Toyota and the sudden acceleration toward madness
It’s been a scant few weeks since the story about unintended acceleration in various Toyota models reached its apogee. Already it’s gone through a furious, though predictable, media arc – shocking revelations, public fear, congressional hearings, expressions of outrage, abject apologies from the company CEO, debates about damage to the Toyota brand, and even an alarming – though unresolved and possibly faked – acceleration incident while all this was happening.
My question is, WTF just happened? Because the statistics tell us that, essentially, nothing did.
Six million cars have been recalled, and the reports of Toyotas experiencing sudden, uncontrolled acceleration number in the dozens. Robert Wright, who drives a Toyota Highlander, did the math and concluded that there isn’t that much to worry about. You’re much more likely to die in a car accident than have an acceleration incident:
My back-of-the-envelope calculations (explained in a footnote below) suggest that if you drive one of the Toyotas recalled for acceleration problems and don’t bother to comply with the recall, your chances of being involved in a fatal accident over the next two years because of the unfixed problem are a bit worse than one in a million — 2.8 in a million, to be more exact. Meanwhile, your chances of being killed in a car accident during the next two years just by virtue of being an American are one in 5,244.
This doesn’t mean nothing is wrong. Clearly something is, as Toyotas suffer this problem far more than any other brand. It’s alarming that nobody really knows the source of it (more on this in a second). But the risk to you or me is going to be quite small. I know: this is no comfort to those harmed by these incidents. But in terms of things we should be worried about in everyday life, and more strategically speaking as a society, Toyota’s sudden acceleration should not automatically rise to the top of the priority list. There are lots of other areas that don’t get the attention they deserve because we get obsessed with the threat-of-the-moment.
Take one subject I know pretty well. The U.S. government is upgrading the New Orleans levees to the “hundred year flood” level of protection – that is, the risk of catastrophic failure is 1/100 in any given year. Much worse than Toyota, much worse than your odds of dying in a car accident. And those odds will likely worsen as coastal erosion and global warming take a toll. Yet it’s hardly a national priority. It’s considered normal – a favor to a beleaguered city, even.
But the Toyota thing is disquieting because it suggests a systemic problem with acceleration and braking systems. Such a problem can lie in the machinery (as Toyota maintains, inconclusively), the software, the production process, the design – and/or in the interaction of the systems with human behavior anywhere along the line, from the corporate labs to the consumers driving the cars. It’s a small but complex problem, but if it exists on a small scale in this one area, we don’t really know if it’s truly isolated. Toyota hasn’t helped by being closed-mouthed about the “black boxes” in its vehicles. Your car is, increasingly, another type of “black box” that nobody, not even the manufacturer, understands.
This is a consequence of the increasingly complex and opaque systems we rely on to get through the day, and don’t really think about, individually or collectively. But should.
Instead, we seem to have come up with a new class of social ill, the transient panic over technology gone bad. It’s a kind of technological analogue to the vague medical or psychological diagnoses of the past, and society’s peculiar reactions to them, like attacks of “the vapors” in the 19th century. Today we might identify particular symptoms with panic attacks or some other physical or psychological malady. Or in some cases those antique sicknesses might be unclassifiable today, being in part a product of the times as much as the body.
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Mr. Quaid,
Let me begin by saying I am not a dispassionate commentator. I have a 2010 Toyota Corolla which has been recalled, I am bringing it in on Monday. I have never detected the slightest indication of any unexpected acceleration from a source other than myself. Full disclosure completed I would note that while your math is correct, I think you miss the point. Toyota produced a defective product which has harmed its customers and others. That no one really quite knows what the defect is, is beside the point, or rather is the point. If we knew what the problem actually was, it would not be the source of so much anxiety. Human beings hate uncertainty, it is literally painful to them, and add to the mix all of the social and psychological issues associated with automobiles, it only natural that so volatile a mixture would explode.
People who own these cars should be concerned, just not panicked.
(BTW, I suspect that the problem is in the software which runs the cruise control and other automated function. As you correctly note, this is so complex no one really knows. I am always amazed how even fairly simple programs can produced expected results. This is the automotive equivalent to the stock derivative. On Monday the Toyota technician will “fix” the gas pedal, which I am sure will solve nothing.)
I have no doubt that Robert Wright’s long division is correct…but are the numbers he used equally accurate? How does anyone know when all the facts have not even been gathered, let alone verified?
