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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
Driving a car is rocket science.
Don't forget to tell them the Japanese use the metric system please.
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
This is an "admission" of nothing. Nowhere does it say that Toyota has asked NASA to help out.
The NHTSA is asking NASA to help out, but the NHTSA has never asserted that this was a pedal or floormat problem. They've just been holding Toyota to the fire to get a fix. And the fixes so far do not appear to be working.
This is a sign that the NTSB is likely suspicious of Toyota's explanation, and frustrated with continuing reports of sudden acceleration even on "fixed" cars, and would like someone without a vested interest in a cheap fix to examine this. Given NASA's experience with writing software that's just gotta work or else, I'd be very hard-pressed to think of no better team of programmers for the job.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
It was my understanding that the entire problem was caused by some Shadowrunners hired by GM and Ford to break into the Toyato supply lines. I heard it was a three pronged attack, their decker injected some software bugs, they let a troll loose in the factory to fuck with the pedals and they got a shaman to curse the floor mats.
Morpheus, God of Dreams.
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.
This doesn't hurt Toyota; if anything it helps them. Nobody is buying the sticky-pedal, caught-in-the-floormat explanation anyway, so how could this do anything but help restore confidence in Toyota? You get NASA to say that the electronics could use some better shielding, everyone assumes that EMI was the problem, and you get right back to selling Prius'.
What's really wrong? I don't know (I'm sort of 50/50 between it being a software race condition or driver error). But one would think that EMI wouldn't result in several cases of the exact same system failure.
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."