinto case or this case, perhaps not, but there is always a cut-off point.
Yet they try to give the untrue impression that thay do in fact recall defective cars. This type of deceit is immoral and should be considered unethical, and should not be tolerated.
I've never really thought that. I think most people assume there will always be a cost-benefit analysis involved. However, clearly most companies cannot stand to take the abuse Toyota has over this incident. That is enough for many companies to actively seek out and fix problems. If all the companies really were being this deceitful, we would notice. People, in general, are not as stupid as some would think.
Its a Prius. Toyota still hasn't solved the "wanted acceleration" problem yet.
Have gnu, will travel.
You are being played for fools by ad execs and propogandists. They win, you lose. the /. echo chamber reinforces the message. You want to know how it works? Follow the money. Dumbass.
And that makes it OK?
The car the trooper was driving has a start/stop button. When moving above a certain speed it only works to STOP if you hold it for 3 seconds. It was a rental and he hadn't read the manual or been given an orientation, obviously.
As a customer, that is very important to me. If my iPhone goes south, I don't want to be phoneless for x days/weeks/months while some tech figures out why. I'd much rather have a working phone.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I agree that a lot of really competent folks no longer even bother to call in to "customer service" lines. But that's not so much because they inherently believe it best to skip that step. It's conditioned behavior, based on years and years of trying it and having miserable results!
I have a feeling that if a tech. company would experiment with the idea of having 2 different phone numbers -- one advertised as the "standard" one for customers to use, and the second listed as specifically for "advanced users" -- it might work out really well for them. Let people calling the "advanced" hotline reach 2nd. (or even 3rd.) level technical staff, while the other (perhaps more prominently published/displayed) number takes them to 1st. level, first.
Sure, this would result in some relative idiots calling the advanced line, thinking it's going to give them a quicker or better answer to their problems ... BUT, that hassle would be more than offset by 1st. level techs. not wasting half their day running people through pointless basic troubleshooting steps, only to determine their issue is more complicated than something covered on the card they read off of. Not only that, but it would help resolve the original problem of "good, knowledgeable users not bothering to call in to report issues they discover". They'd start doing it, if they knew they were quickly able to convey the info to people who would really DO something with it.
Also, in this scenario - there's no reason a higher-level tech shouldn't/couldn't be allowed to "de-escalate" a call to 1st. level if it becomes clear it's a user who just needs simple help - and he/she is abusing the ability to call into the "advanced hotline"! With 1st. level freed up from doing pointless basic troubleshooting for all the people with more advanced questions, the hold times to speak with them should drop too - making this less of a problem to transfer folks back to them.
Wow, 99501 counts as a low ID now? WTF?
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Reading Woz's post makes something obvious to me: This problem would be amplified in the event of a bad brake light switch. One must wonder, then, if that is part of the severity of the issue out in the wild.
(And, yes, they do fail sometimes. I had to replace the switch on my old BMW a few years ago. That car is clever enough to tell you that the switch has failed, but most cars aren't. So, folks will generally drive around with intermittent or no brake lights until someone else tells them about it.)
Kid-proof tablet..
Some new cars with electronically controlled transmissions may either try to lock you out of shifting from drive when it thinks you shouldn't. This can generally be overridden by really slamming the gear shift to neutral, breaking the locking mechanism. Or some cars now have no mechanical linkage between the shifter and transmission. In this case you flat can't do anything.
If your preferred method doesn't work, you need to be ready and willing to turn the car off rather than die in a flaming wreck. Most cars with this level of computer control probably won't lock the wheel unless the car is at a stop. Of course they shouldn't have failed in such a dangerous way either, so YMMV.
"I'd rather he go on a spending spree that saves the economy (yes, it is working. look at the numbers.) than have him go the Bush route. Your deceptive number game not withstanding, it's clear that we finally have a President who cares more about the American people than the corporations that line his pockets."
Please, show me the numbers. Do you mean these numbers (from your own liberal champion, the NY Times, no less)? http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/09/business/economy/09jobs.html
"Bush was so busy cutting taxes for every billionaire and outsource happy corporation that he couldn't be bothered to pay for his wars, even in normal economic times."
If you'd bothered to read the article, you would have noticed that many of Bush's tax cuts were also aimed at the middle class. Owning dividend-paying stocks and selling houses isn't just a hobby for the uber-wealthy, you mindless jackass.
"Barack Obama is cleaning up the mess that Republicans like yourself left us."
Barney Frank. Chris Dodd. Community Reinvestment Act. Home ownership turned into a middle class entitlement program. 'Nuff said. Also, I don't recall claiming Republican affiliation. Your comprehension skills are just pitiful.
"Show some gratitude, or at least have a bit of respect for your superiors."
Typical arrogant liberal response. Your arguments are vacuous and based on shifting sands, so you instead fling ad hominem attacks.
Yep, and I'd further point out that Apple *also* maintains a very good "last resort" system of escalating major issues.
