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Coding Error Sends 2019 Subaru Ascents To the Car Crusher (ieee.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: [A] software remedy can't solve Subaru's issue with 293 of its 2019 Ascent SUVs. All 293 of the SUVs that were built in July will be scrapped because they are missing critical spot welds. According to Subaru's recall notice [PDF] filed with the U.S. National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, the welding robots at the Subaru Indiana Automotive plant in Lafayette, Ind., were improperly coded, which meant the robots omitted the spot welds required on the Ascents' B-pillar. Consumer Reports states that the B-pillar holds the second-row door hinges. As a result, the strength of the affected Ascents' bodies may be reduced, increasing the possibility of passenger injuries in a crash. Subaru indicated in the recall that "there is no physical remedy available; therefore, any vehicles found with missing welds will be destroyed." Luckily, only nine Ascents had been sold, and those customers are going to receive new vehicles. The rest were on dealer lots or in transit.
Human workforce: One welder misses a spot weld on one car, car has to be scrapped.
Robot workforce: Every robot purposefully ignores spot welds, hundreds of cars destroyed.
Extrapolating to Future:
Human burger flipper: Messes up cooking a burger or two, some people get sick.
Robot burger flipper: Every robot across the country cooks meat at too low a temp, hundreds die.
I guess the bright side of the robot firmware-update disaster prone future is that mistakes are more noticeable (would one or two cars missing this spot weld have ever been noticed?), and can be fixed in bulk - until the next flaw...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Right, because humans never make a process mistake that applies to more than one unit on the production line?
Right, because humans never make a process mistake that applies to more than one unit on the production line?
Yeah... right. Garbage In = Garbage Out, whether your employees are humans or machines.
Every employee, human or machine, only works on the best available data. Missing spot welds = missing data.
If you have one of these cars, hold onto it. Verify that it is one of these cars, then save it someplace warm and dry. Automotive oddities, especially manufacturer recalls, are always important to collectors.
If you have to drive it, remember that it's a modern car with modern safety systems. In the rare case of one specific kind of accident, it will be weaker than it should be.
Thirty years ago, you could have had an open beer while you were waiting in line at the DMV. ("I spilled beer all over me, I could have been killed! / A car crashed into me and all you've got is light beer?" - Biff Tannen, Back To The Future, 1985). There were ashtrays in the lineup when I got my driver's license.
Your Subaru is safe. They made a mistake. 10,000 moving parts, and if it's only 99.99% right, there are how many things still wrong with it?
Save it, understand the fault, and don't make thousands of tons more greenhouse gas to scrap it.
Don't drink and drive. Don't text and drive. Your Subaru is safe.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
You claim it was a joke, then go on to explain in detail why the claim in your purported joke has merit. I'm confused.
To be clear, this was not a mistake the robots made. This was a human (i.e. coding) mistake. What would be interesting is to know where the mistake came from - an engineer in the factory, or an offshored or contract position in India.
Explaining a joke is a bit like dissecting a frog. You might learn a lot from doing it, but it kills the frog in the process.
Joke aside the impact of the robot mistake is much greater but it is worth it for several reasons.
First the probability of mistakes is much lower with the robots than with humans, so for a million cars manufactured, the total number of mistakes by human vs robots will be higher for humans. So thatâ(TM)s the first win.
Second if humans make mistakes this will be much more random and less likely to be detected, even with quality check sampling. Which mean that more end users will receive the faulty product.
On the other hand, with robots since the mistake is consistent it is very likely that it will be noticed on one of the end products so it will be easier correct the issue and to track all of the defective units. Which is what happened here.
Cars manufactured before the advent of robots were much more temperamental and failing in various inconsistent ways from one car to the other even when coming from the same factory, the same week.
Who approved the spot welding schedule, who verified the robot did what the spec sheet demanded?
It stopped with 293 cars right? So they noticed something was wrong and fixed it in the 294th car right? How many of these were still unsold at that point?
They determined it is a serious flaw, right? How long did it take? How many cars were sold after that determination?
Yeah, sure blame the code monkey.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You claim it was a joke, then go on to explain in detail why the claim in your purported joke has merit. I'm confused.
The best jokes have some degree of truth to them.
Surely they should go to a breakers where the engines should be dropped out of them and the faulty shell crushed. Seems like a massive waste to just crush the whole of a brand new vehicle.
SUVs are bought because people have actual families to fit in their car. An economy sedan won't work. A minivan would probably be better and even safer, but people want a 'car' to drive.
What pisses me off more is the bloat of the 'pickup truck.' They're hardly a pickup anymore, with four doors, two rows of seats and a tiny little symbolic box.
Are not all mistakes "made" by robots actually human mistakes? Any sense of agency placed onto robots as entities is misplaced. Robots are tools, and they can fail to be instructed properly, or they can be used in circumstances where their efficacy is questionable, but they cannot "make mistakes."
Any automated process, if automated incorrectly, will multiple the defective results the same as automated processes multiple effective results. Production line processes must have some form of quality control that checks to make sure that production is proceeded as expected. When a line is being started up, or changes have been made to the processes used on the line, the quality control checks should be frequent until the line is seen to be in control. Once the initial period has passed, statistical techniques to ensure that the line stays in control should be used. Without any more specific information about what went wrong in this case, it seems like either a new line went into production, or changes were made to an existing line, but the quality control checks on the output were not made soon enough to catch the production process mistake.
Because it was engineered for spot welds, and certified as such. Your type of repair is neither tested nor certified. It would cost more to *certify* the fix for 290 cars than the cars are worth.
A pig of an SUV isn't a "car." A station wagon is a car and generally has more interior room than an SUV of the same size. It's just not lifted and dolled up to look like a truck. Look at the old Legacy wagons, Passat wagon, or Volvo V series.
yeah.. I'm gonna have to nope right the fuck out on this. I can control how I drive, but I cannot control everyone else on the road - hence, the chances of that accident happening are way too high for my liking.
However in this case they knew that exactly 293 cars were affected and which ones they were. This made it easy to track down and remove the unsafe cars from the roads and the supply chain.
If it was humans who occasionally missed welds because they were hung over or were distracted because they had just been dumped by their husband, many would probably make it through inspection and end up on the road never to be noticed until an accident years later causes serious injury or death to the passenger and, for some reason, investigators actually dig into it and discover missing welds. Then, every car of the model/vintage remaining on the roads needs to be inspected for missing welds - which would probably be more expensive and reputation busting, even if not another single missing weld was found, than junking these 293 cars.
One of the advantages of automation is that it tends to make the same mistake over and over - humans are more random about their mistakes.
(I do wonder if they pull some usable components out of them - drivetrain, wheels, ECUs etc before crushing them. Probably it's not worth it as they would have to pay for removal and storage and introduce them into the supply chain for warranty repairs or similar - the supply chain is probably too inflexible to make that work. although, maybe they could use them in mechanic training...)
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading