Members of Congress are generally lawyers and politicians, not engineers, but they are launching investigations and creating policies that have a direct impact on the designers and builders of incredibly complex vehicles, writes Washington Post columnist Frank Ahrens. One of the basic principles they should understand is that the only way to credibly figure out why something fails is to attempt to duplicate the failure under observable conditions. As any engineer familiar with this method knows, Toyota is facing an incredibly difficult task. The carmaker must search its data and look for patterns or similarities among the incidents, taking into account dozens of variables.Read more about automotive testing challenges.
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