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The Engineer's Lament -- Prioritizing Car Safety Issues
An anonymous reader writes: Malcolm Gladwell has an article in The New Yorker about how automotive engineers handle issues of safety. There have been tons of car-related recalls lately, and even before that, we'd often hear about how some piece of engineering on a car was leading to a bunch of deaths. Sometimes it was a mistake, and sometimes it was an intentional design. But we hear about these issues through the lens of sensationalized media and public outrage — the engineers working on these problems understand better that it's how you drive that gets you into trouble far more than what you drive.
For example, the Ford Pinto became infamous for catching fire in crashes back in the 1970s. Gladwell says, "That's a rare event—it happens once in every hundred crashes. In 1975-76, 1.9 per cent of all cars on the road were Pintos, and Pintos were involved in 1.9 per cent of all fatal fires. Let's try again. About fifteen per cent of fatal fires resulted from rear collisions. If we look just at that subset of the subset, Schwartz shows, we finally see a pattern. Pintos were involved in 4.1 per cent of all rear-collision fire fatalities—which is to say that they may have been as safe as or safer than other cars in most respects but less safe in this one. ... You and I would feel safer in a car that met the 301 standard. But the engineer, whose aim is to maximize safety within a series of material constraints, cannot be distracted by how you and I feel."
For example, the Ford Pinto became infamous for catching fire in crashes back in the 1970s. Gladwell says, "That's a rare event—it happens once in every hundred crashes. In 1975-76, 1.9 per cent of all cars on the road were Pintos, and Pintos were involved in 1.9 per cent of all fatal fires. Let's try again. About fifteen per cent of fatal fires resulted from rear collisions. If we look just at that subset of the subset, Schwartz shows, we finally see a pattern. Pintos were involved in 4.1 per cent of all rear-collision fire fatalities—which is to say that they may have been as safe as or safer than other cars in most respects but less safe in this one. ... You and I would feel safer in a car that met the 301 standard. But the engineer, whose aim is to maximize safety within a series of material constraints, cannot be distracted by how you and I feel."
Listen to the engineers and not marketing or the media? You must be crazy!
Maybe the brakes were too good, resulting in all the rear-endings?
Seriously, our scientifically-illiterate society is rife with unintended consequences and cures that are worse than the disease.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
I believe Ford lost the Pinto case because internal tests discovered the problem and also found an inexpensive fix: a $5 plastic wall between the gas tank and the impact zone of the tank.
In other words, the jury decided the company consciously bypassed a cheap and easy fix to shave a few bucks from manufacturing cost. It was a pretty simple tradeoff. I have to agree with Jury in that case. The car's statistical risk compared to other brands is moot (unless the other brands also discovered and skipped the easy fix, in which case, they may also be liable).
Table-ized A.I.
"It's how you drive that gets you into trouble"
I've found that those who drive with blood alcohol levels above 1.0 lead to lots of trouble. Far more than any recent engineering defect I've heard of.
The biggest safety related maintenance problem is usually the loose nut behind the wheel.
had and probably still have more control over production than engineering. Ford figured it would add an $11 per car cost of manufacture to make safe and dead bodies were cheaper. I doubt it's changed..
http://www.cnbc.com/id/1025899...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
While I have successfully avoided being rear-ended by inching up into an intersection before, rear-end collisions typically have a lot more to do with how others drive than how you drive.
Why drag up a nearly fifty year old car as a reference? A known POS that was an engineering disaster.
Dunno, I've heard it said repeatedly that there's not really a safe way to drive a mid-engine sports car. They're designed to go really fast, which serves to make them even more dangerous. They're ridiculously powerful, ridiculously expensive, and finally, just because you can afford one certainly doesn't mean you can safely operate it. Also, aren't they more likely to be made with fiberglass? (Low weight, but comes apart like paper in a serious wreck)
Speedy cars appeal to people with aggressive dispositions, therefore these are marketed to this demographic. This is what is meant by "the car making the driver". Statistics are gathered from the resulting MVA's. This is what is meant by "the driver making the car".
