IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2016 - 36

ETHICAL DILEMMAS

Karl Stephan

he automotive industry has furnished
the field of engineering ethics with
more than one "paradigm" case that generations of
budding engineers have studied.
In the way Toyota tried to deal with
the now-infamous problem of unintended acceleration in many of
its models, they have given us an
example of how not to deal with
a safety problem. Technical issues
are only one aspect of the way an
initially small-scale issue snowballed into a major financial disaster that shut  down sales and may
have permanently blotted Toyota's
reputation. While the whole story

T

A circle-the-wagons mentality
was at least as much to blame
as poor engineering.
has yet to emerge, it looks now as
though a circle-the-wagons mentality was at least as much to blame
as poor engineering.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2016.2554418
Date of publication: 2 June 2016

36

Toyota: Not So
Fast, Guys
We have the Los Angeles Times
to thank for most of the initial journalistic spadework that pressured
Toyota into reluctant action. Back
in August of 2009, an off-duty
policeman and three of his family suddenly felt their new
Lexus race out of control
at speeds of up to 100 mph
before it hit another car,
f lew down an embankment, and caught fire,
killing all four occupants.
Investigation revealed that
if a certain rubber floor mat
is installed, a projection in
the molding can catch the
bottom tip of the rigid accelerator
pedal so that the throttle is stuck
wide-open. In late September, Toyota issued a floor-mat recall on over
four million vehicles.
The August incident turned out
to be the tip of an unintendedacceleration iceberg that Toyota
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

has been struggling to minimize
for over a decade, as fur ther
investigations published by the
L. A. Times in October revealed.
In October 2009, Toyota sent out
a letter to many of its car owners
that the National Highway Traffic
Safety Administration criticized four
days later as "inaccurate" and "misleading." Toyota was clearly trying
to minimize a problem that now
appears to be more serious than
simply a floor mat that interferes
with accelerator-pedal motion.
Some of the incidents dug up by the
Times appear to involve the "driveby-wire" electronic accelerator system, which is of course operated by
computer programs. Toyota admits
that there is no software feature
that disables the accelerator pedal
when the brake pedal is pressed.
In 2010, Toyota had exactly one
machine in the U. S. that could read
a car's onboard data recorder to
∕

june 2016



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