Recalls Triple as Vehicle Electronic Systems Complaints Swamp U.S. Regulators
26 Mar 2010
March 26 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. vehicle recalls related to electronic systems have tripled and investigations quadrupled in the past 30 years following a surge in the use of computers to control functions such as acceleration.
Lawmakers and safety advocates probing Toyota Motor Corp.'s handling of sudden-acceleration complaints say the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has failed to keep pace with the technology. At least 27 individual lawsuits assert that electronics systems are responsible for deaths or injuries in crashes of Toyota vehicles.
Regulations that may emerge from NHTSA's review include making mandatory the so-called black boxes that collect data from crashes and increasing the length of time they operate and the number of incidents they measure, said Joan Claybrook, a former NHTSA administrator. Automakers will voluntarily include black boxes by 2012 that collect "minimal" data, she said.
"The proliferation of features in cars has really passed NHTSA by and caught them somewhat unprepared," said David Champion, director of testing at Consumer Reports magazine. "I don't think anyone thought too deeply before the Toyota issue came along about how to turn off the electronic ignition for a car, for example."
Complaints to NHTSA about vehicle electronic systems rose 50 percent from the mid-1990s to 3,798 annually this decade, according to the data. They involve automakers throughout the industry, from Toyota, General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. to Volkswagen AG and Daimler AG's Mercedes-Benz.
Two Engineers
At NHTSA, the Transportation Department agency responsible for ensuring the safety of motor vehicles in the U.S., two engineers out of 125 specialize in electronics, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said last month. The agency lacks regulations for auto electronics, and rules governing accelerators were written in 1973 and last updated in 1995.
The agency may hire one more electronics specialist and can tap outside help if it needs additional expertise, LaHood said at a U.S. congressional hearing on Toyota's global recalls of more than 8 million vehicles.
That doesn't satisfy congressional critics.
"There is no evidence that Toyota or NHTSA took a serious look at the possibility that electronic defects could be causing the problem," Representative Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, said at a Feb. 23 hearing.
"Ultimately, I believe addressing this problem will require legislation," Waxman said. "Carmakers have entered the electronics era, but NHTSA seems stuck in a mechanical mindset."
No Evidence
Toyota says it has no evidence that electronic defects are a cause of sudden acceleration. The company has blamed floor mats that trap gas pedals, sticky accelerators and human error.
"We are not brushing aside any possibility of electronics being involved with unintended acceleration," said John Hanson, a spokesman for Toyota's U.S. sales unit in Torrance, California. "We simply have never found a case where electronics have been a root cause. And we have investigated it many times."
Olivia Alair, a Transportation Department spokeswoman, said the agency is aggressively probing unintended acceleration.
"NHTSA is currently undertaking a comprehensive review of possible causes of sudden acceleration, including the potential role of electromagnetic interference, as well as hardware or software related failures," she said.
In the Toyota cases, at least 27 of at least 48 lawsuits alleging personal injury or death specifically blame vehicle electronics as a contributing factor, according to a Bloomberg list of the lawsuits. Among at least 148 lawsuits seeking class- action status, at least 71 cite electronics, the list shows.
Consolidating Cases
Toyota and the lawyers handling consumer and personal injury lawsuits against the company related to sudden acceleration asked a panel of judges yesterday in Los Angeles to consolidate all federal claims in one court. The five-judge panel is reviewing the request.
Noriko Uno, 66, was one of the victims, according to a lawsuit filed on her behalf that isn't part of the consolidation request. She was driving a 2006 Camry on a residential street in Upland, California, when it accelerated to as much as 100 miles per hour, the lawsuit says. The Camry hit a telephone pole, went airborne and landed on a tree, killing Uno, according to the complaint. The lawsuit says a shift from mechanical to electronic systems was a cause.
Hanson said Toyota wouldn't comment on pending litigation.
NHTSA enforces 59 vehicle safety standards that govern everything from the design of windshield wipers to internal trunk releases.
NHTSA's rulemaking office has 62 employees, Alair said. The Obama administration has requested 66 additional employees for the entire agency its fiscal 2011 budget "and will target these positions to meet the areas in most need," she said.
Lines of Code
A modern luxury car may have functions run by as many as 100 million lines of software code, enough to fill a stack of letter-sized pages the height of a 50-story building, said Andy Chou, chief scientist at Coverity Inc., which analyzes automotive and other types of software for defects.
