Revisiting Stuck Throttle Litigation via Hack-a-Day Website

Posted this morning at: https://hackaday.com/2022/10/30/recreating-the-stuck-throttle-problem-on-a-toyota/

"[Colin] is recreating one of those failure modes by introducing an electromagnetic pulse at a specific point on the vehicle’s computer. In the real world, this could be caused by certain forms of EMF potentially including cosmic rays. This introduces a memory fault which the computer doesn’t seem capable of recognizing or clearing. With the right set of circumstances that [Colin] can reliably produce, the computer eventually will drive the throttle fully open, and the condition can only be corrected by power-cycling the vehicle’s computer.

...Toyota is adamant that these problems have been successfully swept under the drivers-side floor mat, but according to IEEE and other professionals in related industries such as avionics, the passenger vehicle industry has done remarkably little to ensure enough redundancy in these systems to account for these types of failures."

 

Yes, there's several ways to shut the car down during unintended acceleration... However in the world we live in people don't think clearly during life threatening situations and freeze up and don't know what to do. I'd argue that the majority of major car accidents is because people freeze up with fear when things go wrong. We could get a lot of bad drivers off the road if a driver's license test included a simulator to test if a person's brain and body can keep functioning when faced with a dangerous situation. What's more how many people are taught that sudden turning of your steering wheel when you're driving fast is often more dangerous than than the accident they're trying to avoid, especially if you're fish tailing. People don't understand the limits that if ignored turn a more minor collisions into a deadly accident.

 

Yes... The priority is to protect yourself from life threatening stupidity and there's a greater selection for that than ever before. But more to the point if your accelerator pedal is not directly connected to the throttle then you need way more safety-based redundancy than is currently required or it will cost you more than a billion: Toyota reaches $1.2 billion settlement to end probe of accelerator problems - The Washington Post

 

Nonsense is often the best way for corporate lawyers to make problems go away. Like remember that Lawyer who won a $14 billion dollar verdict for indigenous people in Ecuador who had their land destroyed by Exxon? That was solved by Exxon hiring a team of 400 lawyers to throw so much nonsense at the case that case that it turned into the ruling being overturned and the US lawyer who represented the tribe being placed on house arrest.