The Need for Electrical Engineers

Can't view the video, but I'm not sure I see the point of NHTSA having an overabundance of EEs on permanent staff - much less software engineers. It seems to me that what the NHTSA does in the way of investigation wouldn't generally involve much input from either of those two diciplines. On those rare occasions it might be needed wouldn't it be better to farm it out?

Granted, as we see more hybrid and "drive by wire" vehicles then maybe it will become a more common need.

Coincidentally I did see a story today about how Toyota has supposedly for years balked in court and otherwise on exactly what sensor data their cars' onboard "black box" records in the seconds pre and post crash. Not sure a team of software engineers could easily pry into it - but it might be fun to try.

I had a similar discussion with a co-worker this morning. He felt that our government failed us but the real blame belongs with Toyota. There are a lot of folks who are now being heard for their Toyota car complaints from years past because of Toyota putting them off and discounting their complaints just as they have been found to be doing recently. Our government failed us in other ways.

I work for a multinational company and we use the Toyota system of quality control. Now that our government is looking at the faulty quality system that Toyota uses and considering legal action for the deaths and property loss due to this 'lack of quality' system, it makes it a no brainer that any company using Toyota's quality control system had better rethink their position. There appears to be systemic quality problems resulting in millions of customer complaints that will likely result in legal action.

The flaw with Toyota's quality system is the same flaw as with any quality system. It's only as good as the people who use it.

If you have low-level workers who prefer to cleverly cover up their mistakes rather than own up to them or upper management which chooses to ignore issues due to ineptitude, laziness or - more likely - rely exclusively on a short-sighted estimated cost analysis of the consequences of ignoring problems, you're going to get squat in the way of quality.

You can label colored bins with little cards all day long. Won't help you one bit with a jury.

...the real problem is when you design a computer-controlled system capable of handling literally millions of differing events, you'd better TEST every one of those possible events...and the their unintended consequences that were not intentionally designed into the system.

...the proverbial, digital "gottcha"

I think you've hit on one of the critical nails here.

When I took a class on VHDL programming of gate array chips, I found the software geeks taking the class with me reluctant to include in their designs coding to handle the possibility that any of the state machines might jump to an undefined state. I think that my coding to include this self check and correction baffled the simulator's compiler. It took me weeks to give up on getting my final version to simulate. In contrast the software geeks quickly generated something that simulated but which did not work in the chips when they programmed them. Many of the software geeks never got a chip to work before the semester's end. I instead had code that wouldn't simulate, but which worked flawlessly the very first time I programmed the chip.

re: "There are 10 types of people. People who understand binary and those who don't."

10 = two types of people...those that do (understand binary) and those that don't; where 1 = yes and 0 = no (ha,ha)!

...GOOGLE: TRS-80 ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE MADE SIMPLE, #21851 (Blacksburg Continuing Education Series), Howard W. Sams & Co.

Now, I understand that they are going to get NASA in on this. Lots of luck. NASA couldn't even design a space shuttle that was reliable. I think that Toyota is more qualified than they are. We know that Toyota had a mechanical problem with the accelerator pedal (which incidentally was manufactured by an american company in Elkart, IN). We are not for certain that there was an ECU problem with the drive-by-wire system. If so, it is most likely that Toyota is not the only car manufacturer with this problem.