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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?
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.
That's what she said.
Beware of the Leopard.
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.
People want bigass SUVs because they're more macho than minivans. So all the SUV makers have to pork up[*] to avoid losing sales. The majority of SUVs are not bought for either the S or the U part. They're bought becase of how they look.
What always gets me is how little space many of them have inside compared to a minivan. I'd pick the latter any day. With the good ones, the seats either come out completely or fold neatly out of the way, giving pretty decent cargo space.
[*]I love that! Thanks GP!
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
They've been using rear-facing car seats in Europe for longer than in the US, and generally, cars aren't as big as the barges driven in the US. (Northern Europeans are also taller than Americans, on average.)
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.
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.
A minivan would probably be better and even safer, but people want a 'car' to drive.
Quite. People think they look cool and badass in an SUV or want to race off the lights or something. A minivan has as many seate with more space, more luggage and better economy. And can be converted to hold tons of stuff in about 3 minutes.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
Hope gas shoots up to $5 per gallon to get some of the mastodons off the roads and restore some rationality to the US auto market.
That's a fucked up thing to say. It's happened in recent years and the people fucked the most by $5 gas are not limp-dicked asshole Hummer drivers. It's the wage earners -- you know, the working class -- who take the hit.
Beware of the Leopard.
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
As someone who has 2 compact cars and a giant SUV i can tell you why some people buy them.
False sense of safety. the thing weights a ton, almost takes the full lane.. but the significant other things it is "safer" even thought the cars all have 5 star crash ratings.
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.
+1 whoever trained the robots made the mistake. It was human error not robotic error, the robot did exactly what it was trained to do. At this stage of the game training a robot is a very exact meticulous process. Something like welding a car involves a process with no variation. The real fun and games will begin when people begin attempting to train artificially intelligent robots to perform tasks which are less exact and more organic in nature.