It's not officially published in your owners' manuals or anything (for obvious reasons, if you think about it!), but it's well known on Apple related support forums and blog sites that the "sjobs@apple.com" email address will reach some upper-level corporate people, in charge of "damage control" for serious issues that weren't resolved by the normal channels.
There's even some fairly good evidence out there that in the right situations, a few of these emails even get forwarded on to Steve Jobs himself to read (and even quickly reply to) personally.
Time after time, I've read about people with real "lemons" of Apple products getting free replacements or repairs by explaining their issue to someone at that address - even when the original warranty was expired or the local store denied them service for some reason.
If too many people start using/abusing it, I wouldn't be surprised if it goes away, or stops being useful -- but Apple has been monitoring that address for many years now. It's good to keep "under your hat" in case you really get a negative and otherwise unresolvable situation with your Apple product, someday.
The New York Times reported that Toyota stopped selling their defective cars only after the NTSB "asked" them to do it.
That's not exactly "voluntary". The way DOT and CPSC recalls work is that first they ask the manufacturer to do a "voluntary" recall. If the manufacturer says no, they issue a mandatory recall notice.
About once a decade, some manufacturer is dumb enough to let things go that far. It means national TV coverage ("The National Transportation Safety Board today ordered the recall of all NNN model XXX cars.") It means that, instead of a obliquely worded letter from the manufacturer, every owner gets an official letter from the Government with words like "dangerous and defective product" in big black type. The manufacturer involved usually experiences a large, permanent drop in sales.
First, of course get your car serviced if it's part of the official recall. That's a gimme.
More importantly, if your car starts accelerating uncontrollably as if the throttle is stuck all the way open, for the love of god grab the key and TURN OFF THE ENGINE. Yes, you will lose power steering and brakes -- this is still preferable to attempting to drive the car at 100MPH until it runs out of gas. This didn't seem too difficult to me, but apparently a State Trooper in CA decided to call 911 before taking this rather obvious step.
The 911 call came at 6:35 p.m. on Aug. 28 from a car that was speeding out of control on Highway 125 near San Diego. The caller, a male voice, was panic-stricken: "We're in a Lexus ... we're going north on 125 and our accelerator is stuck ... we're in trouble ... there's no brakes ... we're approaching the intersection ... hold on ... hold on and pray ... pray ..." The call ended with the sound of a crash.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/business/01toyota.html?hp=&pagewanted=all
I know it's not kind to speak ill of the dead, and I understand that it wasn't their fault that their car was fatally defective (and Toyota is completely at fault) but it's hard for me to comprehend how someone could fail to deduce the rather straightforward solution to their problem -- car is going too fast => stop the engine. This has really been boggling my mind for the past week as these incidents pile up -- if someone can explain this to me, I'll be eternally grateful.
I really wondered about this. I also don't want to speak ill or sound like I think I know better, but how did he not at least shift out of gear or turn off the engine? Yes, as someone said turning off the engine can lock the steering, but if you know that ahead of time you can tick the key back to "run" and the steering will be unlocked again. Maybe hard to think that much in a crazy situation, but really, if this guy could operate a cell phone I really feel like he should have been able to operate the key. But i don't know a lot about the situation so I'll admit i probably don't know what I am talking about, it just really seemed weird to me that of all people, a state trooper wouldn't have been able to figure out *some way* to disable the car.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
My "terrible" advice is taken from both Toyota, and Car & Driver, who note that turning the car off should be the last case taken. Brake completely once, then shift to neutral/park, then turn off - in that order.
Sweeping problems under the rug doesn't work well when the rug accelerates to dangerous speeds and wacks the Toyota bosses at 100 MPH.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
You might want to look at the timestamps or browse from oldest to newest.
So Woz just needs to get some good video of him showing how the defect happens along with a nice script ala the racist HP camera and post it to YouTube then let it go viral. Seems simple doesn't it.
This is still an unacceptable software problem. Sensors go bad. It should be an anticipated and tested for problem, if you are getting impossible input from a sensor then you need to have a sane failure mode instead of something dangerous.
A car company cannot admit they have a problem because 10,000 lawyers immediately spring up on their doorstep with their hands out.
If a car company tries to subtly fix a problem they are accused of a cover up.
No win.
The solution is to ignore the "problem" in hopes that it goes away, and maybe only have to pay x number of lawyers an undisclosed confidential amount
Rick B.
From above, this is comment directly to /.
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1430048&cid=29973870
In my Honda, I would simply push in the clutch and shift to neutral, then turn the engine off by turning the key.
Not a problem.
Of course, my Honda is 16 years old... and after reading all this crap, I'm going to be keeping it for the rest of my life. No way I'd ever buy a new push-button software-controlled car.
I have a really hard time believing this story. 97 in a Prius? Was he being pushed by another car? Falling off a cliff? Have a 200mph tail wind in a hurricane?
