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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."
Yeah, pretty much. Besides, error correcting systems are relatively well-uderstood technology. ECC hasn't been the best available option for RAM for ages, and even the imperfect gains of ECC will work around occasional single-bit corruptions in memory. Flash can be used with extensive checksums. Executables can have hashes like MD5 and SHA checked before being allowed to execute, etc. People just don't bother with that sort of stuff because the error rate usually isn't high enough to justify being truly OCD about it. Spending X million dollars of R+D effort, or adding X hundred dollars of per-unit cost, you can probably improve safety in better ways that obsessing over cosmic rays and whatnot.
Car safety problems come from the jerk behind the wheel...
Who is programming his iPod, eating is lunch, fiddling with his Bluetooth earpiece while dialing his cellphone and booting his laptop to get the latest updates into his GPS... and so on.
In other words he is doing everything but "driving" which is ALL he should be doing.
Instead, the marketers have sold the public on the car-as-comfortable-living-room as a vehicle that should be as anti-brainworthy as possible.
Get rid of all the complicated systems. Reduce the machine to its simplest functions. Oh, and it probably wouldn't hurt to plug in some personal responsibility while unplugging all the extraneous crap.
The safest car I ever owned was my old MG. Why? Because I could feel the road and I knew that everyone was trying to kill me so I kept my guard up while driving it!
I had told many friends and family that adding computers to cars would eventually cause unexpected problems.Looks like I was right.
That's why I rebuild older cars and drive them instead of the newer ones.
No computers to go apeshit,Simpler to design & repair.AND NO ABILITY OF THE CORRUPT POLICE TO REMOTELY SHUT DOWN YOUR RIDE!!!
Insurance is much cheaper,too.
Geek Hillbilly
they were trying to compete with the LHC but didn't have enough real estate, so they built a world wide detection network in their automobiles called the Large Vehicle Collider. Every time a vehicle has a sudden unattributed acceleration, it means it was hit by some sort of particle and an investigation could be begun on that controller. They just packaged the detectors in dual-function machinery. Way to go Toyota!