Toyota unintended acceleration and the big bowl of "spaghetti" code (2013)

I still believe that the actual cause was tin whiskers, but all the RoHS lobbying buried the evidence.

http://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/reference/tech_papers/2011-NASA...

Was there ever a recall of the ECU, and if not, why did the UA events go away? Were UA events more common at higher elevations, where there would be more cosmic ray activity?

This story is like Baba Yaga, it comes out from the shadows to scare people every now and then, but Barr’s theory has the interesting property that the ECU would be cleared by the error and so there could never be evidence of the event as he postulated.

Related to [1]; this topic was discussed earlier today (perhaps inspiring this submission?) in a HN thread on C++ coding standards for the F-35 JSF (search "spaghetti").

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46183657

Popular in 2015:

(96 points, 106 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10437117

(152 points, 145 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9643204

Ah yes, where Toyota was found guilty of not being a US company.

The only thing they did in the recall was the same floor mat anchor as so many other cases.

"NASA engineers found no electronic flaws in Toyota vehicles capable of producing the large throttle openings required to create dangerous high-speed unintended acceleration incidents. The two mechanical safety defects identified by NHTSA more than a year ago – “sticking” accelerator pedals and a design flaw that enabled accelerator pedals to become trapped by floor mats – remain the only known causes for these kinds of unsafe unintended acceleration incidents. Toyota has recalled nearly 8 million vehicles in the United States for these two defects." -- transportation.gov

Cosmic rays and other wild theories over the simple theory of driver error. Even with a stuck throttle, the brakes will still stop a car (not to mention shifting into neutral still works).

Safety Research Systems, the author of TFA, is a for-profit company whose income is based on lawsuits.

Make of that what you will.

Does anyone know where one could obtain the firmware for this? It might be interesting to reverse engineer.

"supply voltage to the electronic control system was purposely lowered and perturbed to simulate bad alternator and/or battery system. The result from the manipulation of supply voltage was rather astonishing. The control systems seemed to work even with the perturbed supply voltage but not correctly. As a matter of fact, it seemed to cause the sudden unintended acceleration repeatedly. The supply voltage to the ECU can be disturbed by minor mishap in the alternator output function and possibly by the overload of ever increasing use of electric devices in the vehicle by the driver. In any case, the current study showed the reproduction of the sudden unintended acceleration when the supply voltage changes abruptly by sudden drop of the alternator output voltage or by overload of the electric devices."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03790...

> Other egregious deviations from standard practice were the number of global variables in the system. (A variable is a location in memory that has a number in it. A global variable is any piece of software anywhere in the system can get to that number and read it or write it.) The academic standard is zero. Toyota had more than 10,000 global variables.