He'd run out of gas before he got to 97 in a Prius under normal means.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Some of these cars have a push-button ignition switch. My dad has one. But I do not know what happens if you try to push the sbutton to switch off the engine while it's howling away at 5500 rpm. Will it shut off, or just ignore your suggestion to kill the ignition? Who knows.
On some of them you just have to push and calmly hold the button for only 3 seconds while your car is accelerating uncontrollably around other moving vehicles.
I think they should make it 10 seconds, so the car is really sure that you want to turn it off.
Information just wants to be free, and from my viewpoint, his electronic ignition system is a functioning computer with a lot more power than my old Timex-Sinclair or the S-100 bus computers I used to code on.
He should have locked down the protocols.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You only drive standards, right? Ever standard I've owned cuts the cruise control when the clutch is depressed to change gears -- every slushbox I've owned will run itself up and down through gears as required without messing with the cruise control.
Yet another shining example of why changing the UI for no actual reason is a retarded idea. Theres no reason to not use a key and keeping the same traditional operations as the key has always had.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Yes and no - if the brakes aren't properly used I imagine you could wear them down - especially if they were already worn.
I imagine for the brakes to reliably stop the car you'd need to apply full force to the brakes so that the car rapidly stops, and then the wheels lock (obviously you'd want to avoid locking the wheels before you stop).
Instead imagine that you tentatively hit the brakes - you apply moderate braking but you're afraid to jam on the brakes. Now the engine doesn't get enough opposition to decelerate the car much, and the pads begin to wear down. If you hold this braking force long enough the pads will fully wear.
That isn't to say that there isn't a braking problem - I don't know one way or another. However, a car with perfectly good brakes won't be able to stop against the engine if the driver doesn't use them properly.
Yup - just like that. :)
What can I say - the Woz has my vote now...
What if he hit the brake outside of the work zone, as he was supposed to, and then when he released the brake, the car suddenly sped up to the original speed limit, or higher, and hit the car in front of him before the driver had a chance to react?
I'm not saying this is probable, I'm simply offering a counter argument. A case could be made now. Accident lawyers are salivating...
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
However, clearly most companies cannot stand to take the abuse Toyota has over this incident.
The abuse was called for, as they kept denying there was a problem over and over. Had they come out and said "we'll check it out", checked it out and acknowledged a problem and then did a recall, their image would not have been tarnished. But they denied problems all along, just as Ford and Firestone did.
That is enough for many companies to actively seek out and fix problems.
Which they clearly did not.
If all the companies really were being this deceitful, we would notice.
We did notice, which is why they got all the flak.
Free Martian Whores!
It's a goddamned index in a database record, people treat it as if it's some shorthand for your IQ or something around here. For all you know, I signed up for an account once in 1999 then never visited the site again until yesterday.
And if you had enough foresight to register the name "LinusT" or some such, you'd be in for some epic lulz. Few people plan their trolling that far in advance, which is why it seems likely that SteveWoz (152247) is who he says he is.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
That already exists (yes, even on Priuses). It's called the BRAKE PEDAL!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
A brake pedal slows down the car. A kill switch cuts off ignition.
Different kettle of fish.
Apparently the car in that case had no "key" to turn off the engine, you had to either hold the start button in for 3 seconds or press it three times, depending on which version of the software it was running.
I shit you not.
1. Show me the numbers?
The economy has gone from losing 700,000 jobs per month to losing 10,000 jobs per month. That means we've gone from a recession per month, to just a tough labor environment. It's not good yet, but even a Republican like yourself should be able to see the positive trend in those numbers. If that's not enough, check out GDP (gross domestic product) which has gone form - 6% to positive 5.7% under Obama's watch.
2. If you bothered to read Obama's policies and budget, you would see that the Bush tax cuts for the middle class are staying. You might find a tax break here or there that's gone, but not on the middle class tax hike you claim. One link from one biased reporter doesn't change the facts.
Also , Bush and Republicans didn't pay for their wars. This shouldn't be a surprise because Republicans never pay for anything. They just wait until Democrats take power and blame them for the deficits they created. Only fools believe Republicans' sudden concern for the deficit.
3. We didn't end up where we were because the middle class was encouraged to own homes. We ended up where we are because of poor regulation. Barney Frank fought to make these sleazy loans illegal, because they actually harm the poor. Too Bad Republicans can't stand government working in people's interest and still fight any kind of meaningful regulation.
Republicans still want to leave this insane regulation-free system in place.
4. For someone so adept at flinging ad-hominam attacks, you sure are sensative to them.
In which case, that's just how cruise control works. The problem here is the user's expectations not meshing with reality, otherwise known as operator error.
CC is a simple feedback system, where the correction is proportional to the difference between the target and feedback values. The correction is NOT a rate of acceleration, but simply a value of throttle. A large negative differential will result in a large value of throttle whether that differential was created by a steep hill (with perhaps only a minor to the rate of acceleration) or by changing the target velocity by hitting the Accel control 10 times in a row on level ground (where the car may leap forward). The system works very well at maintaining velocity, probably better than most drivers on their own, but so well at *changing* velocity, and certainly not as well as an actual driver, because it has no control over (or awareness of) the rate of acceleration.
