{"id":812,"date":"2010-02-10T20:52:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-10T20:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/2010\/02\/10\/812\/"},"modified":"2010-04-17T15:29:19","modified_gmt":"2010-04-17T20:29:19","slug":"812","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=812","title":{"rendered":"Snow, No Brakes"},"content":{"rendered":"
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We dodged the snow bullet last Saturday, see my last blog; but we couldn’t hide from this one. Here are some views from my little corner.<\/p>\n

TOYOTA THOUGHTS: The recent news that Toyota has been selling faulty cars that need a recall in order to avoid crashing is a bit disturbing. Toyota has been thought of as the gold standard for quality at a reasonable price. (Well, relatively reasonable; car prices are NOT reasonable anymore). But recent Corollas have sticky accelerators (gas pedals), and Priuses have something wrong with their anti-lock ABS brake systems. I think that each situation raises a different concern, aside from the prime concern of fixing the cars before someone gets killed.<\/p>\n

As to the sticky accelerators — that looks like corporate greed at work. It could be that Toyota was trying to maintain its bottom line (profit) in spite of declining sales during the economic recession by cutting costs (and quality \/ safety margins). That’s an old story, greed.<\/p>\n

But the Prius situation might be a different duck, something more scary in a way. That one looks like a complex machine gone astray, doing certain things that the designers did not anticipate in certain conditions. That’s the nightmare of our increasingly computerized, increasingly automated world. We cede more and more responsibility to keep us safe to machines, and we build in safety factors so that those machines won’t fail us when we need them. But our machines are becoming so complex and inter-dependent that we cannot forsee all possible behaviors that these machines might have. <\/p>\n

The Prius actually has two brake systems<\/a> controlled by a single pedal and computer program; one system is an old-fashioned hydraulic friction brake, and the other is a regenerative system based on magnetic generator drag on the axle. The computer is programmed to make the two systems harmonize, and avoid locking the hydraulic pads during emergency braking. But the hydraulic system is subject to all sorts of changes based on pad wear, temperature, wet road conditions, etc. The computer may not know its every response in every conceivable condition. As with the butterfly in chaos theory, just a small deviation between the program and reality in one system can be amplified as it interacts repeatedly with other systems. Thus, no braking when brakes are needed.<\/p>\n

What is scary about this is that there really is no cure until after it happens. If you want to have complex, interdependent machines that do many things very efficiently, you take the risk that there is an odd, unanticipated reaction that will occur at some point with serious, possibly fatal consequences. We might just have to accept this as the “lay of the land” in the information age.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We dodged the snow bullet last Saturday, see my last blog; but we couldn’t hide from this one. Here are some views from my little corner. TOYOTA THOUGHTS: The recent news that Toyota has been selling faulty cars that need a recall in order to avoid crashing is a bit disturbing. Toyota has been thought […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=812"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1379,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812\/revisions\/1379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}