Toyota has a problem. If you’ve been anywhere with access to news, you already know this. It seems a good number of their vehicles suddenly accelerate for no apparent reason. It’s been blamed on wayward floor mats, sticky accelerators, faulty programming, and bad circuitry. But, there may be another reason – radiation from space.
Well, as we learned in high school science class, the earth is bombarded by cosmic radiation all the time. The good news is that the atmosphere blocks the most dangerous so what does fall to earth is pretty much harmless to humans. Aircraft and space craft have all experienced weird electronic glitches because of this radiation.
However, now, it seems as though someone anonymously put a bug in the ear of federal regulators that this radiation could possibly be affecting the software in Toyotas. So, now apparently, they are planning on using a particle accelerator to test this theory.
Toyota, however, denies this:
Toyota staunchly defends its electronics, saying they were designed for “absolute reliability.” Responding to the Free Press, Toyota said its systems “are not the same as typical consumer electronics. The durability, size, susceptibility and specifications of the automotive electronics make them robust against this type of interference.”
Electronics on aircraft and space craft have both hardware and software designs to eliminate such interference, but apparently, not on automobiles. Apparently, though, as more and more functions are computer controlled, it may be time for such redundancy on our ground transportation.
Before Windows, there was good-old stable DOS. Then the GUI interface came along and opened up a world of efficiency, but also introduced more potential problems. When something went wrong, it was pretty simple to figure out and fix. The same way when cars used carburetors to feed fuel and air to the engine. A distributor caused a spark to ignite the fuel-air mixture at the right time and your car went. A mechanical linkage controlled a flapper in the carburetor to tell the engine how fast to go. Not very efficient, but pretty damn stable. When something went wrong, you knew exactly where to look. Now, we use a computer to control fuel injectors and spark timing to run much more efficiently. The computer also controls acceleration in a lot of cars now to further improve upon fuel efficiency.
As electronics take over more and more mechanical functions, maybe we do need more redundancy.
See also:
Possibly Related Posts:
- Revocation of Independence
- Grandma and Santa Claus
- So Sioux me
- Friday Rants: Gay puppets, Pee-er skier
- Pray for rain? Why not?
Loading ...
Twitter
RSS