I know the sudden unintended acceleration issue is in the past, but I thought some would find interest in this presentation I just came across. A Case Study of Toyota Unintended Acceleration and Software Safety https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_slides.pdf
completely biased and wrong headed. the real question is, why did it all stop? because the lawyers moved on to other ambulances. his first page with incendiary pictures highlights the problem. differentiation between multiple non oem floor mat and accelerator pedal interference, and software issues which were never and cannot be proven. how much were these 'experts' paid to try and discredit toyota?
The first part is background. The second part is technical and about how we can work to ensure the software in our cars is safe. "software issues which were never and cannot be proven" and neither can it be proven to be not at fault. it has been shown that Toyota programmers didn't follow methodologies and best practices when it came to writing code that avoided errors, and was robust enough to continue working if a problem did arise. They did so because it is not a requirement for the automotive sector, and other auto companies likely operate the same way. Perhaps that was good enough, or they have mostly been lucky up to this point. But now they are working a autonomous cars in which more than the brakes are in the hands of the software.
