A Case Study on Toyota Unintended Acceleration Toyota’s Unintended Acceleration disaster could have been avoided if the software engineers had practiced proper software development steps. Numerous lessons, both technical and managerial can be learned from this software catastrophe. Three crucial lessons include: ensuring the proper implementation of fail-safes, adherence to rigorous coding standards (MISRA-C), and minimizing software complexity. The first incident of “unwanted acceleration” occurred in 2003. However, this was not reported to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) until five years later. And it was not until 2004 that the NHTSA actively began investigating certain Toyota models. These investigations were eventually deemed inconclusive due to the “lack of resources” (rather than actual evidence) to investigate further (Bagnara, 2014). Over the next three years a series of investigations open up, but once again have been deemed inconclusive due to lack of “administrative resources” (Bagnara, 2014). In 2007, the acceleration issues are associated with faulty floor mats getting caught beneath the pedals causing the vehicle to accelerate uncontrollable. Toyota begins issuing recalls soon after. Two years later, a fatal accident occurs involving the death of four people which was again linked to defective floor mats. However, it was quickly becoming evident that not all the fault can be blamed on floor mats. In 2010, Toyota reveals that the
Toyota is doing the right thing by stopping production on an unsafe product, while they try to figure what went wrong with the gas pedals and how to fix them. The plant will shut down one of its two assembly lines as Toyota explores what is causing gas pedals to potentially stick. The 2,500 or so affected employees will continue to work during the down time. They will be offered the opportunity to do training exercises or discuss ways they can improve their processes, the kaizen concept for which Toyota is famed.
Accidents will continue to happen and occur. Be it a near-miss, minor-injury, disabling-injury, or fatality, an accident will happen somewhere, sometime, someplace. The optimum measure to minimize accidents is three-fold, which are education, reinforcement and
As a collaborative case study, we analyzed the American Airlines Flight 1420 accident using the SHELL Model. The SHEL Model was developed by a Professor Elwyn Edwards in 1972 and it was later modified to the SHELL Model by a human factors consultant named Frank Hawkins. We can see all the human factors that were involved in the accident utilizing following aspects software, hardware, environment, liveware and liveware. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) conducted a thorough investigation and determine that the American Airlines Flight 1420 was a runway overrun accident caused by human factors.
Toyota has hit the headlines over the years over the defects in several of their models which has sent it on a public relations and safety campaigns relating to its vehicles. Notably is the Toyota safety campaign in North America for certain models of Toyota as well as Lexus brands concerning the floor mat entrapment of accelerator pedals, later on it extended to other models in November 2009.
In one or more complete sentences, explain how natural laws apply to the following scenarios:
In 2009 Toyota encountered a public backlash after the discovery of a potentially catastrophic engineering defect among its brand of automobiles including its best-selling Corolla and Camry models. This led to a massive and global recall of approximately 10 million units a year later. The engineering defect caused the models to accelerate out of control and put their drivers and other
Toyota grew at a record speed and could not keep up with the speed in which it was growing. They are a centralized company and Japan only made the decisions. This prevented the company to keep up with the safety problems. The process that Toyota external suppliers follow when improving product and making sure the product is functioning properly before shipping to Toyota needs to be improved before they release the product from their warehouse to be sent to Toyota. This problem began when the company started to rapidly grow. Toyota’s lack of communication led to the faulty gas pedal recall.
One of the main errors leading to this situation was the fact that ChassisCo didn’t follow on the Toyota principle of giving the bad news up front. Toyota stated with every supplier that they expected a swift alert in case any risks were to arise, in order to tackle root causes and diminish the problems right away. On the same line, Toyota knew that the manufacturing process for the
A vehicle, a 2006 Acura TL, is in a location where storage charges are being accrued daily.
There are lots of cars passing different roads everyday and a percentage of these cars will end up in a collision and look for Acura collision repair specialist. There are times when the owner is the one to choose the auto collision repair company, but more often it is the insurance company who has the authority to choose. This is the reason why you need to know the truth about the car insurance before you choose a particular insurance company. Although an average car can be repaired to any auto body repair shop satisfactorily, there are cars and brands that requires the service of a collision repair specialist.
Autonomous vehicles are on the verge of drastically changing transportation. They potentially can save millions of dollars in damages and fuel efficiency as well as countless lives. However, the development of driverless cars pose serious ethical problems for software engineers. For instance, the millions of people who earn their living driving trucks or cabs would lose their jobs as they get replaced by computer programs. Another issue is transparency because the driving software needs to be very high quality to increase safety. Company designers and researchers tend to work secretly, so others can’t steal their progress but this close mindedness closes off extra ideas and criticism. Finally, the need for safe code delves into morality. An autonomous car will have to make life and death
The following problems are often the result of minor accidents and can have a significant impact on a vehicle’s safety and performance:
As if this weren’t enough, quality problems mounted week after week. Only months later in February 2010, the NHTSA revealed that it had received claims citing another life threatening defect in the break system for the Toyota Prius. More than 400 thousand Prius recalls resulted. In April of 2010, customers reported handling issues in the Lexus brand which resulted in another recall of 9,400 Lexus cars and a “Don’t Buy: Safety Risk” rating from Consumer Reports. Also in April, the company voluntarily recalled Siennas to address a problem with corrosion on a spare tire cable. Later that month, Toyota voluntarily recalled 2003 Sequoia SUVs to improve the stability controls. 2010 Tacomas were also recalled for defective front drive shafts. Once the quality icon, Toyota had hit a really low point; so low that credit
Due to Toyota’s financial greed and unethical practice, vehicles were wrongly equipped with faulty brakes, sticking pedals and poor quality door looks, which caused death of many Toyota customers and hundreds of dollars in damages. When a company like Toyota acts in an ethically questionable manner, it causes the company to lose customers and develop a negative reputation. Customer tend to lose faith in the company and have to look for better service
As a ramification, it is difficult for human operators to anticipate faults within the system and prevent and manage the risks incurred by an operational accident accordingly, making them “incomprehensible”. Therefore, organisational accidents in complex systems are inevitable as despite defensive measures implemented to mitigate their risk, such as the training of operators and regular maintenance, the fragile design of the systems is the core reason why accidents occur.