Tag Archives: sudden unintended acceleration

Robots and the Law

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In the April issue of PCD&F/CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY, I wrote about the need for a balance between autonomous machinery and human-operation equipment. I wrote the piece in the aftermath of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappearance, and referenced, among other things, the Toyota sudden unintended acceleration problems and the self-driving cars that are beginning to appear on US streets.

Seems I’m not the only one working their way through this. On May 5, a pair of researchers at the Brookings Institution began a series of papers (The Robots Are Coming: The Project On Civilian Robotics) that considers the legal ramifications of driverless cars.

That led me to Google, which uncovered a few more references to potential tort roadblocks.

While my work considered the technical and emotional issues that always factor into to any major technology shift, the legal aspects are equally in play here. For those interested in the subject, the Brookings Institution project is especially worth a read.

 

 

 

 

Tin Liability: Careless Whiskers and Toyota Acceleration

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A failure mode is reemerging that has been responsible for the loss of billions of dollars worth of satellites, missiles and other equipment — the culprit is the electrically conductive entities known as ‘tin whiskers’.  Now one research group says that tin whiskers may be responsible for the sudden acceleration in Toyota Camry models from the year 2002 and possibly beyond.

Earlier this year we reported that the US Department of Transportation (DOT) said that Toyota’s problem was not in electronics.

Now, University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering or CALCE researchers have found the potential for tin whiskers in the electronic control module or ECM.  Circuits Assembly broke the story, quoting the CALCE report as follows:

“The ECM contains surface mount electronic devices connected with tin-lead solder to a multilayer PCB. … Interconnect terminals of the perimeter leaded devices were found to be plated with tin. In addition, tin plating was found on terminal pins of the edge connections. As previously discussed, tin-finished leads can grow tin whiskers which can lead to unintended electrical shorts.”

“We know whiskers can form on tin finished terminals,” said Michael Osterman, senior research scientist and director of the CALCE Electronic Products and System Consortium. said.  “In this case, Toyota has tin plating in a rather sensitive area, where the system relies on changes in resistance to provide a signal for acceleration.”

The studied pedals furthermore have been shown to cause shorts known to spur sudden unintended acceleration.

The odds of tin whiskers: 140/million. Someone known to this blogger recently drove a 2010 Camry and noticed subtle but perceptible decelerations that were not led by the driver. Was it tin whiskering?  Hard to say, even CALCE’s study figures that the whiskers would only form in 140 cars per million, which is statistically very significant but als makes it statistically unlikely that my friend’s only Camry experience would be on the wrong side of those odds.

It’s also worth noting that the whisker syndrome is probably not limited to Toyotas.  Nonetheless, the spotlight has fallen where it has fallen, and tin whiskers pose a serious problem in that warrants attention.

Tin whiskers. Tin whiskers develop — or may develop — on any product type that uses lead-free pure tin coatings.  Thus, in greener, lead-free products, tin whiskers can pose a major safety, reliability and potential liability threats to all makers and users of high reliability electronics and associated hardware. The CALCE brain trust concluded that existing approaches are not sufficient to control tin whiskering in high-reliability systems such as automobile electrical systems.

US Secretary of Transportation said Toyota is “all clear” in February. The official blog of the US Secretary of Transportation on February 8, 2011 stated:

NASA engineers pored over more than 280,000 lines of software code looking for potential flaws that could initiate an unintended acceleration incident. Alongside NHTSA, they bombarded vehicles with electromagnetic radiation to see whether it could make electronics systems cause the cars they control to gain speed.

And today, their verdict is in. There is no electronic cause behind dangerous unintended acceleration incidents in Toyotas.

To read more about it: http://supply-chain-data-mgmt.blogspot.com/2011/02/us-dot-says-toyota-problem-was-not-in.html

We will continue to follow this story.

Has Toyota Solved SUA?

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I remain skeptical in the light of Toyota’s latest statements that driver error caused “virtually all” of the unintended acceleration problems that have plagued the carmaker for the past decade.

Per the Wall Street Journal, NHTSA analysis of the affected cars’ “black boxes” found instances in which throttles were open and brakes hadn’t been deployed, suggesting drivers were pressing the gas, not the brake. (NHTSA isn’t commenting.)

The dreaded sudden unintended acceleration is supposed to have caused up to 89 deaths in 71 crashes since 2000.

Admitting in advance that my reasons are somewhat circumstantial, I would counter that Toyota

1. Has failed to provide solid evidence to refute a university researcher’s claim that the electronics wiring could be the cause, and that the car’s software lacked a fault code to point out the defect.

2. Has failed to explain why the rate of accidents attributed to SUA is not similar in competitors’ vehicles.

That said, the shims the carmaker has installed beneath the accelerators, the complaints over SUA appear to have subsided. Perhaps Toyota was correct, after all.

(Full disclosure: My wife drives a Prius.)

Missing Code in Toyota Claim

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Toyota today claimed Prof. David Gilbert’s testimony on the sudden unintended acceleration isn’t representative of real world situations.

However – and this is important – Toyota makes no mention (at least in this report) about Gilbert’s more important finding: that Toyota’s on-board computers contain no defect code for the problem, which speaks to the reason the company’s diagnosis is (according to several experts) incorrect.