Analysis: The Top Executives Reality Gap
Last month there was an important decision in Oklahoma. The court ruled against Toyota in a case over a death caused by unintended acceleration. Unintended acceleration? The case revolved around the programming of the car’s Engine Control Module’s programming. Modern cars are heavily dependent on software. Not just a few lines of code here and there, but thousands, if not tens of thousands of lines of code.
There are standards for this sort of code, but they appear not to have been rigorously applied by Toyota. The result – acceleration even though the throttle wasn’t being pressed and a failure to detect that the driver was trying to apply the brakes. Ultimately the sloppy coding caused death.
One could go on at length about the dangers of bricks and mortar behemoths not taking coding seriously, but actually it’s really only a symptom of a much more general problem, that has been growing worse over the last twenty years. It’s quite a simple problem, but like all problems relating to corporate culture, difficult to fix. The fact is that software driven machinery and systems are now so pervasive that the companies involved are now, to all intents and purposes, software companies.
The best example of this is the banks and big financial companies. They are no longer banks with a software division. They are big software houses with a banking license. The programs they produce and use are fundamental, pervasive and essential to what they do. The problem is that their top management is clueless over this issue and believe that they are just bankers. Some of them are still talking about outsourcing their programming to cut costs!
In the case of the car industry we see a fascinating, and lethal, disconnect over this issue. Would Toyota have developed the hardware part of their cars in same sloppy way they developed the controlling software? Of course not, they are a car maker with rigorous standards and a reputation to support. The reason for the deadly problem is that the powers that be at Toyota – and probably other big car firms – have not come to grips with the fact that they are now software houses, writing safety critical software.
And as for self-driving cars, controlled by ultra-sophisticated software...
http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer-firmware--Bad-design-and-its-consequences
http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-honda-odyssey-recall-20131104,0,3097543.story#axzz2kPPQpZaU
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9243518/Self_driving_cars_could_save_more_than_21_700_lives_450B_a_year (Ha! A.L.)
Alan Lenton
17 November 2013
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