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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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLk81XnkGUM
Right, because humans never make a process mistake that applies to more than one unit on the production line?
The world doesn't need another lumbering bovine of a full-sized SUV anyway. And Subarus have, in general been porking up over the years such that even the Outback and Forester are too damn big now as well. WRX or BRZ, or GTFO.
Imagine all the people...
Right, because humans never make a process mistake that applies to more than one unit on the production line?
Yep, it's Slashdot, there's always gotta be that one guy that makes you explain a joke in GREAT DETAIL. Ok then.
Humans making a process mistake do not generally do so in a way that instantly applies to EVERY production line across multiple facilities, in places where the process was working just fine previously. Also P.S. the joke was about workers, not people defining the process. A process mistake would affect workers and robots the same way so is irrelevant to the joke.
I'm not saying it's impossible for humans at the topmost level to make mistakes on this scale where human workers all do the wrong thing. But with robots it is tons easier for mistakes to be distributed instantly everywhere to "workers" on the line and affect many more units more quickly.
I don't even think It negates the advantages of having robot production lines, it's just an interesting and (to me) kind of funny aspect of production automation. There are a whole host of interesting consequences and probably behavior that follow from this if you think forward instead of being pedantic about a joke.
"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?
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.
On the other hand, once it's discovered, it's easy to figure out everything affected. The alternative is to figure out which nights in the last 6 month Weldon decided to hit the bar then show up faded for work.
That's not a coding error.
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
Local junkyard had to hire more to help with crushing the cars
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.
The programmer did.
How is this not a human error?
It says it was coded improperly. I wonder who writes the code? A human did, so the human made the mistake of improper coding.
Or use as the classroom vehicle at Subaru training. I'm sure high school automotive shop classes would welcome them.
How is it not possible to run a welding torch over the weak seams? Sure, it's a couple hours to remove the seats and some trim, but that's still got to be a lot cheaper than scrapping the whole car.
That's exactly what happened, one person programmed the robots wrong.
Really, humans rarely forget or mistake how they're supposed to be doing their jobs and only make one-off mistakes instead?
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.
Or use as the classroom vehicle at Subaru training. I'm sure high school automotive shop classes would welcome them.
Yes, but if some dimwit takes one for a spin and gets in an accident then Subaru is looking at a lawsuit.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I kind of doubt this car with its manufacturing defect will ever hold any significant value. It's quite likely that even if you decide you're going to keep it, the VIN will be invalidated in the system meaning that you will not be able to license and insure it, so forget about driving it on public roads.
As recalled vehicles go, a more interesting example would be the late 80's Nissan Van. After Nissan recalled the van several times and failed to correct the tendency of the vans to overheat and self-immolate, Nissan gave up trying to fix them and attempted to buy back every single example at above market value and sent them all to the crusher. However, Nissan couldn't actually force anyone to sell their van. So despite all of this, a handful of owners decided to keep their vans anyway, making surviving examples extremely rare today. However, rare doesn't mean valuable, and it seems that the van is considered more of an oddity or a curiosity rather than something collectable.
So we can expect to see lots of Subarus appearing in the movies. Being blown up, totalled in crashes, shot to pieces or catching fire for no good reason.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
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
Really, you can't understand that "one", and "a few, but nothing close to all" are not the same?
In general, a downside of mass production is that making new items is more efficient per unit than specialized repair jobs even though the wasted material seems sad.
As a currency nerd, I'm reminded of some things about US paper money.
Replacements for damaged bills are 'star notes', a separate serial number range ending in a star - since 1910 it's been easier to make those ahead of time rather than print new ones with the same serial numbers. Not replacing with something would make the print run a nonstandard size or serial number increment.
If an error on one bill has been discovered after the bills have been cut and wrapped into packs of 100, it's quicker to destroy and replace the whole pack than to find and replace the damaged bill(s) or save the undamaged bills for later use. With the latest $100 bill redesign, there were so many errors (with paper creasing) that it was worthwhile, but it was still a very involved process. The initial printings through much of 2010 and 2011 couldn't be released until 2016 as they were sorted. A new printing was ready for release by late 2013. The first wave was 6% star notes, an abnormally high error rate. The second wave was about 1%, still slightly high. The current wave is about two thirds of a percent, closer to normal.
*except for a few very small runs of high denomination bills decades ago
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
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? ...
I you had read the linked article
Power steering can fail any moment, and comes back a second or so later. (No idea what that has to do with a missing weld point, though)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
No this is a process mistake, it's like line worker getting wrong instructions and nobody ever checking if the finished product meets the original specs.
Robots: just doing what they were told to do. Canâ(TM)t think for themsleves.
Station wagons were outlawed by the cafe gas mileage laws. Those don't apply to 'trucks' so auto makers build larger, heavier, even less fuel efficient replacements to make sure they are truck like enough that cafe doesn't apply to them.
"...remove the unsafe cars..." Maybe we should say remove less safe cars? Somehow I feel like those 293 are still safer than anything made by Fiat Chrysler
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Sure I understand. I also understand that people sometimes forget their training on how to build their part of a product and so make the same mistake for every unit they touch until they've been corrected.
Somewhere in an autonomous driving car lab, a tech makes a mental note:
Note to self: add one other possible destination, shopping mall, supermarket, movieplex, car crusher. The competition heats up in the self-driving car race.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
I'd hope they'd dismantle them for all those new parts and drivetrain and just scrap the body.
More to the point,
Human workforce: One human screws up writing the procedure, all cars have to be trashed because the human workers followed the procedure.
Human burger flipper: One human screws up writing the procedure, hundreds die because the human fast-food workers followed the procedure.
There's a procedure for everything. Programming human workers is not unlike programming robots. Seriously. An ambiguous assembly procedure leads to inconsistent product because Alice on first shift does it one way and Bob on second shift does it another. Not a lot is left up to worker discretion on a human-run assembly line, or in a fast-food kitchen.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
I wonder if they're being sent to the crusher as is, or if they're being stripped down and parts (seats, radio, stuff like that) are being reused?
Well, their QA caught it -- but why did it take so long. One would think that once the line has been re-tooled and the units are going through assembly that each station is checked for spec.
ultimately the Engineer needs to sign off
That's not what the industrial exemption means. It means (in states where it is in effect) that no professional engineering signature is needed for manufactured products.
Have gnu, will travel.
Or, you know, get a mechanic to weld the required places and it will be good. Probably no different than patching a rust hole.
I thought at first that some kind of coding error caused tons to be scrapped for no reason. Wondered why they would crush perfectly fine brand new cars without noticing something fishy.
I guess that's profit protection. I mean if I repair my iPhone, Apple doesn't get money from me. The company that makes the replacement parts gets some money, the person who repairs the phone (if I don't do it myself) gets some money, but not Apple.
And when I get a welder to patch a rust hole in my car, the welder gets some money, the companies that make the welding materials, paint etc gets some money, but the car manufacturer doesn't. Since the welder lives locally and probably spends the money on food etc, the local companies get part of that money and not all of that money leaves my country.
If I bought a new car, most of my money would leave my country and end up in the pockets of various managers and investors, with very little money going to the workers.
I am such a horrible person in that I do not pay the manufacturer continuously for an item I bought and already paid for. Think of the profits and the investors!