Short of designing a new system to replace the ~60 year old version we're still using, the solution is to use manual controls for desired changes in velocity >5MPH.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
That should have read: "...but not so well at changing velocity..."
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
A Prius does have gears, actually. Its CVT uses a planetary gearset (as opposed to cones or belts, like other CVTs). The difference is that the Prius's gears are arranged differently than in a normal transmission.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Read this.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Its not nice to nitpick peoples' grammer.
Um, the brake pedal is on the left. It usually shuts the cruise control off. If that fails, brakes generally tend to slow a car down.
Woz has stated that the problem is reproducible, so Toyota will quickly know if this is the problem. If so, they can fix it.
As another poster stated above, this is like restating a bug as a feature. It's still a bug, and needs to be fixed. Whether or not it was exacerbated by unexpected (but, not unusual) user interaction.
Admittedly, my response is a bit off topic, but so is the comment I am responding to. WRT to the weird, if not unsafe, behavior of your VW, that's why you should drive a manual transmission...
- they're lighter (less weight helps fuel economy)
- more efficient in terms of drivetrain loss/energy transfer (ever felt all that heat coming from under your A/T car after a long drive?)
- more responsive (shift when you want to, and ONLY when you want to, not in the middle of a turn when on ICE for example)
- until very recently, they came with more gears than their automatic counterparts (again this saves fuel, and provides improved acceleration when desired)
- you can cruise with the engine completely disconnected from the wheels and thus idling (or even turned off... again, this can save fuel)
- much cheaper to service. An OEM style clutch costs typically less than $200 while a remanufactured (not new in box!) A/T costs usually in excess of $2000 and often much more. Sure, if your automatic transmission has only failed because of it's clutch packs, then the parts are typically only about $75 to $200... which is on average maybe just slightly less expensive than a M/T clutch. But that's only in the case of one class of failure: worn out A/T clutches. If it's a planetary or something else forget about it. It also takes a great deal more labor to rebuild an A/T than replace a clutch on an M/T. You have to do essentially the same things on the A/T -- disconnect drive axles or driveshaft, drop it down, remove flywheel/torque converter (would be flywheel and clutch on an M/T), and then disassemble and rebuild the A/T. You seldom ever have to open an M/T unless you grenade it from racing with it or abusing it greatly (most M/Ts seem to take a lot more abuse or increased power levels than their A/T counterparts in the same car).
You have absolutely no idea how a Prius drivetrain works, do you?
Here are a few hints: First, the Prius doesn't have anything resembling a normal automatic transmission. Second, it has to be computerized because there's no easy mechanical way to implement the algorithm that decides how much power needs to come from the gasoline engine and how much of it needs to come from the electric motor. Third, even normal transmissions are computerized these days (e.g. anything with "Tiptronic" or paddle shifters).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
to the term "blue screen of death"?
No matter how well tested and bug-free these types of systems are SUPPOSED to be, a basic design principle of any system should always be to have built in safety checks for things like conflicting input values that make no sense. Even though it SHOULD never happen, the computer should watch for invalid information (like not opening the throttle past a certain point if the brakes are applied) just in case something fails. If the input values make no sense, always default to the safest case. While a throttle cable breaking could potentially cause an accident if the car returns to idle or doesn't move from a stop, drivers shouldn't be ending up in a situation where that is a problem. If is designed so that if the cable breaks the throttle spring defaults to wide open throttle, this would be an obvious design error. Why they have not managed to build this system correctly eludes me. It can't possibly be designed correctly for this application if these types of faults can even be possible.
The Slashdot readership is composed mostly of computer programmers, and parsing computer languages that have very precisely-defined meanings is the bulk of the job. Can you blame them if some of that mindset spills over when processing natural language?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I agree that a lot of really competent folks no longer even bother to call in to "customer service" lines. But that's not so much because they inherently believe it best to skip that step. It's conditioned behavior, based on years and years of trying it and having miserable results!
There was a lovely Dilbert cartoon long ago that covered that - something about replacing the on-hold music with the sound of someone rubbing a balloon to get the call rate down.
Come to think of it, that's not much worse than elevator music punctuated with occasional "Your call is important to us" messages.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
This is EXACTLY the kind of behavior that would occur if the switch were to fail in the "speed up - closed" position. You can replicate this by holding up on the speed control switch.
You're not explaining it precisely enough.
First of all, there are two separate cases: curves and slopes. Curves, whether horizontal or vertical, do indeed require you to accelerate by definition because you are changing direction. Slopes, on the other hand, are straight both horizontally and vertically (their rate of elevation change is constant), so no acceleration is required to maintain speed.
