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Do Car Safety Problems Come From Outer Space?
Hugh Pickens writes "As electronic devices are made to perform more and more functions on smaller circuit chips, the systems become more sensitive and vulnerable to corruption from single event upsets. This is especially true of Toyota, which has led the auto industry in its widespread inclusion of electronic controls in the manufacture of their various car models. 'These circuit families store not just data, but their basic function electrically,' says Lloyd W. Massengill, director of engineering at the Vanderbilt Institute for Space and Defense Electronics at Vanderbilt University. 'In the unfortunate event of a particle flipping just the right bit, a circuit configured to carry out a benign action may be reprogrammed to carry out some unintended action.' Denise Chow writes in Live Science that some scientists are pointing to cosmic ray radiation as a plausible mechanism behind the sudden, unexplained acceleration reported to have occurred with the late model Toyotas."
"As the design of automobile systems continues to evolve from mechanical to electronic controls, relying more and more on various circuitry and chips, these electronic components may be vulnerable to being confounded by high-energy radiation writes Chow. Federal regulators were prompted to look into the possible role that cosmic rays played in Toyota's product recall fiasco after an anonymous tipster suggested the design of Toyota's microprocessors, software and memory chips could make them more vulnerable (PDF) to interference from radiation compared with other automakers. 'What's not known is what direction Toyota and other automakers are taking in terms of finding and correcting these issues,' says senior researcher Ewart Blackmore."
At the risk of sounding like a geezer, I remember back in the late 70's when this was a problem in early designs of mini-computers. Then we used to see single bits get flipped and crash computers from a variety of sources including cosmic radiation and alpha particles that came from the spontaneous decay of elements in the ceramic chip housings. More recently, when I purchased my 2005 Cadillac CTS it experienced a variety of problems similar to this when I would drive through a toll station that was equipped with RFID ID systems. Behaviours including sudden acceleration, engine stalling, indicator lights on the instrument panel going "crazy", On-Star calling for help when nothing was wrong, causing the driver's seat to suddenly drive forward to the steering wheel (making it really hard to steer), etc. At the time the only solution was to pull over, shut off the car, remove the key, open the door, wait for everything to shut down and then restart. After many frustrating weeks of "we can't duplicate the problem" it was discovered that the car had faulty shielding on one of the cables that makes up the in-car network. Once fixed the "gremlins" went away. The real crime here is that, because the problem can't be replicated on demand, Toyota is blaming the behaviour on attention seeking owners. This bizare response was recently repeated on the floor of Congress by one of Toyota's congressional tools. (I mean duly elected government representative.)
When I was working for NASA, on the NISN network, we'd get these weird router crashes for the old Cisco router located at (or very near) the South Pole in Antarctica. It was always a memory problem, and I'd always have to call someone to get them to powercycle the router. It irritated me to keep bothering those guys, so I opened a case with Cisco TAC.
The TAC guy sent a terse response, saying that particular crash was a "transient memory error" due to "alpha radiation or sun spots." That really pissed me off -- Cisco TAC just gave me a standard BOFH response! I escalated, and swung the NASA club around some, and finally got a senior engineer on the phone. "You said this router's at the South Pole, right? So that means it's at very high altitude, with very little ozone shielding, right?" "Umm, yeah." "Well there you go. There's a lot more radiation at that altitude than at sea level. Our stuff's only rated for sea level. See if they can .. I dunno, put a lead blanket over it or something."
I relayed the info to my contact at McMurdo, and he laughed and said he'd figure something out.
On a hunch, I checked the other two "high-altitude" routers we had, and sure enough, they both had a statistically higher failure rate for "transient memory errors".
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My dad was an IBM CE (Customer Engineer) specialist on one of the models in the IBM System/360 mainframe range. He used to like telling the story about how he and another engineer were out on a customer's site trying to determine an intermittent fault. They would bring the machine up and sure enough there would be this glitch at precise intervals. They just couldn't figure out what was causing it. That was, until the other CE took a look out the window.
After a bit he said 'Tell me when it happens'. OK... '...now' my dad said. Then he said 'I'll tell you when the next one happens' and a few seconds later said '...now'. Which is exactly when it did glitch.
It turned out that the customer's DP center was situated close to an airport. The CE could see the radar dish revolve at the end of the runway. When it pointed straight at him was when the glitch occurred. Needless to say the computer room received some RF shielding.