Toyota Unintended Acceleration and the Big Bowl of “Spaghetti” Code (2013)

You speak of the olden times like they're long gone? My car is from 2001, has side curtain airbags which will render most common crashes non-fatal, and it still has a fully mechanical throttle and no electronic brake controller of any kind. I don't consider it all that old.

Yes it has an ECU, but EFI is not the problem in my opinion, and the computer by itself doesn't frighten me. EFI was a fantastic invention as far as I'm concerned. Also despite it being a "black box" I find it much more pleasurable to tune and maintain EFI systems over fickle carburetors.

The real problem was making the ECU an _active control system_ which directly controls the engine, throttle, brakes, etc. in response to your inputs; as opposed to a passive one which merely _reacts in response to changes in its environment_ (e.g: more air moving through the intake, wheels locked up, losing traction on one side.)

So yes, my '01 Toyota has a black box, but it's simple enough that it could be replaced by a handful of aftermarket controllers, many of which have their source freely available, or available for a modest licensing fee.

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Also I'd like to disagree that reacting to WOT is a "complex decision matrix." -- My instinctual reaction would be as follows.

First you open the clutch and/or put the car in neutral. Disconnecting the motor from the wheels is the most reasonable solution to this problem. When I was taught to drive stick the very first thing I was told, before I ever moved the car an inch, was: "when you need to stop, clutch and brake."

(Of course if it's an automatic transmission: "going into neutral" is just controlled by another black box. Sucks to be you if you hit deadly bugs in two separate powertrain management controllers.)

(As an aside I do personally know people that commute every day in the US, and they don't even know what a transmission does. Why are we licensing these people as skilled motorists?)

If I somehow found myself without even the most basic control of my transmission then you just press the brakes as hard as you can and you stop in ~300 feet.[1]

If that didn't work, or if I had stopped but hadn't regained control of the vehicle, I would then kill the ignition. (To be fair: I'm told this is not quite so simple in modern cars! Apparently someone thought "pushing and holding a button for 3 seconds" was a better idea than "turn a key." -- However I also wouldn't agree to drive a car if I didn't know something as basic as how to kill the ignition under duress. I'm the sort of guy that reads the manual cover to cover for fun.)

If killing the ignition doesn't work[2] and your transmission is somehow stuck engaged then today is really not your day.

I don't see how any of this requires any more skill than driving does normally. To me this is not some complex decision tree, it's reflex at this point.

(Also there is a good reason I would brake before killing the ignition. Brakes and steering are mechanically assisted by the engine. It would be extremely irresponsible to cut the ignition in a vehicle w/ power steering and power brakes on a public motorway in my opinion. -- Again I don't think this is some complex decision, I believe it should be requisite knowledge for being licensed to operate a motor vehicle under such conditions.)

tl;dr: the complexity in this matrix is inherent in the task itself. If this is "too complex" then maybe we should work to improve our driver training and licensing programs; or better yet consider having more people take public transit, instead of handing out licenses like candy.

[1]: http://media.caranddriver.com/images/media/51/braking-result... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NRaqgab0_w

When you say fake steering do you mean power steering, or electronic assisted power steering?

Because the way I see it power steering itself is just as mechanical as hydraulic brakes; and electronic steering is a far more recent development than throttle-by-wire.

If you're willing to accept power steering it's not too hard to find vehicles w/ side curtain airbags. Lots of '01 Toyotas had side curtain airbags, and it wasn't until '02 that they started putting drive-by-wire in the Lexus lineup (much later for the rest of their lineup, I believe it was phased in over '03-'05 for Toyotas.)

I adore my '01 Camry. The 5S-FE is a bit sluggish compared to modern powertrains, but its bulletproof, insanely easy to work on, and drives quite smoothly. It'll be a cold day in hell when I have to replace that car with a glorified playstation controller.

They're also all triply redundant control systems with rad hardened computers and error correcting memory... you won't find that level of redundancy in passenger cars; and Toyota outright lied to NASA about the type of memory that was used in the 2005 Camry. (Claiming it to be ECC when it was not.)

On top of that: pilots of any caliber undergo far more rigorous training than what is required of a licensed driver in the US. They routinely have to train for the autopilot systems they use, etc. -- I trust a pilot to react appropriately when the fly-by-wire system goes haywire moreso than the average driver.

The automotive industry has quite a ways to go before I'll consider their safety critical engineering to be anywhere near the level of robustness present on even the oldest commercial airliners in service.

All the cars added a marginal [ O(10ft) ] amount of braking distance at wide open throttle; with the exception of a very powerful, heavily tuned sports car which was the only one able to overwhelm its brakes.

If we convert MPH to FPS we can look at the data as follows:

70 MPH: 102.667 fps 100 MPH: 146.667 fps

    CAMRY, V6,  70-0: delta 16 feet,  .15sec
    CAMRY, V6, 100-0: delta 88 feet,  .60sec

    INFINITY  70-0: delta  9 feet, .08sec  
    INFINITY 100-0: delta  6 feet, .04sec

We're talking tenths or hundredths of a second of unintended acceleration. A cursory search tells me reaction time to visual stimuli is about ~250ms.[1][2]

This means that in all but the Camry 100-0 case your reaction time is a larger factor in braking distance than the presence of wide open throttle.

[1]: http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime/statistics

[2]: http://www.jneurosci.org/content/26/15/3981.full.pdf

It's something learned. You are explicitly taught to do it if your vehicle does not have ABS. It prevents the wheels from locking up. ABS does the same thing, and does it much more effectively than a human ever could.

Preventing the wheels from locking up under hard braking is crucial to stopping when you have little traction. To provide traction on any surface _wheels must keep rolling._

When wheels are static their contact patch is effectively the size of a hockey puck, that little bit of rubber is not very good at stopping a car going 80MPH. Not compared to disc brakes w/ ceramic pads bleeding off all that energy, at any rate.

While I'm on the subject, I'll take this time to drop a PSA: on ice, where ABS is most helpful, the rubber of your all season tires is about the consistency of a hockey puck. -- Please invest in actual winter tires if you get regular snowfall.

(Also if you live in Texas: invest in a set of winter tires anyways and go have a blast when the streets are deserted.)