Secondly, you're confusing acceleration with power. In order to maintain speed around the curve, you must increase power because some of the energy that had been used maintaining your speed when you were going straight is now expended as cornering friction. In order to maintain speed on a (positive) slope, you must increase power to compensate for the gain in potential energy.
In other words, despite it being often called the "accelerator pedal," mashing on the throttle to maintain speed up a hill isn't really "acceleration," except at the vertical curves at the bottom and top.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Would this work on a Prius? It has an on/off button
The grandparent poster has a manual-transmission car. Cruise control can't downshift by itself in that case, so it just has a switch that cancels the cruise when the clutch is depressed (just like with the brake) in order to keep the engine from revving up in neutral.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
A million to one, you say?
Hmm
The chances of anything coming from Woz
Are a million to one, he says.
The chances of anything coming from Woz.
Are a million to ooooone
But still they coooome!
He did provide the steps. Right here
You've never owned a car with a manual transmission, then. (Or at least not one with a manual and cruise control.) They have to cancel the cruise whenever you depress the clutch, or else the engine revs up.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Capital gains should be taxed as income (which is what it is.) So what if some (upper) middle class people then have more taxable income? I could get behind a scheme where capital gains were only calculated when you sold stock in order to get cash, rather than when you traded one type of stock for another. I could even get behind a system where the differnce between short and long term capital gains was graduated so that gains on assets held less than a year are taxed the same as regular income and the long term rate remains at 15%, but long term is redefined as 10 or 15 years. But the fact remains that the vast majority of people who derive any significant income from capital gains are extraordinarily wealthy (as are the people affected by the estate tax by the way). I can't find any info on the Bush tax cuts impacting home sellers, so I'll be happy to read any info you have on that. Generally speaking I think that lowering transactional taxes on home sales would be a good thing provided that it isn't across the board - say you can only benefit on tax incentives on one sale every three years. Otherwise it incentivizes speculative "flipping" which isn't good for the economy.
I won't defend Chris Dodd, but I will defend the community reinvestment act. Fannie and Freddie didn't start the housing bubble or bust, Bear Stearns, Lehman, Countrywide did, and they were enabled by AIG and the rating agencies - none of these organizations were regulated by the CRA, they were making risky loans or investing in risky loans not because they had too, but because they thought it was a good idea (incidentally they were right if by good idea you mean an action likely to earn you a fat bonus.) The sub-prime bubble was a consequence of under-regulation and "innovation" in the financial markets. It was caused by the proliferation of ARMS, the collateralization of debts, the insurance against default, and most of all by the gigantic shadow market (max notional value ~$45 trillion) that traded all these things where nobody understood what they were buying or selling. It was not caused by the CRA or any other onerous regulation.
I'll also defend both the (Bush) bank bail out and the (Obama) stimulus bill. Even though I don't particularly like either of them, I feel that they were both necessary. (aside: FWIW McCain's ineptitude during the period where everything was collapsing did more to cost him the presidency then everything except maybe picking Palin). Massive immediate government outlays were necessary to prevent a banking collapse and a new great depression. They were only necessary because wall street is, frankly, incompetent. The culture of dealing with other people's money is just perverse, yet I can still only select from a handful of "approved" 401(k) funds. Remember how Bush wanted to privatize Social Security? Imagine what a cluster fuck we'd be in had that happened.
It's also important to remember that the stimulus bill and the bail out bill are separate entities. The bail out bill has been mostly repaid, and the rest should be recouped by a fee on the largest banks. The stimulus bill consists of mostly popular measures, reform of the AMT (which everyone thinks was necessary), the first time home-buyers credit, money to state and local governments to hire or retain police and fire fighters, money for basic science, etc. Look through the list of provisions and tell me what you're not happy about. I'm not happy that unemployment is above 10% either, but the reason that we lost 85,000 jobs in December is that the economy was much worse than we though - it takes a while to stem that kind of tide. If anything, I'd argue that the continued job losses illustrate that the stimulus was calibrated for a smaller recession than we're actually in and that based on these new facts the government should increase its position as the spender-of-last-resort, but I understand the argument that spending is getting out of
Well that makes sense.
Not to make excuses, but I'd (hopefully) look less the idiot if the story had anything specific about the nature of Woz's complaints. Or if I knew anything about the Prius drivetrain.
