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Fiat Chrysler Recalls 1.3 Million Ram Pickups For Fatal Software Problem (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNNMoney: Fiat Chrysler is recalling 1.3 million pickup trucks because of a software problem that may be tied to at least one death and two injuries. The problem could disable side airbags from deploying and seat belts from tightening in a rollover accident. If there is a significant impact on the truck's underbody, Fiat Chrysler says the truck's safety system could incorrectly conclude that a sensor underneath the truck has failed. If a sensor does fail, the truck's safety system is designed to suppress the airbags from deploying and seat belts from tightening when they are not supposed to. That's why there is a risk if there is a subsequent rollover. The good news is the driver should be alerted to this problem by a instrument cluster warning light. If the light comes on, drivers should then turn the truck off, and then turn the key back into the on/run position to verify that the light is no longer on. They should also follow instructions on their recall notice. The report notes that the affected vehicles include the 2013-16 Ram 1500 and 2500 pickups, and 2014-2016 Ram 3500 pickups.
So they are using a Fail Unsafe system. If something fails, put the system in an unsafe state. Brilliant.
Love how they say they _designed_ it to work this way. Ah, no you didn't.
I come here for the love
The good news is the driver should be alerted to this problem by a instrument cluster warning light.
The last time all the lights appeared on the dashboard of my 1999 Ford Taurus the head gasket had blown and a piston broke inside engine. My mechanic refused to work on it as it was a waste of money. That was six months after I spent $1,500 on tires and brakes. Pick-N-Pull bought it for $250.
It was the Note 7 not the S7. If you are going to make jokes at least know what you are talking about.
Throw in the VW engineers while you are at it.
Table-ized A.I.
The good news is the driver should be alerted to this problem by a instrument cluster warning light. If the light comes on, drivers should then turn the truck off, and then turn the key back into the on/run position to verify that the light is no longer on.
They are supposed to be worrying about a light on the dashboard after taking a significant hit that causes a rollover?
10. You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off."
That's how our Lexus works...the "Start" button starts and stops the engine.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Have gnu, will travel.
If we've learned anything from the number of defects that are discovered in ECUs it's that they exist and people die because of them. Cars are becoming increasingly computerized which is disturbing because they are incorporating non-vital features into ECUs which are black boxes that we are just expected to trust behave properly. What we need is standardized and open source ECUs that handle all the basic systems needed for the car to function. Car companies can keep their fancy features in a secondary module but that car should be able to function and meet emission standards without it. This way, there will never be another Volkswagen type incident where they cheat the system and no more of these type sensor incidents.
Modern ECUs are not based around your old rock solid M68000 chips at 20MHz and 64KB of software, they usually run at a minimum of 200MHz with a few megabytes for software because they run full-blown operating systems.
How many people need to die easily preventable deaths before we learn?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I don't know anything about the Pinto engineering team either, but you didn't mention that.
love is just extroverted narcissism
On any modern Windows computer, you go to the 'start' menu to start the shutdown sequence.
Only a troglodyte would have been still be running a computer when that meme was created (MS-DOS? CP/M?) where you just switch the power off.
Ask any sheep farmer what they keep a Ram on the farm for. Just to fuck the ewes.
Whenever I see a Dodge 'Ram' on the road, I think "sheepfucker." In general usage I call any of the Dodge vehicles with the sheepfucker logo on it a "sheepfucker." In particular the burly pickup trucks whose driver is clearly compensating.
I haven't seen a 'Sheepfucker' bumper sticker, but have toyed with the idea of creating one.
Just interesting how we react to safety issues and recalls and have no real concept of statistics and risk evaluation. So of the 1.3 million Ram trucks on the road covered by this recall, many of which have been safely driven for several years, only 1 death has occurred because of this and 10 injuries confirmed. So that's a reliability rating of some five 9s, which fro a purely capitalistic point of view is actually well within reason and a perfectly acceptable death rate (unless of course it affects you!). Your odds of dying in a car crash despite working safety features are orders of magnitude greater than dying in a crash in a vehicle with this flaw where this flaw caused your death. So how do we evaluate the true risk and true cost?
So on the one hand a correctable flaw probably should be corrected, but on the other hand, if the odds of it happening are near zero, from a completely economic point of view it'd be far better for the companies and the economy to do nothing and let people die at the present rate. Is the latter action morally wrong? It may be. Depends on how you evaluate the risks. Forced recalls seem like a great idea because a company is forced to foot the bill and learn from it, but in reality the costs will be passed on to consumers down the road. I do wonder where this continual threat of litigation, particularly by the NTSB, is going to lead us. Might make us safer, might just make us spend more money.
First time I realized that "ram" doesn't mean memory.
Second time I noticed that "pickup" had nothing to do with music or old TV equipment.
I am very obviously not a car geek...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Fix it again tony!
I used to like editing that bitmap to read "It is not safe to shut off your computer."
On any modern Windows computer, you go to the 'start' menu to start the shutdown sequence.
So how come there's no on-screen "Stop" button to click on to start it up then?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
"Have you tried turning it off and then back on again?"
So yes, you're suggesting we *not* use computers to determine air bag deployment. You clearly never experienced one of the early air bag cars from the 80's...
At least VW didn't make any engineering mistakes.
They build a car that performed as good as possible for the customer, and as good as possible for the government inquisitor. The only problem was, that the government inquisitor didn't like that the car was able to figure out it was being tested and changed it's behaviour based on that.
Because you don't run Linux.
Why? Why is this a thing?
I've never had any issues with the older, all mechanical style.
Because you don't run Linux.
Actually, I *do* run Linux Mint (on my laptop) and I like it a lot.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Correct, air bag deployment can be done by purely mechanical inertial based systems that have superior reliability and lifespan compared to computer based ones. Yes, I know people whose lives were saved by airbag systems from the 1980s. You are not an engineer, you spew in ignorance