More sudden acceleration phantoms for Toyota.  Sigh.

At this point the sharks are circling in the water and an ambulance chaser mentality has arisen.  With $39 billion of cash on hand Toyota is going to be in the sights of every lawyer on the planet.  I guess Toyota deserves it but I suspect it’s soon going to get very hard to separate fact from fiction. 

As hard as they’ve worked to pin this down as a mechanical failure, the specter of some electronic or software glitch just simply isn’t going to go away.  Sorry. 

What’s Toyota to do???? They’re sort of pinned between a rock and a hard place here.  Even if they HAVE completely investigated this (which I’m starting to doubt) and if they really believe there is no problem with their electronics (which I’m starting to doubt) people are definitely starting to doubt (of which I’m sure). 

So here’s a wild proposal.   What if Toyota were to openly publish ALL their electronic technical information on the internet?  Both throttle and brake systems –   everything…  Schematics, board layouts, component specs, firmware code, test reports, theories of operation… the whole thing.

Publish it on line and throw it out for open-source collaboration on finding a technical problem. 

Why not?  What is there to lose? Confidentiality? It can’t be that proprietary – every other car company has the same things (oh and they don’t seem to be backpedaling quite as fast so perhaps your stuff isn’t all that good anyway).  Worried about disclosure and lawsuits?  I think that horse has left the barn! 

What would happen?  Would it work?   Can you imagine chat boards with electrical engineers trading theories and exchanging findings?  Engineers at GM working on their evenings looking for glitches on Toyotas as a point of professional pride??  Real time tweats as people traded hypotheses back and forth?  PhD electronics wizards, weekend code warriors and crackpot conspiracy theorists all with total access?  What would happen?  Could – or would – the collective power of thousands of fresh pairs of eyes bring new clarity to the problem?  Would we find anything or just how damn complex all this stuff really is?  Would anything credible arise? Would a Wikipedia like organization and singular point of view evolve or would chaos reign supreme?   

I know – It’s never going to happen but I’d love to see it just for the fun of the experiment!

In a previous post I promised to provide my guesses on what factors may have contributed to the recalls Toyota is facing right now.  Here are a few: 

a)            Increasing interwoven system complexity.  What were once purely mechanical system with very intuitive failure modes (hey… that cable broke) have evolved to electro-mechanical systems and now electro-mechanical systems with integrated micro-processor control and firmware.  Failure modes that previously lay entirely within a single discipline now splash messily across functional areas.  Electrical and software problems are particularly bedeviling and notoriously hard to faithfully observe, detect and eradicate. 

b)            Increased reliance on outside suppliers for subsystem engineering.  Once upon a time a company’s engineers would design and meticulously test each and every aspect of a product’s function.  No more.  More often suppliers are brought in to “black box” or “gray box” subsystem leaving the company’s engineers to often function as “system integrators” – a sort of general contractor.  At its best this system can leave the details to subsystem experts.  At its worst, it is a recipe for omissions, mistakes, confusion, finger pointing. 

c)            Platform Engineering.  Toyota is the mastery of assembling a huge variety of unique cars from a building block of components and systems that are fundamentally identical.   At its best, this practice allows for reduced costs, increased development speed and adoption of best practices.  At its worse, systems end up over-designed for some applications or under designed for others.  Change can be slow and improvements forgone because of the interwoven complexity of validating revisions on every instance where a system is used.  Furthermore, as this situation has shown, if design errors do crop up in fundamental components and systems used through the platform the effects and scope can be far-reaching.   I was sharing this theory with a former classmate and he commented on the similarity between platform engineering and the risks associated with a lack of genetic diversity…

‘It is not a trivial thing to lose your genetic variation,” said Dr. Stephen O’Brien, head of the research team. ”Genetic variation exists so ecological pressures can be adapted to.’

http://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/17/science/loss-of-gene-diversity-is-threat-to-cheetahs.html

d)            Finally, I firmly believe a potential culprit is Toyota’s massive recent success combined with relentless plans for expansion.  It seems entirely probable that Toyota tremendous expansion and a well publicized plan for industry domination lead to a degree of rapid growth, internal pressure, hubris, disorganization and errors.

Looks like Toyota is headed for a software fix for the Prius brakes.  Weirdly enough, I feel like I have a personal intersection with Toyota’s alleged ABS brake difficulty.  I own a 1997 Toyota 4-runner.  Several times in the life of that car I have experience a complete loss of braking – always when braking while riding over significant bumps.  The first time it happened was weird… but not overly terrifying.  I quickly assumed the failure was being caused by “resonance” or the unhappy combination of the ABS choosing to brake when a wheel was virtually mid-air and then releasing just as the wheel hit the ground as the wheels bounced over the bumps.  If this explanation is right it could and perhaps should have been solved by tuning the ABS braking frequency to ensure that the natural frequency of the suspension could never match the ABS braking rate.  

Perhaps this explanation is naïve or just plain wrong.  Regardless I am left to wonder if my 1997 car suffers from the same flaws as the 2010 Toyotas.  Is it possible that these cars share the same basic control strategies and algorithms even after all these years???  If so this highlights a weakness of platform engineering and presenting a pretty damning portrait of their ability to spot and eradicate problems.  I’ve never experienced this phenomena on any other car I’ve ever driven.  Alternately perhaps it’s the same engineering team making the same mistakes year after year.  It is ironic that as an engineer I simply wrote this off to a freak combination of speed, bumps and possibly a sloppy -  but not criminal – job of engineering.  The brakes on the 4-runner have always been pretty marginal and even need to be pumped a few times in very cold weather before they’ll work.  Like many engineers I think I’m perhaps too tolerant of design related issues.