Oh well, being called an idiot is a small price to pay for some education.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I drove an early 90's BMW 3 series back in the day which had a speed control system that used a lever on the bottom right side of steering wheel. Once cruise was activated a click forward on the lever accelerated 1mph and a click down the opposite. One day when messing with this feature I noticed that if I held the lever forward my car would just accelerate (at a pretty high rate I might add), as well as making the petal hit the floor without touching it, just like when using regular cruise control and your car is going up a hill etc you can feel the petal move. Yet I was easily able to disengage this sudden acceleration by either letting go of the lever or hitting the break. I eventually starting using this as a lazy driving technique. My thought is maybe the WOZ is mistaking this "Scary" acceleration as just a feature ( I have not researched this), like the coast function which slows you down. Also the system could be queuing his successive "Nudges" as 10 or so MPH and applying them at once. It does take some time for a car to go from 80 to 81 depending on the car, but having a Prius I do not see it getting from 80 to 81 in an instant... I understand this could be a scary situation if you have never experienced it but if he is easily able to hit the brake, which would stop acceleration effectively cutting off cruise, maybe he is mistaking this "bug" for a "feature".
he describes here that he was driving 80mph, would bump the cruise to 81, allow the car to accelerate, and then bump it up again, to 82, etc, until about 84 when the car just starts accelerating beyond the setting of the cruise control. He isn't talking about getting so far ahead of the car that it has to accelerate like crazy to catch up.
Everybody else is talking about cars with automatic transmissions. Yours were all apparently manuals. (Good choice, by the way!)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Seriously, if anyone can get Toyota to look at some broken computers, it's you, man. Note: you cannot throw a car's acceleration computer out a window.
If that's the case, it's a shit design -- it should never allow such a differential between "current actual" and "current goal" speeds. If you keep mashing the button after the differential hits, say, 5mph, it should ignore further presses until it's back in range.
Just a guess -
A PID algorithm is used for cruise control and reset windup isn't handled properly. That is, the integral term (which zeros out the small error that must exist using proportional control alone) can grow large when the system hasn't reached the setpoint after a long time. That condition can occur when driving up a hill or when the car isn't in a suitable gear. A large uncorrected integral term can cause the control system output to saturate (equivalent to flooring the gas pedal) resulting in loss of control. Reset windup is generally handled by logic to halt integration when the controller output reaches a predetermined output.
Some years ago, when the Audi 5000 (IIRC) was under fire for a similar problem, one of the car magazines (Car & Driver, IIRC) did a test where they compared the stopping distance from 60 mph at closed throttle (the normal case) to that at full throttle. They reported the stopping distances were identical -- the brakes were so much stronger than the engine that the engine's torque had no effect at all.
I used to own an Audi 5000 Turbo. Indeed, the brakes were much stronger than the engine. But if the check valve between the intake manifold and the brake booster failed, then you would have high pressure air where you needed sub-atmospheric air, resulting in an inability to operate the brakes.
This happened to me. If the engine had positive boost, you couldn't budge the brake petal.
So while the Car & Driver magazine was correct for a car in perfect shape, their test did not show what would happen with the combination of a worn check valve and a turbo engine.
Oh yeah - one day the cruse control made the car suddenly accelerate, and with a worn check valve I found myself in a runaway Audi with not brakes. Glad it had a on/off switch on the dashboard.
Place nail here >+
Of course you should be able to use cruise control on hills - and this works fine on many cars. Your cruise control is just broken by design. No sober, rational person would consider that as a working cruise control. If the engine lacks the torque to maintain speed at low RPM, it should simply hold the lower gear and higher RPM. Clearly there's some engineering manager involved here who just didn't care enough to see it done right.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Woz's example that he posted here a while ago suggested that tapping the cruise control level a few times to increase speed by 1mph each can cause this issue. Perhaps a software bug is causing the cruising speed to jump up 10,20 or more mph causing the exact behaviour you describe. But I certainly wouldn't be game to see what speed the car levels off at...
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Corporations do NOT care about your safety unless it is monetarily profitable to them or a government forces them to.
OK, I'll bite because you are talking bullshit.
Every corporate executive I have met cares about risk. They have families, friends, and are part of community; in otherwords they are people like you and I.
They are also much more paranoid than you may think about risk & safety.
Risk = Likelyhood of occuring x Severity of Incident.
Risk is impossible to eliminate and becomes exponentially expensive to reduce past what I call the practical point.
Society demands an 'acceptable' level of risk for an 'acceptable' monetary cost.
This is what engineers design for and ultimatley what courts reinforce.
That bar rises higher every year as technology improves and legislation/standards are created to enforce/reinforce our understanding of risk.
46137
Your cruise control is not very good, then. The gain is set too high, so it's underdamped. Go read up on PID controllers. Good cruise controls tend to be overdamped to prevent speeding tickets.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
The strange thing in this, actually, is that 1st level customer support for cars isn't the NHTSA hotline or the Toyota 1-800 number - it's your mechanic! Woz doesn't say anything about taking the car to the dealer's and having them look at it.
Some of these cars have a push-button ignition switch. My dad has one. But I do not know what happens if you try to push the sbutton to switch off the engine while it's howling away at 5500 rpm. Will it shut off, or just ignore your suggestion to kill the ignition? Who knows.
I bet the owners manual knows.
Anyone who puts themselves and their family into 2000+lb missile capable of going 100+ MPH, and when confronted with a control system they've never seen before doesn't take the time to refer to the owners manual is a real moron.
I really hope you've never driven your dads car. Knowing how your vehicle works before you turn it on is a very important part of being a safe driver. If you can't take the time to drive safely then don't drive at all.
