Toyota Pious
By donar | Related entries in Cartoons, Political Graffiti
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 and is filed under Cartoons, Political Graffiti. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
February 10th, 2010 at 7:23 am
I’ve worked in a company that supplied microelectronics to Toyota, and other major automotive companies. I’ve also been responsible for design/manufacture of components into satellites (deep space, commercial, military) First, the reliability requirements used by the automotive industry are incredibly strict…more strict than satellite-level. Second, all electronic systems that are directly responsible for life-critical functions (brakes) have redundant systems. Finally, it is typical for the electronic component technologies used in automotive applications are relatively old (mature) ones: wafer technology and packaging. This allows the auto industry to rely on many years, and billions of units, statistical data to understand and mitigate risks.
The interesting part of this? The microelectronic assemblies (how they build the semiconductor into it’s supporting package) are performed on the same asian assembly lines that run the low-reliability consumer -level products. Additionally the ASP price pressure for automotive components is one of the most aggressive, with the exception of cell phone or computer products.
The mantra of automotive reliability is zero ppm failures, which is impossible. I have personally been involved in issues that have a 20 ppm failure rate. The task of identifying, isolating and correcting a 20 ppm issue is extremely difficult. You need to build 50,000 units to have a chance of finding one failure. Considering the low profit margin due to the aggressive price pressure and the use of extremely mature technologies (little room for improvements), you can easily eat up years of profits with one issue.
In my opinion, this is an unsustainable model. Something’s going to break. If you are in this market, you have the option of reducing your already thin profits, or cutting corners. Hmmm…wonder which one will be the first. (Remember that all corporations are evil entities, only desiring to make a profit by harming the consumers -_- ).
February 10th, 2010 at 3:04 pm
The ironic thing is that none of the recalls so far, save for the “remove the floor mats” advice, is related to the crashes and deaths attributed to “sudden acceleration”. The Prius recall is to fix a momentary hesitation between switching from traction braking to friction braking; instead of a few milliseconds, the delay is up to a second.
Audi has experience with this, and in the end, it was found people were mashing on the gas pedal instead of the brake. There was a slight surge that people responded to on those early fuel injected cars, and fearful of “unintended acceleration”, they jammed on the brakes. Audi, borrowing from racing, had gas and brake pedals in nearly the same vertical plane and close together. As far as I know, 60 Minutes has only apologized for one story, the “unintended acceleration” of Audi cars story they ran that decimated sales for several years.
In about a month, it will be a very good time to buy a Toyota as the media’s feeding frenzy raises panic and increases the number of driver-initiated crashes.