The New Yorker, insurance companies, bad drivers.
Too many easy targets in one story?
"But the engineer, whose aim is to maximize safety within a series of material constraints, cannot be distracted by how you and I feel."
and that boys and girls is how American car manufacturers rationalize producing the crap that they produce.
This is not surprising. GM or Ford would have to be one fscked corporation to walk out of a meeting with the mandate "let's make crap cars". Instead they manage to convince that their junk "had to be done this way", even though most other foreign car manufactures have much lower design failure rates.
Are we supposed to just ignore non-fatal Pinto fires or somehow forget about costs of responding to the fire, cleanup, property insurance. Is no one in the statistics department concerned that non-fatal injuries carry cost to society too? I guess no - not because it did not happen - but because there is no clear data available.
http://shameproject.com/report...
http://mikethemadbiologist.com...
Malcom Gladwell is the product of conservative institutes and think tanks; he has worked for racists, the tobacco industry, oil companies, big pharma, and more. His books popularize the kind of thinking that said industries have used to defend their practices.
Please help metamoderate.
Modern approach to car safety is wrong, instead of focusing on training and testing drivers it was decided that cars must be equipped with automatic systems that take away control from you. Like systems that will override the driver and try to stop the car for you, never mind that tractor trailer behind you that won't be able to stop in time.
A sticky accelerator pedal doesn't cause unintended acceleration, it causes lack of intended deceleration. There's a big difference: the car should slow when you take your foot off of the accelerator as there's less fuel being fed into the engine whereas taking your foot off of a sticky pedal will not change the amount of fuel being supplied so the car will neither accelerate nor decelerate (assuming a level road).
I think there's a blurry line here.
I'll accept for the sake of argument that the ford pinto with the gas tank problem was statistically not a problem.
That being said, any corporation that accepts a casualty/loss over safety/loss deserves punitive damages. If it was your family in that wreck that killed them to save the corporation money - would you be as forgiving?
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Excessive speed, for example, is implicated in an overwhelming number of fatal crashes. Traffic enforcement cameras—“speed cameras”—have been shown, conclusively, to reduce road fatalities.
What? Where is your evidence? It certainly doesn't bear out in the road crash fatality figures. I see this every day: people slow down as they pass a fixed speed camera then, as soon as they pass, they accelerate again. It's an idiot tax: speed cameras raise revenue from people too dumb to slow down as they pass them. They do nothing to improve traffic safety.
The biggest danger to driving, drivers and pedestrians is the cell phone. Folks walk out into traffic staring at the samsung. Go 10 blocks in Manhattan, you will get at least a dozen of these folks. No spatial awareness at all. In public. I saw a guy holding a cell phone conversation on speaker while bicycling yesterday. The guy who doesn't move from the light when it goes green didn't stall his manual, he's texting. Left Lane blocker ? contractor or housewife in huge SUV/Pickup...62 in a 70...ON THE PHONE. Really, just close your eyes instead and go lalalalalalaaa
I heard that the Air Force bought as many Pinto's as they could during the Vietnam War because they were cheap and exploded on impact....
IIRC, the Pinto design was the result of Lee Iacoca wanting to quickly turn his Mustang platform into something in the econo-box bracket. Reuse of the frame involved rotating the u-brackets that held the axle in place so they now faced the fuel tank which was right up against them. End result was a rear-collision having the potential to push the tank into the bolts causing a puncture, leak, and possible fire.
I remember a bit of design in a small aircraft. In order to address the problem of gear-up landings, Piper came up with a system that, when it detected the appropriate combination of airspeed and engine conditions, would automatically lower the gear. It had an override so the pilot could indicate that this was not accidental and to not deploy the gear.
