Toyota, WSJ, and Computers: An Update
Back in 2010, I wrote about the sudden unintended acceleration problem (SUAP in the earlier article here, UA in the source I’m about to link) in various Toyota vehicles. Drivers would find their cars accelerating out of their control and braking was unresponsive. People died. Survivors spoke of their unsuccessful attempts to get their car to stop. And commentators like Mike Ramsey of the Wall Street Journal opined that all of it was operator error. I opined that Mike Ramsey was full of it, and that when the dust settled, fault would be found in Toyota’s software.
The dust has settled. While an analysis of Toyota’s firmware by NASA in 2011 failed to find faults that could lead to UA, other embedded systems experts persevered and did find them. Michael Barr of The Barr Group testified in a case in Oklahoma that marked the beginning of the end for Toyota’s claims that its software was OK, and its customers were idiots who couldn’t find the brake pedal to save their lives. Literally. Experts for the plaintiffs demonstrated a host of errors and bad practices within the firmware, including paths to unintended acceleration. (The article linked just previous delves into some of the embedded systems analysis and the faults that were found. I recommend it highly.) Later, Toyota settled a class action lawsuit over the matter for a cool $1,100,000,000 ($1.1 billion, with a “b”).
I also recommend a more robust approach to analysis for those of you who were advocating the “operator error” explanation back in the day. The odds that the drivers of a particular manufacturer’s vehicles would experience pedal confusion at a much higher rate than the general population are small. The odds that in 100% of cases accelerators remained fully depressed and brakes remained entirely untouched, the data from logs that Ramsey erroneously believed exonerated Toyota, are too slim to even be believable. It was, in fact, the 100% report that convinced me that the fault was not due to operator error and lay within Toyota’s systems.
While I was looking things up about the Toyota UA problem, I noticed a claimed instance concerning a Ms. Myrna Marseille, who contended her 2009 Toyota accelerated and cause her to crash into a building. Google for “myrna marseille toyota” and you’ll get pages of results touting the news that the Sheboygan Falls Police Department concluded that this instance was driver error. Now, we know news reports are incomplete, but what those said was that the police concluded driver error because video of the crash did not show brake lights coming on until after the crash. As we know now, that doesn’t mean that the driver was *not* frantically trying to brake.
So I looked up the Sheboygan Falls Police, found their web page, and used the handy “contact” form to send them the following:
It’s not really worthy of the name “investigation” if all that happened was looking at a video, IMO. Hopefully I’ll find out more soon.
A lot of people were subjected to all sorts of online abuse when it appears that quite a lot of them may have been right all along. I’d like to see some more recognition that errors were made by people who had a responsibility to care.
I sent email to Michael Barr (CTO, The Barr Group), the expert on embedded systems programming who testified in the Bookout v. Toyota case. I asked about the Electronic Data Recorder, and Mr. Barr kindly pointed me to his testimony in the case itself. Given that chunks of information are under seal and Toyota seems to be litigious, this is perfectly understandable. Here’s is a section from the cross-examination of Mr. Barr where the topic of the Electronic Data Recorder comes up:
That part of the cross-examination is a thing of beauty. It demonstrates the truth of an old legal adage, “Never ask a question that you don’t know the answer to,” and how the Toyota lawyer ignored that to his peril.
It also undermines every single determination of “driver error” ever premised upon Toyota’s EDR showing no braking was applied. There is a critical difference between what the EDR records and what that means about reality.
Mr. Barr also offered an opinion I could quote:
This is an eminently sensible suggestion that, unfortunately, has not been well heeded in the history of Toyota’s problems with unintended acceleration.
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