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."

Comments

Re:Heads better roll

[tonywong]

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.

Re:Here come the shackles.

[Beardo the Bearded]

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.

Legitimate checks to power

[copponex]

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.