[Shop-talk] Toyota Recall

[Randall]

> With all the discussion on the Toyota recall, I thought some 
> of you might find this article interesting

Indeed, that is interesting.  Thanks, Joe.

I find it particularly amazing that the dealer gave him back the car,
without ever identifying the root cause.  I would have thought they would
have kept the car, still running (as long as it would run) while the factory
experts flew in to examine the problem first-hand.  Giving the owner another
2007 model would have been a small price to pay for a first-hand glimpse of
the bug in-situ.

But perhaps letting the press catch a glimpse of the car, engine racing,
throttle not held down by floor mats or friction, would have out-weighed any
benefit of actually finding the problem.

Or maybe they just don't understand the nature of embedded software bugs.
Real-time code is fraught with hazards along the lines of "what if this
event happens between those two lines of code" and we are long since past
the point where it can be exhaustively tested in any reasonable length of
time.

Oddly enough, I'm currently working on some embedded code that has been
"working in the field for years" and finding lots of uninitialized
variables, race conditions and so on.  Very likely it didn't work for about
the same percentage of people that are finding Toyota problems, but
fortunately it couldn't kill anyone.  About the worst that could happen is
the equivalent of your cell phone dropping the connection for no apparent
reason ...

-- Randall