Toyota Unintended Acceleration and the Big Bowl of "Spaghetti" Code(2013)
3 days ago
- #Software Safety
- #Legal Case
- #Toyota
- Toyota settled an Unintended Acceleration lawsuit after a $3 million verdict, avoiding punitive damages.
- Plaintiffs' experts testified that Toyota's software was defective, with bugs and inadequate failsafes leading to the crash.
- The 2005 Camry's software had issues like bit flips, task deaths, memory corruption, and lacked industry-standard protections.
- Toyota's software development process ignored MISRA-C standards, leading to thousands of violations and unsafe practices.
- Experts described Toyota's source code as 'spaghetti code'—badly written and structured, making it untestable and unmaintainable.
- Toyota's system allowed single-point failures, making it inherently unsafe despite any countermeasures.
- The company had over 10,000 global variables, far exceeding the academic standard of zero.
- Toyota failed to conduct peer code reviews and didn't check the source code of its second CPU from Denso.
- NASA's review of Toyota's software was limited and misled by Toyota's false claims about safety features like EDAC.
- NHTSA lacked the expertise to investigate software-related UA events, relying on outdated explanations like floor mats.