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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."
Interference from radiation doesn't just come from outer space, it comes from cell phones, TV/radio stations, microwaves.... you see where this is going. I once worked in an office where there was a cell phone relay antenna too close to a PC, and we were constantly reinstalling the OS until I told them to move things around in the area.
Thing is, when Windows gets a corrupted OS... it BSODs and we move on. Single-bit errors shouldn't send the car out of control... there should be some checksum that shouldn't add up. When a fault is detected, it should go to a backup program about safely shutting down the car.
Since the biggest Toyota runaway story has turned out to be a problem exists between seat and pedals situation... is this all hype with no science behind it?
I bet they still use C for these kinds of things, how about something safer, such as Eiffel?
There's a reason that our entire modern world doesn't come crashing to a halt around us every 30 seconds. If every CPU was vulnerable to bit flips from random radiation, every part of your house would be on fire and arcing electricity. Times Square would look like the bridge of the 60s enterprise under attack.
This is just some douchebag professor trying to ride the tragedies to fame. There's a reason it's always hitting the same system in the car. It's because the system is defective. There's a reason the professor has nothing but speculation to back himself up.
This is the worst kind of charlatanry from someone who should know better. I hope his hosting school takes this very, very seriously.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Sounds a whole lot like the e-cache parity errors in the Sun UltraSPARC-II processors.
If you were never affected by that, consider yourself a lucky person.
particle-caused bitflips are very much real.
It's not out of the question, IBM noted in the 90s:
Extensive background radiation studies by IBM in the 1990s suggest that computers typically experience about one cosmic-ray-induced error per 256 megabytes of RAM per month. If so, a superstorm, with its unprecedented radiation fluxes, could cause widespread computer failures.
You have to fix this though. As a large manufacturer you have to accept this risk just like your competitors do. Airlines accept this risk and triple check their data because people's lives are at risk. As a car manufacturer, you are in the exact same position.
I hope the fix they already rolled out as a recall includes triple checking data or -- if the article is correct -- we won't see a drop in these horrible accidents. I hope for drivers and public safety that it does. It's led to death and possibly wrongful incarceration. Restitution is in order. Take testing motor vehicles seriously.
My work here is dung.
Whether you subscribe to Occam's razor, or just plain old common sense, rays from outer space are not Toyota's problem (though they may be the author's problem).
... but rays from outer space? Please.
/. had posted that in the last Toyota story they would have gotten a +5 Funny.
This type of thing is just plain bat shit crazy. There is a problem somewhere in Toyota's system somewhere. Either a software bug or bad chips or something real and tangible
If someone here on
Tonight on CBS, a very special episode of Everyone Loves Space Ray:
Space Ray: Hey, Deborah, did you hear what happened to my car?
Deborah: Don't worry about it, Space Ray, you didn't cause it this time (simulated audience laughter)
With a special guest appearance by Ace Frehley as "Just Another Confused Alien". Coming up right after "The Ghosts of Gilligan's Island"
Since the biggest Toyota runaway story has turned out to be a problem exists between seat and pedals situation..
Ignorant alien between seat and pedals. Toyotas were designed for humans to drive. 'nuff said.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Single-bit errors shouldn't send the car out of control... there should be some checksum that shouldn't add up.
What if the cosmic rays corrupted the checksum routine?
The mind boggles!
So, in the case of Toyota, these cosmic rays are very clever. They targeted cars in the US and not cars in Japan or other countries. How did the rays target selective areas of the planet? Did they choose highly litigious geographical areas?
I predict government grants will be spawned to finance new careers (and even a new federal agency) in Terrorist Cosmic Ray Detection and Analysis (TCRDA) to protect the US from these rogue rays.
While working for Motorola, I worked on electronic throttle control (ETC). We spent a ton of time working to make the system "fail safe". I think we all had in the back of our minds that it was only a mater of time before we would have to testify as to our engineering decisions.
My little part of ETC involved adding a sub processor which watch-dogged the main micro. The little micro asked a series of questions of the main micro. Both processors would need to agree on all the inputs and output of the system. The little micro would also ask question regarding real time OS (RTOS) of the main micro. The main micro would need to have tasks executing in the right order to satisfy the small micro. Lastly, the small micro would ask the main micro to perform math operations to verify accuracy. Oh, and the main micro was continuously checksumming it's memory too.
Both micros had a direct hardware disable path to the H-bridge which was delivering power to the throttle plate. The throttle plate was spring loaded, so, with power cut, the throttle plate would snap to an idle position.
Next came the electro / magnetic compatibility testing (EMC). We spent months inside huge chambers testing both radiation and susceptibility. One of the tests for susceptibility involved using a zap gun to spark a 20kV spark on each pin of our ECU. Not satisfied with that, our customer opened one of our modules and used a sparking spark plug to slowly zap our board to failure. Bottom line, that throttle plate better never stick one way, or the other.
In the end, it always amazed me that the whole thing would work at all. Seemed to me that the system was always seconds away from going into some kind of fail safe mode.
No, a stray bit flip is not going to facilitate a run away car. Least not on my system!
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".
http://unxmaal.com
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.
Having heard all these stories really makes me wonder, i live in Belgium where cars with manual gear boxes are the common norm, and i've had my car accelerate like nuts once (pedal got stuck because of the floormat) i shifted to neutral, turned of the engine & used my momentum to get to the side of the road where i could dislodge the mat.
Are manual gearboxes that rare in the States?
Wrong analogy. Windows does crash a lot. It should be "It reminds me of Windows users who say Linux isn't ready for the desktop".
Funny, this is the first time I ever saw a computer analogy used to explain a car problem in Slashdot. But, come to think of it, this is a rather neat analogy. Toyota is blaming their problems on driver error, Microsoft says third-party drivers are the only cause of crashes in Windows ever since XP came out.
Both of these corporations are *wrong* at that, any system should be resistant to outside errors.
A computer shouldn't crash just because a hardware driver fails. I have seen several Linux computers freeze when running some graphics applications, ATI cards are particularly prone to this, but you can still enter through the network and kill the offending application or, at worse, restart the windowing system. The fault with Windows is not the third-party hardware driver, it's the windowing system being built into the operating system.
Likewise, a car shouldn't depend entirely on one computer system for operation. Brakes, even with anti-lock, should have a hydraulic system that should always be able to stop the wheels from turning if the driver presses hard enough on the pedal. The transmission should have a mechanical lever that puts it into neutral. Steering should be operable by mechanic links from the wheel if the power-assisted system fails.
All this because a broken mechanical link or a leaking hydraulic system can be seen, or heard, but a software bug will remain lurking there undetected until it kills you.