Accidental Blogger

Now the outcry over the Toyota car recalls has gotten to the point where the venerable Edmunds.com is offering a one-million dollar prize to anyone who can "re-create unintended acceleration in a car and then solve that
problem and prove the whole thing" to Toyota. What a comedown for a company that has been known as the flagship of quality in cars for so many decades!

'Reproducible' is the key word here and gets to one of the salient and undiscussed points in all the alarming reports we read in the press. After a long series of horrific articles about the last moments of drivers in runaway vehicles, this Washington post article finally attempts to encapsulate the problems Toyota faces in engineering terms vs. the legalistic view taken by lawmakers on the Hill proceeding with their inquisition of the company's officials.

"It was made painfully clear at the hearings that a number of
lawmakers do not understand the process. An exchange between Rep. Eleanor
Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) and Toyota president Akio
Toyoda illustrated the problem.

Toyoda said that when his company gets a complaint about a mechanical
problem, engineers try to duplicate the problem in their labs as a way
of trying to find out what went wrong. Norton said: “Your answer — we’ll
wait to see if this is duplicated — is very troublesome.”

'Reproducible' defects in products are gold for the engineers tasked with failure investigation and analysis. Generally, it is only if the defect leads to repeatable failures that a fix can be found and applied with some degree of confidence that the failure will not recur. Anything else is searching for needles in haystacks. Sometimes it can take a very long time to hit upon the exact combination of conditions that cause a particular failure mode, even with large teams of engineers working to figure it out.

For those of you who don't own and drive late-model Toyotas, you aren't out of the woods. While Toyota has hogged the major share of unintended acceleration related complaints and crashes, the same complaint has shown up even in other cars. A common feature seems to be not the sticky pedals or floor mats initially blamed by Toyota, but the use of Electronic Throttle Control Systems. 

Who knows when this issue will be finally put to rest? Nobody, at least not Toyota, which presumably still has teams feverishly working on reproducing the problem, so they can figure out what to fix.