Even the most carefully written software probably has about 1 defect per 10,000 lines of code, he said, based on an analysis the San Francisco company has done of its work during the past seven years.
"You could have literally trillions of paths that could have errors in them," he said. "It's just hard to test every possible behavior."
Microchips for U.S. cars were introduced in some luxury models in the 1970s to control engine timing, fuel injection and brakes, said John Wolkonowicz, a former automotive engineer who is an analyst at IHS Global Insight Inc. in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Microprocessor Modules
The first industrywide microprocessor modules, or devices that run particular automotive systems, were the engine control units required in 1981 to cut pollution, he said.
Automakers added modules in the 1980s for heating and cooling systems, and transmission and drive-train functions were computerized in many models in the 1990s, Wolkonowicz said. Since 2000, the most significant proliferation has been of microprocessors to help avoid crashes, control air bags and improve engine efficiency, he said.
Electronic throttles like those in Toyota models under scrutiny didn't come into widespread use until 2002 and later, Wolkonowicz said.
Today, a typical car has from 80 to 100 microprocessors, according to Atlanta-based Hughes Telematics Inc., which makes electronics for cars.
"Electronics have given us new capabilities that will make us safer," Wolkonowicz said. "But we need to move forward and make these systems bullet-proof -- and we can. We got to this point because government didn't get it."
Sudden Acceleration
While allegations of sudden acceleration in Toyota models drew attention to possible electronics defects, the majority of such alleged failures involve less deadly incidents such as stalling, instrument failures or fires.
In one such case, U.S. regulators started tallying electronic-system complaints for 2004 Buick Rendezvous models almost as soon as they went on sale. The vehicles' reported failures included stalling at 65 mph and at stop lights, according to complaints to NHTSA.
GM's subsequent 2005 recall of about 35,000 Rendezvous and Pontiac Aztek sport-utility vehicles to replace ignition modules was among 45 actions related to electrical systems that year, according to U.S. data.
For the GM SUVs, the problem turned out to be silicon used to make ignition control modules that could become contaminated and keep the engine from starting or cause stalling.
1,100 Models
NHTSA first added a specific software-failure category in 2007 and has since tracked software-related repair campaigns for more than 1,100 models.
In one failure, Volvo last year recalled 11,993 cars and SUVs to download new software onto an engine controller because the original programming could fail to send a signal to a fuel pump, making the vehicles stall and possibly causing a crash, according to NHTSA records.
There are about 60,000 complaints about electrical or electronics systems among 767,000 records in the NHTSA database since the complaints were first compiled by computer in 1995. Complaints can be entered by phone, letter or the agency's Web site and aren't always verified by agency personnel.
Black Boxes
The data showed complaints alleging 1,100 crashes based on the malfunctions with electrical or electronics systems and a handful of deaths, several of which are included in at least 110 deaths linked to sudden acceleration at Toyota and other automakers in the U.S.
Regulations that may emerge from NHTSA's review include making mandatory the so-called black boxes that collect data from crashes and increasing the length of time they operate and the number of incidents they measure, said Joan Claybrook, a former NHTSA administrator. Automakers will voluntarily include black boxes by 2012 that collect "minimal" data, she said.
Updating the requirements for throttle performance and writing a new standard for electronic safety also may be required, said Claybrook, who is president emeritus of Public Citizen, an auto-safety group that has sued automakers to get crash data.
"The key issue is that they be redundant, truly redundant," she said of diagnostic technologies. "It means you have two systems that are independent of each other. By and large, the automobile systems are pretty crude in terms of redundancy."
‘More Complicated'
With the lack of specific rules for electronics systems and no standards for what automakers collect in the black boxes, it can be very difficult to recreate the causes of crashes, said Coverity's Chou.
"Vehicles are getting so much more complicated and we have to expect that to diagnose these problems is going to be ever more hard," said Champion, the Consumer Reports auto tester. "With mechanical problems, you could trace it to an issue you can see. In today's cars, most of the time you have to plug it into a laptop computer to find out what's going on. How often do you figure out what caused your laptop to crash?"
By Jeff Green and Angela Greiling Keane --With assistance from Margaret Cronin Fisk and David Welch in Southfield, Michigan. Editors: Jeffrey Taylor, Joe Winski
To contact the reporters on this story: Jeff Green in Southfield, Michigan, at jgreen16@bloomberg.net; Angela Greiling Keane in Washington at agreilingkea@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jamie Butters at jbutters@bloomberg.net; Larry Liebert at lliebert@bloomberg.net.
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