The system was very popular and copied onto a variety of aircraft. Nobody knows how many gear-up accidents were prevented since nobody calls up after a fine landing to report that they had actually screwed up and were saved by the auto-extend system. But the one person who failed to override the system after an engine failure and had the gear deploy filed and won a lawsuit claiming that the auto-deploy system was what caused them to be unable to glide to the airport. As a result, the manufacturers ceased making them and directed their removal from existing aircraft.
How long will it be before someone sues claiming that the auto-braking system in their car caused whiplash?
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
Driver: "Open the door, car."
Car: "I can't do that <insert name here>. You're too stupid to let behind the wheel."
Problem solved.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Ford Explorer roof pillars were initially spec'd with a fairly high-grade steel. Citing costs, management refused to use the high-grade steel and instead used a weaker steel.
Result? Lots of roof-cave-ins on a vehicle that was prone to roll over.
http://www.autosafety.org/memo...
Please help metamoderate.
commenting to remove dismoderation
See? All you techno-libertarians just want to sell us shoddy crap now. Why should we let you participate in society again?
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
You work for authority. You work on commission. Therefore you can not be trusted.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
Because the real idiot is the one who thinks that professional police exist to enforce the law fairly, whereas, in fact, they exist to reproduce a subordinate, beaten-down working class.
You know, the "idiots" that make your enchanted techno-life possible won't have to worry about you when you're riding a lamp post. You might want to think about that real hard before you open your arrogant fly-hole again, child. Americans have overstayed their welcome in the world and should all STFU.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
... bourgeois neoliberals love to use to defend their sycophancy.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
Traffic accidents are almost always caused by driver error. Mechanical failure is lost in the noise at less than 5% of all crashes.
Well I was in the steel industry afterwards which is why I can tell you that they barely tried at all in comparison to the Japanese cars that took their market from them.
We need to recall all of the cars with those damned blue lights.
We need to recall of the cars with the movie projector like beam that blinds everyone that they point at, and don't even show when it's not pointing directly at them.
If you are talking cars, safety, and engineers you have to mention the relevant norm, ISO 26262, very early on, because there you will find information about how development processes are to be structured, how safety should be assessed and what is to be done about safety critical systems in an autombile. But talking about (the reality of) engineering doesn't make for exciting story-telling.
As computers gets more integrated with cars, engineers are following the computer industry side: blame the user, not the equipment. You're driving it wrong!
The Pinto retailed for $1850.
The article's main point was that given limited resources an engineer tackles the problems that have the biggest impact on safety, not the most publicized or scary ones.
But the article missed the point of a key quote from an engineer: "Then how do I have enough information to make a compelling case to convince an executive panel that they really should spend thirty million dollars on a recall". This is the core problem; safety resources rely on someone taking initiative to make a compelling business case against other competing objectives like features, sales, marketing, etc.
If safety were truly taken seriously then the way safety is approached should be the opposite: all observed safety issues should be on the docket to be fixed by default, and then the case should be made why it does not make sense to fix particular problems (for exampe, unlikely to happen, a rare defect, etc).
For every case like this, you can find cases where engineers and/or their employers made really bad choices when left to their own devices. The outcome of the Pinto case, and others like it, should not only be judged by the specific issue, but also by their cumulative effect in encouraging manufacturers to be proactively cautious (though that is hard to measure.)
Cars built for the NASCAR racing series are among the safest full bodies racing cars around. You *could* build passenger cars to that standard. You would wind up with a very safe car, but it would have only 2 seats, next to no cargo capacity and you'd have to climb in through the windows. Oh, and it would cost around $75,000.
If you want usable doors and a little cargo room, you could opt for a WRC spec car. It'll cost you $150,000 (Using a conventional engine/gearbox combo significantly lowers the cost.)
Ok apparently no one here actually owned a Pinto. The problem wasn't that they would catch fire in a crash. The problem with the Pinto is they would catch fire for no reason at random intervals through out the day.
The real joke here is, the Minister was wondering how to get them into his congregation, the Dr. was wondering how to get a referral fee from a colleague, and the engineer was trying to improve the quality of life of the firefighters (no longer being pushed by others) while maximizing the utilization of the golf course.
