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Toyota's Killer Firmware
New submitter Smerta writes "On Thursday, a jury verdict found Toyota's ECU firmware defective, holding it responsible for a crash in which a passenger was killed and the driver injured. What's significant about this is that it's the first time a jury heard about software defects uncovered by a plaintiff's expert witnesses. A summary of the defects discussed at trial is interesting reading, as well the transcript of court testimony. 'Although Toyota had performed a stack analysis, Barr concluded the automaker had completely botched it. Toyota missed some of the calls made via pointer, missed stack usage by library and assembly functions (about 350 in total), and missed RTOS use during task switching. They also failed to perform run-time stack monitoring.' Anyone wonder what the impact will be on self-driving cars?"
Realistically, you are quite a bit more likely to die in your classic car than you are in a new car despite issues like this.
The new car brakes better, handles better, is an order of magnitude safer in a collision thanks to the crumple zones, airbags, and modern collision testing requirements. It also uses less fuel, and pollutes less.
I like classics too, but I don't have any illusions that they are generally safer or more reliable. I will give you that they are usually easier to fix (assuming they aren't so classic that parts are a problem) but that doesn't make them safer -- and safety was the underlying catalyst for this discussion.
Did you read TFA?
In a nutshell, the team led by Barr Group found what the NASA team sought but couldn’t find: “a systematic software malfunction in the Main CPU that opens the throttle without operator action and continues to properly control fuel injection and ignition” that is not reliably detected by any fail-safe.
That's proof, not an argument that they could have tried harder to find the system could fail. The bottom line is that its software that puts people's lives at risk. It's reasonable to hold that type of code to a higher standard. There are millions of other cars, trains, and planes out there with similar software but without this type of problem. At some point you should be responsible for the things you create.