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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.
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
"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."
Developers: We can use your help.
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
If Woz can reproduce the problem, then I'll believe him.
Sounds like Woz's stint on "Dancing with the Stars."
[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."
That quote ignores the influence of the mass media. From all accounts, this problem with Toyota's accelerator is extremely rare. However, Toyota has been getting absolutely reamed in the press for weeks over it. There's no telling how many potential customers they've lost because of this, but the damage to their previously spotless reputation for quality could take decades to recover. When people talk about quality reliable automobiles, Toyota and Honda are almost always the first two names that come up. For a company like that to have an issue like this, and to have handled it like they did, is devastating.
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 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!
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
Not sure what century you ar ein but "drive by wire" is pretty much the current wave of technology. I would expect manual linkage to steering, brakes and all drive train components to be a thing of the past in the VERY near future. Some of the drive train designs being unveiled at the autoshow put an electric motor on every wheel and eliminate mechanical drivetrain altogether.
Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N
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!
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.
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.
Carwinism!
The thing is, since it's most likely a software problem.. they need to change their model to accommodate for hot-fixes. You shouldn't need to recall the car just to upgrade the firmware.
Maybe this sort of publicity will push towards a more modern servicing model.
Sigs are for the weak.
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.
Its, not it's. Curses!
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)
Yeah, they patched the engine management software on my Subaru while it was in for an oil change. It apparently takes longer to do the patch than the oil change and vehicle inspection combined....
(Problem was, it would go into fast idle for a few seconds after declutching. So much for PZEV....)
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.
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
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 you think that approach is stupid, I suggest you never fly. Exactly the same approach is used in avionics, although I think they usually need a majority from 7 systems. Each system is designed by a separate team. They all solve the same problems, but in different ways, so hopefully they'll have different bugs.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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.
And he expresses an opinion.
Is he still wrong?
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.
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!
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.
Easy fix: Don't make right turns
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.
Its a Prius. Toyota still hasn't solved the "wanted acceleration" problem yet.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
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
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.
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 >+
As much as I hate Europeans, I have to agree. There's a reason that I drive a manual base model Camaro with power nothing, and it isn't just because it was dirt cheap. I refuse to hand control over a 3300lb vehicle capable of more than a hundred miles per hour over to a computer mass produced by the lowest bidder that's running code written by an overworked programmer.