Toyota brought some of this upon themselves by suppressing and denying these reports for years, until the tinder finally met the (growing) powder keg. In doing so, it calls into question all reports and statistics it now issues related to the recall.
Toyota could have had a much smaller, more (P.R.) manageable recall years ago, with a commensurately small loss of credibility. Even so, this is not the largest or most dangerous recall by any stretch of the statistical imagination. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons you don’t hear GM and Ford crowing about it. Judge not; cast the first stone; etc.
The reason sudden acceleration (or immolation) is scary to some people is because, like flying in an airplane, it is utterly random and out of one’s control. Otherwise we could apply the same long division to homicide and terrorism and reach the conclusion that we should not be concerned about airport security, because one is a far more likely way to die than the other. Such math must ultimately lead us into a life of complete inaction, or, utter carelessness.
It is no secret that the media feed on fear, and government power aggregates either directly or indirectly from it. So who is there to stop the frenzy? The guilty corporations themselves, but only if the government supports their statements and the media report them, which they have no incentive to do. Even if one party were to take up the cause of sanity, the other would charge them immediately with endangering the public.
Once the problem has finally been fixed, we can look forward to all sides (media, gov’t, corp.) trying to take credit for it, as well as saving all our lives in the process.
“Bugs” typically occur in system boundaries- though the parts themselves are well tested, systems are complex enough to create unexpected effects. This will always be the case with digital systems, which even a small variation of inputs, if not anticipated by developers, can lead to drastically different (discontinuous) outputs.
We’ve “black boxed” systems because we’ve given up trying to understand them, and instead focus on monitoring the “behavior” of these wild things- which can turn on us if we do not fully understand their underlying functions.
In response to another comment. See in context »[...] Toyota and the sudden acceleration toward madness – John McQuaid … [...]
Toyota and others knew they were having issues and attempted to hide it. All Car Companies should have came forward with a full disclosures of what car were dangerous. Instead of waiting for a huge media blitz and tons of public pressure. I never seen so many car companies GM – NISSAN – TOYOTA – HYUNDAI having recalls all at the same time. I had no idea my car was affected until I looked on http://www.carpedalrecall.com and found I had a bad Anti Lock control unit on my 2008 Pontiac G8 , my co workers Ford Truck had a recall also. So be careful
The first thing everyone needs to do is to tell the lawyers to cool their heels for a while to give engineers time to figure out what happened. If they start suing now, people will clam up and nobody will ever learn anything from this incident.
It has happened many times before and it has happened to the detriment of society. The classic case that comes to mind followed the infamous melt down of one of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactors. There are still details kept under lock and key to the detriment of a generation of nuclear engineers.
What we as a country and the world at large needs to consider, is that this is a learning opportunity. Instead of suing Toyota, offer them an opportunity to come clean, revealing everything in the software and hardware that may have to do with this problem.
Allow an independent group of engineers to review this data and publish an open document describing the causes and how they could have been discovered, avoided, or mitigated.
If we unleash the courts on this, we’ll have a competition among the ignorati to decide whose version of gobbledygook sounds more plausible. Society as a whole will miss an opportunity.
I keep coming back to this example of how things work well: Back in 1975, the Federal Aviation Administration, in one of their most brilliant ideas ever, decided to give safety problem reporters immunity from prosecution if they would came clean about what happened. Offenses that were not the result of criminal misconduct would be noted, but not prosecuted. This is actually enshrined in the regulations governing the enforcement the FAA may take against flight crews, ground crews, mechanics, and air traffic controllers. Shortly thereafter, the function of gathering this data was given to NASA and it became the Aviation Safety Reporting System.
We need that here. Right now, Toyota has absolutely no motivation to come clean with the public, and every motivation to try and bury data concerning actual causes. Furthermore, as the courts settle cases, there are more than likely to be secrecy clauses slapped on everything –thus removing any opportunity to learn from these mistakes.
As others have pointed out, these are horribly complex systems of systems. Failure mode analysis of systems like this could be so complex that it may not even be computationally feasible with today’s technologies.
So for just once, could we please cage the courts and lawyers so that the rest of society can learn from these accidents? If Toyota did something wrong here, it was probably a subtle mistake –not a deliberate act.
I love this type of reasoning, Ford used it with the exploding Pintos…it made the phrase bean counting famous…I remember reading about the Woz who drives a Pius, I mean Prius, he noticed some braking problems and wrote to Toyota saying they have a software problem. They ignored him…it’s the Woj…there could be a software problem.
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