Top Gear brought up the more interesting question regarding future concerns of self driving cars, namely, how to prioritize how to handle impending accident. Will the car swerve to avoid a collision at the risk of injuring a pedestrian? Will it sacrifice itself and maybe injure the occupant to avoid a pedestrian? In other words if a collision with another object is certain in all options, how will it choose which to allow itself to hit?
Your post is misinformed in so many ways.
First of all - it makes no sense in terms of realities like physics and driver reaction times.
No citation does not demonstrate your claimed conspiracy. Studies are notorious for missing confounding factors (like driver attentiveness, see below for more factors) and other biases. I suspect the study (if it ever really existed) was removed because it is flawed.
Wikipedia is our friend: "The National Safety Council suggests that a three-second rule -- with increases of one second per factor of driving difficulty -- is more appropriate. Factors that make driving more difficult include poor lighting conditions (dawn and dusk are the most common); inclement weather (ice, rain, snow, fog, etc.), adverse traffic mix (heavy vehicles, slow vehicles. impaired drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists, etc.), and personal condition (fatigue, sleepiness, drug-related loss of response time, distracting thoughts, etc.). For example, a fatigued driver piloting a car in rainy weather at dusk would do well to observe a six-second following distance, rather than the basic three-second gap."
Bring on the autonomous cars, humans are crap drivers including the 'professionals' who drive for a living and think that their crap driving is somehow ok because "I passed an advanced driving test".
Cars right now are built like tanks to protect the occupants, if they weren't prone to crashing they wouldn't need to weigh 2 tons. If people hired autonomous cars they could hire small vehicles when they are going alone and larger vehicles when they are taking the family etc.
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If 1.9% of cars were Pintos in 1975-1976, and 1.9% of fatal fires were also in Pintos, isn't that actually an awful record? According to Wikipedia, the Pinto was introduced in 1971, so every Pinto was less than 6 years old at that time. It's my understanding that car fires are more likely on older vehicles (fuel lines rust through, repairs are done poorly, etc...), so I would expect a car model that has been around for less than six years would account for a lower percentage of fires than the number of vehicles on the road. I know cars of that era didn't last as long as they do now, but about half of Pintos that existed at that time would have been less than three years old.
Umm... no. NASA explicitly rejected monolithic SRB's because of the significant (and costly) technical challenges involved.
That sounds damming - unless you know the history of the joint, as opposed to the sound bites.
The joint was failing (the o-ring was being severely damaged by blow-by, even when the specifications said there would be zero blow by) even at temperatures well within the specified range. On at least one flight, it came within a few seconds of complete failure despite the launch temperature being in the 70's.
And there is precisely zero evidence that the engineers ever objected to continuing to fly despite these ongoing failures.
Yeah. Engineers designed cars that killed people for decades - and didn't change their ways until forced to by legal and stay on that course because marketing has determined that safer cars sell.
Yeah.
That's a reason to trust engineers.
There is no such thing as absolute safety.
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The link has precisely fuck-all to do with what I wrote.
So lately I've wonder if I'm gay. But i'm not really sure. Sometimes tho I'm think i'm becoming gay? Just wonder if anyone in the community can advise on this feeling?
Of course you are.
The Pinto had plenty of modern safety devices planned by engineers: ABS, air bags, double-lined gas tank, etc. It was that clueless managers cut all that out forcing a car that was cheaper to manufacture, but that really cost Ford more money in the end. Without the cuts the Pinto would have been the safest car made at the time. I do agree that a lot comes down to how people drive. The biggest problem is the ridiculously low requirements for obtaining a driver's license in the US. No professional training is required, only mildly phased approaches, and a way too low eligibility age. A 16 year old is considered mature enough to drive a Porsche or Hummer, but not mature enough to drink a light beer? Look at the requirements for getting a driver's license in Germany....noticeably less whackos on the road and noticeably less accidents and vehicle accident deaths.