NHTSA Has No Software Engineers To Analyze Toyota

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 23, 2010 @09:16AM from the analog-agency-in-a-digital-world dept.

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."

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Re:Heads better roll by dave562 · 2010-02-23 09:54 · Score: 0, Offtopic

Completely off topic, but have you ever spoken to your parents about the way the FDA handles vitamins and supplements and their seeming propensity to force anything off of the market that threatens pharmaceutical interests?
The following article discusses the FDA's handling of L-Tryptophan because it produced similar clinically observed effects as Prozac and other SSRIs.
http://www.qhi.co.uk/features/feat_002.asp