Toyota's Sudden Acceleration Tested in Court

October 24, 2013, jury in Oklahoma City found Toyota Motor liable for a 2007 crash after a Toyota Camry suddenly accelerated. The jury also found Toyota acted with 'reckless disregard' for the rights of others, which triggered a second phase of the trail to determine punitive damages. Toyota was able to have reached a settlement for an unspecified amount on punitive damages beyond the court approved $3 million actual lost.

This case was significant because for the first time, a technical team was able to recreate the sudden acceleration symptom under a controlled environment that was recognized by a court. By ejecting a flip of a single digit number, which could be caused by many possible scenarios listed, the testing item entered a verifiable potential fatal status.

There are many things Toyota could have done to avoid the fatal crash:

1. Amateur architectural design. There are 67 functions with complexity over 50 - untestble, and 12 functions with complexity over 100 - unmaintainable. The key culprit function that controls the throttle and other sensors contains over 1300 lines of code and 146 degrees of complexity. Unbelievable, Toyota used more than 11,000 global variables, which should be entirely avoided.
2. Not following developing guidelines. As a safety critical system (SCF), there is an existing guidelines MISRA C, which is adopted by major automakers. Toyota claimed that they followed their own internal guidelines, which is 50% compatible with the industrial guidelines. However, the real overlapping is less than 10%. What's more, Toyota did not even follow it's own internal guidelines. The tech team found over 80,000 violations in Toyota's code. Toyota had proposed its own finding that every coding violation implied one major defect and ten minor defects.

   Recursion technique, a taboo in embedded programming, was used extensively.

3. Lack of protection to key variables, including the most critical variable: the TargetThrottleAngle global variable. Toyota used an uncertified operating system. In some cases, they did not use ECC code. In other cases, they used insufficient ECC code.
4. No stack protection. Toyota estimated their stack is used 41% max in the worst case, while the tech team found it could be as high as 94% without taking into consideration of the recursion issue. With recursion it would be unlimited, thus a real risk of accidentally overwriting key program values. Some models of Toyota has no monitor of stack overflow (to a key OS task allocation record area).
5. An overwhelming task X.
6. No watchdog program on tasks, and an insufficient watchdog on CPU overloading (using hardware interrupt to feed the dog).
7. A hardware protection system fails when task X fails.
8. Brake Echo Check must be triggered by an act on brake.
9. Brake Override System included in task X.
10. A 'litany' of other faults were found in the code, including buffer overflow, unsafe casting, and reac condition among others.

Bookout v. Toyota Motor Corp. CJ-2008-7969, Oklahoma County District Court

This post summarized discussions in a Chinese analysis which was in turn based on testimonies from Michael Barr.

Toyota's statement on Oct 25, 2013:

While we strongly disagree with the verdict, we are satisfied that the parties reached a mutually acceptable agreement to settle this case. We remain committed to providing our customers with safe and reliable vehicles, and we will continue to defend our products vigorously at trial in other legal venues.

The biggest problem? NASA, contracted by the NHTSA, did not find the problem in a previous government investigation.

Further reading at EDN, and do not miss the comments which are very informative.

Toyota Strikes Back

In wake of the recent congressional investigation of the unintended sudden acceleration problem of Toyota cars, Toyota strikes back.

The tactics are ordinary: carrots and sticks. On the sweet side, Toyota dramatically increased lobby fund, on top of the 32 firms on the Hill already representing Toyota on every fronts. A whopping 40% of the 140 congressmen and senators who are involved in the investigation already on Toyota's payroll before the 'incident'. To show its teeth, Toyota pulled two managers from an advisory board of the Southern Illinois University, which is known for its automotive programs, 'in view of recent events'. The events refer to a Southern Illinois professor who testified on the Congress on possibility that an electronic malfunction in the throttle system of Toyota's unique drive-by-wire system caused the problem. Professor David W. Gilbert demonstrated the discovery on evening news with a real Toyota car. He also testified he couldn't duplicate the same problem on similar cars from other manufactures, including Honda and Ford.

The chief engineer of Toyota testified Tuesday that Toyota would make better cars, "so that Toyota customers would make less mistakes while driving Toyota cars". In the end, it's all customer's problem, after all.

Subtle in Bowing

US trained MBA Mr. Toyota 'apologized', finally.

While every US media ridiculing Mr. Toyota's broken English, some were quick to point out the bow took place before the news conference held in Toyota City, not after. Toyota already had senior executives apologies in a prior news conference, picky audiences complained there was no deep bow, as always seen in Japanese culture. Now, Mr. Toyota gave the audiences the 'deep bow' as they expect to see, but deliberately made it before he started to speak. In Japanese culture, this bow is a greeting gesture. For Americans, that's the 'deep bow' they had asked for.

So an American trained MBA couldn't speak English? That's another practicing prank pulled by Mr. Toyota. If reporters spent less time in laughing on the odd accent, if you read Mr. Toyota's statement on paper rather than hearing it in his broken English, they would know when Mr. Toyota used the word 'apology', he carefully to make sure on record that it was not for what Toyota did, but for the concerns of Toyota owners caused by the media.

Toyota's Broken Axles

Japanese companies have long been accused for intentionally manufacturing products with inferior quality for Chinese market. A bunch of broken axles of Toyota cars just added to the evidents pool.

March 17, 2009, Ms. Zhang Yan of Nantong, Jiangsu was driving on a highway at around 60mph when she felt something was wrong about the Camry which she purchased less than on year ago on May 22, 2008. The car then spun off the road, but in a miracle it didn't bump into anything when it finally stopped. The rear right wheel was found 800 feet away, and the rear axle broken. It was a flat highway, and there was no scratches on the body. Apparently, the axle broke on its own.

It was not until Toyota refused to fix the car, and Ms. Zhang had to do some homework on the records of this model in Chinese market had she learned of the horrific history of broken axles on new Toyota Camry cars in China.

Zhang Jianguo of Beijing had his Camry axle broken when he was driving on Jing-Shi highway near Zhuozhou on May 22, 2009. The Toyota Camry was purchased July 2008.

On March 29, 2009, Mr. Huang Xinyuan of Shenzhen, Guangdong lost control when his Camry had two broken axles. The car was purchased on July 2, 2008.

Camry is not the one Toyota car that have been entangled with broken axles.

On January 26, the New Year's Day in Chinese lunar calendar, Mr. Li Jianming of Guangzhou, Guangdong was driving his Toyota Ritz, when the car lost control because of a broken axle. Toyota refused to have a third party agency examine the car because, ridiculously, Toyota had its own examination. The case was in the court of Huangpu, Guangzhou since June 23, 2009.