Toyota Fined $1.2B - Crackdown or Shakedown?

[thstone]

Originally Posted by Trey T

Didn't NASA, the pinnacle of the world's technology, concluded that there's no evidence that there's electronic malfunction regards to the accelerator?

Yes and no. It is correct that NASA did not find any fault with Toyota's electronic control system.

However, Toyota would not allow NASA to have access to the actual code so NASA's analysis was very top level and was generally considered inconclusive from a technical viewpoint.

I am trying to find the background of the analysis which convinced the jury in Oklahoma to agree with the plaintiffs.

[Trey T]

you mind provide reference to your statement?

Originally Posted by thstone

...

However, Toyota would not allow NASA to have access to the actual code so NASA's analysis was very top level and was generally considered inconclusive from a technical viewpoint.

....

[thstone]

Originally Posted by Trey T

you mind provide reference to your statement?

Yes, I'll try to find it...

[thstone]

Originally Posted by Trey T

you mind provide reference to your statement?

From Appendix A, Software, of the formal NHTSA report:

In order to support the confidentiality of the 2005 Camry source code, the software was maintained within offices controlled by Toyota. The software teams traveled to these offices from NASA for study of the source code and Toyota documentation.

As noted, the NASA engineers performed the study on Toyota premises within an access controlled area. The NASA Software team/NHTSA/DOT had agreed not to remove Toyota intellectual property from this location, most notably software source code and design documents.

The focus in analyzing the Camry05 source code has been on a thorough static source code analysis of the ECM to find possible coding defects and potential vulnerabilities in the code.

Static analysis of source code is almost irrelevant in terms of finding deep logic errors. This is the equivalent of making sure that the code will compile and not much more.

Without full access to both the source and executable code in NASA labs and simulations, NASA's hands were tied behind their back and they never had a chance to truly evaluate the ECU software for hidden errors.

[thstone]

Originally Posted by thstone

I am trying to find the background of the analysis which convinced the jury in Oklahoma to agree with the plaintiffs.

Last month, Toyota hastily settled an Unintended Acceleration lawsuit – hours after an Oklahoma jury determined that the automaker acted with “reckless disregard,” and delivered a $3 million verdict to the plaintiffs – but before the jury could determine punitive damages.

What did the jury hear that constituted such a gross neglect of Toyota’s due care obligations? The testimony of two plaintiff’s experts in software design and the design process gives some eye-popping clues. After reviewing Toyota’s software engineering process and the source code for the 2005 Toyota Camry, both concluded that the system was defective and dangerous, riddled with bugs and gaps in its failsafes that led to the root cause of the crash.

Bookout and Schwarz v. Toyota emanated from a September 2007 UA event that caused a fatal crash. Jean Bookout and her friend and passenger Barbara Schwarz were exiting Interstate Highway 69 in Oklahoma, when she lost throttle control of her 2005 Camry. When the service brakes would not stop her speeding sedan, she threw the parking brake, leaving a 150-foot skid mark from right rear tire, and a 25-foot skid mark from the left. The Camry, however, continued speeding down the ramp and across the road at the bottom, crashing into an embankment. Schwarz died of her injuries; Bookout spent five months recovering from head and back injuries.

Attorney Graham Esdale, of Beasley Allen, who represented the plaintiffs is the first to say that the Bookout verdict – in some measure – rested on those two black skid marks scoring the off- ramp.

“Toyota just couldn’t explain those away,” Esdale said. “The skid marks showed that she was braking.”

One of the outside software experts testified:

There are a large number of functions that are overly complex. By the standard industry metrics some of them are untestable, meaning that it is so complicated a recipe that there is no way to develop a reliable test suite or test methodology to test all the possible things that can happen in it.

Some of them are even so complex that they are what is called unmaintainable, which means that if you go in to fix a bug or to make a change, you’re likely to create a new bug in the process.

Just because your car has the latest version of the firmware — that is what we call embedded software — doesn’t mean it is safer necessarily than the older one….And that conclusion is that the failsafes are inadequate. The failsafes that they have contain defects or gaps. But on the whole, the safety architecture is a house of cards. It is possible for a large percentage of the failsafes to be disabled at the same time that the throttle control is lost.

Even a Toyota programmer described the engine control application as “spaghetti-like” in an October 2007 document Barr read into his testimony.

http://www.safetyresearch.net/2013/11/07/toyota-unintended-acceleration-and-the-big-bowl-of-spaghetti-code/