What was the part?
That's what led me to think this, but if I understand the system correctly and this is what Woz is actually talking about then it's not a "bug," just poor design (which could still be considered a bug, in some sense). Now, I'm not 100% certain about this being the case, but this is based on my experience with my fiancee's Prius and how its cruise control SEEMS to work.
The Prius only usually takes one tap for one mph, as far as I know, it just takes a moment and this is not readily apparent. You're going 50. You hit the button and don't notice a difference, so you hit it again, and hit it again, and by now it's accelerated 1mph. So you go "Ah, I see, 3 bumps = 1mph," when in reality you've just told the car to accelerate to 53, which it is still, gradually, doing.
So you hit it a bunch more times, and by the time it's actually at 53 you've told the car to accelerate to, say, 60. The car is still accelerating, but the Prius's cruise control is very slow, as I've noted before, so you may not even realize you're still accelerating. Now you want to get to 55 so you hit it 6 more times, but now you're at 54 and the car thinks you want it to go 66, so it, noting the disparity in requested speed and actual speed, changes the gear ratio and accelerates more rapidly, jumping up 11mph very quickly.
The fact that he says he has to tap the control again and again is what makes me think this is the case. If so, it's poor design on the part of the cruise control, but it WOULD still be working "as intended."
Also, to the guy above complaining about criticizing other people's grammar... that was me, correcting myself. Rancho relaxo!
No wonder it sings:
Faster than a bullet ... ... :D
terrifying scream
I doubt he would be complaining if 15 taps = 15 mph, to me it reads like a firmware bug.
Perhaps something like; If you hold the lever down for a couple seconds it adds 10mpg instead of just 1. Now if that was implemented by starting a timer when the lever is pressed, and if the lever is being pressed when the timer elapses it adds 10mph. But maybe there's a bug that doesn't always clear the timer when the lever is released...
But who knows, any number of race conditions could potentially cause this. It all depends on how the system is implemented.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
woz said he could reproduce safely
Good to know he's getting laid.
Thank you for taking my mildly snarky post politely. I shouldn't post under the influence of a bad day at work.
Say what? If what you say is true then you must think that if you twice tap the + button on a CC twice +4 MPH is a good idea but if you hit it that third time then more than +20 MPH is a good idea? I hope you don't work in UI design.
I will stick with my 17 year old Holden (local GM owned car maker) with it's mechanical accelerator. That way I don't have to peel my face of the back of a truck due to a shitty piece of Jap crap.
When my cell phone goes wrong, I can also bring it back to one of my carrier's official stores because they will service the phone and debug "user" issues. They've been doing it *long* before Apple got into the phone business.
Now it's another thing if you were talking about a laptop vs. a Mac Laptop...
If it was really Woz, he'd have taken out the system board and redesigned it with 35% less components used, all bugs fixed, and a couple of extra features.
I have the same problem in a 1994 Camry, so this has been around for awhile.
Never, ever, not once have I ever heard of Woz making a blanket, absolute statement phrased as fact about any type of electronic or mechanical system that was later found to be inaccurate. Woz is, first and foremost, a methodical engineer and he never makes sweeping statements without something to back them up. He may occasionally say things like, "Well, I think that..." but his strong phraseology indicates:
a. He's damn sure there's something wrong
and
b. Someone has really pissed him off.
Ultimately, I think Toyota is screwed on this one. A lot of people don't know who Woz is. Those who do know he's the guy who single-handedly solved electronic engineering problems that large teams never made progress on. And, if he says something is really, really wrong, and Toyota is denying it, it just indicates that when it all finally comes out Toyota will almost certainly be proven wrong - and they may actually be sincere! I could believe that Woz could find and identify a problem that Toyota's own engineers may not be able to come to a consensus on.
-Steve
Saying that it is a feature, not a bug, still makes it unexpected behavior. And yes, the prius still uses a very old Cruise control design, gving no feedback until you feel teh acceleration. (at least in the Prius 2008, not sure about the 2010 executive model)
Really, why? I use to run a restaurant with a smoking section. It was in a separate room, in the back, with its own ventilation system. People like you still bitched. What business is it of yours anyways? Instead of whining so they changed to law to make EVERY restaurant (and bar!) smoke-free, why you didn't you just go some place else, or fickin' stay the hell home! And that is coming from a non-smoker.
Wow. You really read a lot into that. Yes, I got upset when I sat in the non-smoking section and coughed all through my meal because the smoking from the smoking section came right on in. If there was a truly no-smoke section, I was perfectly happy. If there wasn't, I never went back willingly.
As for bars, I've never figured out why nobody seemed able to open a smoke-free bar. I always figured that having one or two like that in a town ought to get plenty of business. I find the smell of beer about as unpleasant as the smell of cigarettes, but entering a room of beer smell doesn't start me coughing like I'm going to hack up a lung.
