This report ( Technical Support to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on the Reported Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) Unintended Acceleration (UA) Investigation) is just a half-baked whitewash, which is of course what NHTSA wanted to justify their complete ignorance of all things electronic for the last 30+ years, whilst safety-critical systems in vehicles were all going electronic.Note that at the top of page 20 of the full report it says that no amount of analysis and testing can prove that the vehicle electronics doesn’t cause sudden accelerations. So why is NHTSA saying that it does?[Although I haven’t fully digested the full report yet], it is obvious that a) NASA did not apply the state of the art in electronic safety engineering, and b) that bad news has been glossed over. The state of the art in electronic safety engineering is described in the International standards IEC 61508 and IEC TS 61000-1-2. Both of these have been around since 2000, which means they are based on knowledge from the mid-90s, and they have both recently been updated (2010 and 2008 respectively). U.S. safety experts played a big part in creating both of these standards.But in the auto industry, the “state of the art” means “what competitors are doing.” So you’ll find no mention of 61508 or 61000-1-2 in the NASA report. On its own, this tells me that the people NASA had working on it were not international electronic-safety experts, and were not aware of what the international safety community knew full well even in 2000. NHTSA’s use of NASA is thus seen as a ploy to catch the attention of the public, who naturally assumes they must have the world’s experts working there, but it is obvious that this is not the case.And here are two examples of glossing over bad news:1) Page 19 of the full NASA report mentions that a “non-degrading intermittent fault” could cause an event such as an SUA, but this possibility is then not mentioned further in the report.You would think that, having identified a potential cause, they would investigate it. But they did not perform an FMEA or (as far as I can see) assess any Toyota FMEAs. (FMEA = failure mode effects analysis)An example of a non-degrading fault would be the Ford Cruise Control I was testifying about a year ago in Florida. Ford’s engineers had identified – in their FMEA – that a fault in an EMI filter capacitor could cause sudden acceleration – but this would not have any effect on normal operation of the cruise control (i.e. it would be a “non-degrading” fault).However, since the normal protection against EMI was no longer working, when the right EMI disturbance appeared —– bingo! sudden acceleration! 2) On page 172 it says comprehensive EMC testing was done, then says that “No throttle control vulnerabilities from EMC radiated testing were identified that would result in throttle increase.” (My emphasis)I find this careful wording very interesting, because the comprehensive EMC testing they did involves a lot more types of test than just radiated. I have to assume it means that other types of EMC immunity test were found to cause increased throttle opening! But no doubt they are hoping that the speed-reader will overlook this important omission.I haven’t had time to go through the report fully yet, but at the top of page 167 it reports on the results of some conducted tests (not radiated!), and says that “Functions observed and documented included throttle valve position, changes in engine speed, changes in vehicle speed, …..” (My emphasis)Why did the report not say that these tests made the engine speed decrease? The use of phrases like “changes in engine speed” means we must assume that these changes included speed increases. So the information is in the report but the summaries gloss over and mislead, and every attempt is made to de-emphasise any bad news and to present everything in a way that throws a positive gloss on Toyota (and hence vindicate NHTSA).It is hardly an independent non-partisan report, and it adds hardly anything to what I knew about the problems with Toyota’s electronics when they started this project. What do you think about the NHTSA report? Join the discussion in the Automotive Forum
My View: NHTSA Report Glosses Over Bad News
