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NHTSA Has No Software Engineers To Analyze Toyota
thecarchik writes "An official from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told investigators that the agency doesn't employ any electrical engineers or software engineers, leaving them woefully unable to investigate correctly what caused the most recent Toyota recall. A modern luxury car has something close to 100 million lines of software code in it, running on 70 to 100 microprocessors. And according to consultant Frost & Sullivan, that number will rise to 200 to 300 million lines within a few years. And the software that controls the 'drive-by-wire' accelerators of Toyota and Lexus vehicles is one potential culprit in the tangled collection of issues, allegations, and recalls of many of those vehicles for so-called 'sudden acceleration' problems."
They don't need Electrial Engineers or Software Engineers. They need Computer Engineers, people who are trained to understand both sides of the hardware/software boundary.
"This mission is too important to allow you to jeopardize it." -- HAL
What exactly would the NHTSA do with a set of engineers? Audit all 100 million lines of code for each and every car they suspect has a safety issue with the computer system? Yeah, that sounds like a worthwhile endeavor. How about they do it the old fashioned way; collect the reports, identify the risk, and sanction the manufacturer to find/fix the problem. Thinking that an NHTSA coder (or a hundred) would have gotten to the bottom of this Toyota issue in any reasonable amount of time is a joke!
What is wrong is that everyone started believing the mantra that smaller government is better government. This isn't just limited to the United States.
In Canada, the province where I live (Alberta), derives a major part of its revenues from oil and gas. In the same conservative government 35 years ago, we had 2 independent arms of the government who could determine how much royalties were owed to the government from the oil and gas producers.
Today, we have no one in our government who is able to determine how much we should be collecting and therefore have to rely upon the oil and gas companies to tell use how much they are supposed to remit. Our own government auditor believes we have been bilked out of billions yet somehow we have a leaner and, ahem, more efficient government.
Just remember that the only thing to stand up to a big business nowadays is big government, and the goal of any big business is to convince everyone that a small government can watch over big business just like a big government can.
Given that there isn't a car made today whose safety can be properly evaluated without the skills of EE and software engineers, why would it be inefficient for the agency responsible for that evaluation to have people with those skills on staff? It's not like next years cars won't have even more of the same complete with modified firmware to examine.
Given that the safety evaluation will involve interactions between mechanical, electrical and software systems, you'd want a cohesive multi-disciplinary team, not a revolving door.
Big picture, it's not costing that many lives. Bad drivers are much deadlier, and simply sitting on your butt in the car and not getting enough exercise is deadlier yet.
One would be a good start. Oh hell, let's get wild and crazy and say.. 2.
Certainly more than zero.
"How in the hell does the NHTSA even do their job?"
Like every other safety certification organization. The car companies pay for a certificate, NHTSA takes some of the blame when something happens, and the general population feels safe knowing their is an entire organization dedicated to protecting them.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Dunno.
My kids were runover by an out-of-control Mustang about four years ago. There was nothing mechanically wrong with the car. Maybe it was driver error. I don't know, but apparently the accelerator was still stuck to the floor when the police got there. I remember how the cruise control on the cars I've owned will lower the accelerator when the CC is accelerating.
I've always blamed the firmware. Maybe that's because I'm an EE who used to write firmware for a living. (Firmware that's been in use in life-critical applications for five years with a 0% failure rate.) Odds are the code is shit and there's an edge case that nobody thought about. Maybe there's an uninitialized variable in there. I've seen it happen before. Of course, I'm not Woz-brand, so my opinion doesn't mean a thing.
For some reason, the various regulatory agencies (i.e. Engineering Associations) have been rolling over and letting the manufacturers put any code they want into public use without any thought that hey, maybe we should get someone with some credentials to look into it. I've tried to mention it to mine, no results. Maybe they're dinosaurs who think that engineering is about roads and sometimes other things, like buildings and handrails. Software can't hurt people, can it?
This problem is not limited to Toyota, and we've only just seen the beginning. I guarantee that other manufacturers are clenchinging their butts hoping that nobody in the media wonders about all the intermittent "floor mat" problems.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Most of the financial regulators are former high level executives from Goldman Sachs...
Some are but most are demonstrably not. Many are financial industry insiders but that's by necessity. Do you really want an financial regulator who has no knowledge of the industry he/she is regulating? The only place to get people with the appropriate financial experience is from the finance industry.
I don't understand why we need so many useless regulators who are usually wolves being put in charge of the hen house when the courts could easily handle this.
While I admire your faith in the court system, in truth the courts are woefully ill-prepared to deal with the sorts of issues the SEC and other regulating bodies deal with. The court system is sloooooowww, expensive and can only effectively deal with misconduct after it has occurred. The courts are a poor monitoring system. The court system also is not heavily staffed with financial experts who understand the issues involved. Trust me, you REALLY don't want financially illiterate judges deciding financial regulations.
The reason the industry insiders often end up as regulators is precisely because they are the only ones who really understand what is going on. Finance is really, really complicated. Yes it's not perfect but that's why the regulators are accountable to other bodies including the President and Congress. If anything the problem with the regulators isn't (usually) that they do poor quality work but rather that they aren't given enough resources to really do a great job. The SEC for instance is badly understaffed given it's mandate. If you really want to keep a better watch on the finance industry, lobby congress to increase funding to the SEC and other watchdog agencies.
It's going to end up being prosecuted in a court of law anyway and not solved by some magic regulation hand-waving.
Spoken like someone who has no experience whatsoever in the financial industry. I won't argue that all regulations are good or well enforced but relying on the court system alone to solve the issues that regulators deal with daily would be insanity. If you really want to screw up the financial system, get rid of the regulators. Our current financial mess is due in significant part to a lack of regulation.
Wrong. There's a reason Theodore Roosevelt is on Mt. Rushmore. Go back in history and read up. In the USA, we are re-living many of the same issues, roughly 100 years later.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The government doesn't have to do anything complicated. It just has to have the ability to strike fear into the hearts of the business community it's supposed to regulate.
This requires a few things: an independent media, which we don't have; a civically informed populace that takes it's democratic duties seriously, which we don't have; and a culture that values human dignity over profits, which we don't have.
In cultures that do have all of these things, government regulation works very well and fosters progress, since you don't have to constantly worry about getting screwed over, you don't have to wonder if you'll have access to medical care, or a good public school, or a good safety net to get you back on your feet if your fall ill, get in an accident, or whatever.
Clear and concise regulation with real penalties for breaking those regulations fosters competitive markets. Diminishing the government to the point where it can be bought and sold by businesses usually leads to fascism. The markets destroy themselves with greed, destabilize the economy (and eventually the whole society), and further concentrate wealth and power until you have a virtual oligarchy sprinkled with political theater.
It's not a race condition, is it?
I can't believe I'm the first one on this thread to make that joke. I'm not even a programmer.
You should all be ashamed of yourselves.
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