I've never asked for a law to ban smoking altogether. In fact, from what I understand, that law's primary purpose is to protect the employees, not the customers.
However, I am happy that I can finally go to a bar with my friends and play pool and have a drink, all without suffering from irritated lungs for hours afterward.
The smokers have had their way for a few hundred years; now they get to experience how the non-smokers have felt all that time. Apparently, they can't take the same treatment they've been dishing out. Now it's the smokers who get to choose to go out without choking other people around them, or as you said "fickin' stay the hell home!"
Going back to my signature, how about you setup two separate swimming pools and see which is more popular? After all, everyone is addicted to peeing, aren't they? Sooner or later, you've got to get your fix; you just can't help yourself. Oh wait, you would prefer to swim in the no-peeing pool, and have people go somewhere else to get their peeing fix?
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
I had the same problem with an aftermarket cruise control installed in a Honda Civic hatchback. But mine was triggered by trying to Resume a cruising speed of 75 MPH on the Interstate (legal). Took the car in three times, twice they replaced the electronics. I never managed a reproducible test case.
It could have been the Resume button was double-triggering in a short interval. I can't test it now: that car got T-boned in an intersection after the driver of one SUV waved me to proceed into the path of another SUV in the second lane obscured by the first car. (What's the universal hand gesture for, "No. I can't see around you. You go.")
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Yes. I can blame them and I do--harshly. This is a forum for ideas and debate--not a forum for devising critical computer algorithms. Although syntax parsing may be precise, it's a very unforgiving mode of thinking and highly irritating when done by humans because it's indicative of a poorly developed ability for abstract thought. Near perfect emulation of algorithmic processing is not what I consider to be a rich form of intelligence; it is robotic intelligence.
Abstract intelligence is the one that's superior because it's capable of comprehension even when the information stream is noisy, irregular, or ambiguous. Abstract thought can exceed expectations; robotic thought can only meet expectations.
Camping on quad since 1996.
Bullshit, my ass.
Do you think not having doors on an elevator is "acceptable risk"? That's what killed my Grandfather in 1959. Someone at Purina obviously didn't care if HE or his co-workers lived or died.
What about the chicken plant in Georgia that had the fire doors chained shut to keep the minimum wage workers from stealing chicken parts?
You say "Every corporate executive I have met cares about risk", bullshit. They care about liabillity. Their workers' lives are unimportant to them. Period. People who worship money don't give a rats's ass about anything else.
They worry about their families and their friends in the boardroom, but if it's a choiice between dead workers and more profit, they'll take the profit. Whay do you think they were all against OSHA?
Free Martian Whores!
The people from Car & Driver are not mechanics, and probably are not familiar with many economy vehicles. It's like asking Jeremy Clarkson to evaluate the safety of a Honda Fit.
The average car consumer in the US gets automatic transmission and a 4-6 cylinder engine (this is why US rental cars all have auto trannys--so you don't "learn" on their manual). Car and Driver tend to evaluate cars with 6-16 cylinders and a manual transmission. When neutral come from pushing in a clutch, I wouldn't see why anyone should shut off the engine either...but that doesn't cover most of the cars people on the road actually drive in the US.
Toyota is, at this point, completely untrustworthy since it is their beliefs that caused this mess.
With respect, I believe my points still stand.
- Sig
Taylor,
The officer in San Diego was driving a loaner Lexus while his vehicle was being repaired. This loaner Lexus had a push-button "ignition" system, requiring just a push of a button to start the car, and a push of the button to stop the engine, unless the car is in gear and moving greater than velocity $x$, in which case it requires keeping the "starter" button on the dash {b}depressed continuously for three seconds{/b} to turn the system off. It also has an interlock requiring some weird combination so that putting the car into neutral at high velocities is not easily done. That's the information I've gleaned from the Union-Tribune's articles on it. I've driven that stretch of road to go to Santee to eat pizza and shop at lowes, and you often see people speeding recklessly down the steep grade.
Combination of new car with bad human-interface and a panic situation, even for a trained high-performing trooper lead to a deadly result.
KL
Taylor,
The officer in San Diego was driving a loaner Lexus while his vehicle was being repaired. This loaner Lexus had a push-button "ignition" system, requiring just a push of a button to start the car, and a push of the button to stop the engine, unless the car is in gear and moving greater than velocity $x$, in which case it requires keeping the "starter" button on the dash {b}depressed continuously for three seconds{/b} to turn the system off. It also has an interlock requiring some weird combination so that putting the car into neutral at high velocities is not easily done. That's the information I've gleaned from the Union-Tribune's articles on it. I've driven that stretch of road to go to Santee to eat pizza and shop at lowes, and you often see people speeding recklessly down the steep grade.
Combination of new car with bad human-interface and a panic situation, even for a trained high-performing trooper lead to a deadly result.
KL
Ah, thanks. I knew it couldn't have been as simple as an officer not thinking of removing the keys.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?