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NASA Summoned To Fix Prius Problems
coondoggie writes "If you want to solve a major engineering mystery, why not bring in some of the world's best engineers? The US Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration today said it was doing just that by bringing in NASA engineers with expertise in areas such as computer controlled electronic systems, electromagnetic interference, and software integrity to help tackle the issue of unintended vehicle acceleration in Toyotas. The NHTSA review of the electronic throttle control systems in Toyotas is to be completed by late summer." We're really in trouble when NASA has no choice but to call Bruce Willis.
I guess today's NASA is a good call...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
So, this is an admission that sticking pedals and faulty floormats had nothing to do with the problem, and that the recalls to fix pedal and floormat "problems" were simply a smokescreen to hide the actual cause of the problem (albeit, unknown cause)?
Driving a car is rocket science.
Don't forget to tell them the Japanese use the metric system please.
Bruce Willis? They'd better call Chuck Norris to fix the pedals with a roundhouse kick or I'm selling my Toyota!
If the problems with the shuttles were related to floor mats then perhaps NASA could help. Otherwise, it's just another set of computer scientists looking over a few million lines of code they didn't write, trying to find a defect that has supposedly manifest itself less than a few hundred times out of million of cars and probably billions of miles driven.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Three.
One to remove the floor-mat.
One to absorb the cosmic rays supposedly causing the problem.
One to actually fix the problem, by reintroducing mechanical acceleration.
I'll be here all day.
The budget cuts at NASA apparently keep them earthbound and working on earth crawlers
and when it is all said & done, they will conclude people are hitting the GAS instead of the BRAKE.
You do realize the government could flush every penny invested in GM and Chrysler down the toilet and not miss it, right? Dragging down Toyota to prop up GM and Chrysler might make sense if the federal government was dependent on their success, but it isn't. And even if they took down Toyota, that wouldn't prevent the dozen or so other non-gov't owned brands from rushing to fill the gap (and likely succeeding given the shitty reputation of GM and Chrysler over the past couple decades). Without a motive, inventing conspiracy theories in advance seems rather pointless.
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What is truly ironic here is that NASA regularly summons external panels to fix their problems.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
That is just a horrible car analogy. I can't even figure out which one of you is supposed to be the car and which one is supposed to be the analogy.
Moreover, their vehicles operate in adverse conditions (radiation, temperature extremes, chance of collisions with fast moving things). They might actually be fairly adept at looking at systems which are supposed to be robust and failsafe, and identifying ways in which they are NOT failsafe.
"The total cost of the two studies is expected to come to approximately $3 million, including the cost of purchasing cars that have allegedly experienced unintended acceleration to be studied." I guess they don't have to bother looking at the Car Fax. What does "unintended acceleration" do to the KBB value?
"I'm not a quack, I'm a mad scientist! There's a difference." - Dr. Cockroach
I said this earlier:
If NASA does find a problem then Toyota can spin it as it being so subtle that it took the resources of NASA to find it. They can then use this, with PR spin, and an agreement to contract with NASA for "consulting" as a win.
If NASA finds nothing, then Toyota is off the hook wrt the drive by wire system, again a win.
Toyota's engineers needed a challenger.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I think this more appropriate for Keanu Reeves... Speed 3: Hybrid Control
CAN Protocol(the de-facto automotive protocol) contains error checking. So if a node in the system sends out 00000001 but the "sun spot" turns it to 01000001, it finds that error. So unless it changes that to a 01000001, while also changing the parity bit(or whatever they use for error checking) to 0 as well(as compared to 1), WHILE ALSO somehow disabling the entire safety section of code that reduces the throttle input when brakes are applied... then I seriously doubt it.
Everyone involved in this knows the above facts, what they have to do is prove the above facts. The reason they called in NASA is because they lack the right type of experts, NASA does not. Case closed.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
I'd really like to see how the computer in the car manages to consistently only enter this mysterious state when the driver is 60 or older (or maybe in the late 50s). Because normally, if you have a ton of examples of something failing, all of which involve people of an age famed for acquired inattentiveness or confusion, and which look just like many other reported and documented cases of elderly folks getting confused and hitting the gas pedal thinking it's the brakes, you'd not assume it was the computer.
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...Richard Feynman. Oh wait.
Toyota will learn what went wrong with its software, and NASA will find out how to get a vehicle into space.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Did you RTFA? Toyota is mentioned twice, and only in the context of Toyota the vehicle make, not Toyota the company. NASA is not being hired by Toyota. NASA is being called in by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of the USDOT to look at the vehicles, because the NHTSA apparently does not have the expertise to handle the investigation as to why the vehicles are suffering from the uncontrolled acceleration. The US government, not Toyota, is paying scientists from another federal program 3 million dollars to investigate the problem, which is actually bad PR for Toyota. This makes it look like they cannot explain their own problem, let alone fix it, and the US government has to do clean up work to get to the root of these failures.
That said, why is it in these stories of runaway acceleration, that nobody slaps the thing into neutral and hits the brakes? The stories always read like "I was powerless to stop my deathcar!" but drivers have lots of options in situations like that. You can even just turn the car off and hope you haven't picked up a vacuum leak.
I hear that these cars are "too smart" to let you shift while driving. I drive a stick (my preference) so I have no idea if that's accurate or not, but I did sit in a Prius at an auto show once and there's nothing mechanical about the drive/park/reverse selector. It merely indicates to the computer what you would like to do.
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