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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (548113)	2/4/2010 8:46:15 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1576880

" And now they have problems with the brakes on their new Prius" Those brakes, being regenerative, are much more complex than standard brakes.

To: tejek who wrote (548113)	2/6/2010 10:55:42 AM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576880

"And now they have problems with the brakes on their new Prius." And that seems to be a computer problem as well. I remember back in the 1980s when the Japanese were predicted to take over the software market because of their superior quality of code. Then, I went to work for CBM and got a look at Japanese coding and coding practices. I was less than impressed. I dunno if it was a general thing or not, but what I saw was classical cowboy coding. The Prius problem sounds a lot like the computer gets confused because the combination of data from the sensors isn't covered in the code. So it does nothing. And that is very poor programming. The default should be some safe state. In the case of the throttle position, if it gets confused, it should never apply the throttle. In the case of the brakes, it should default to braking if the pedal is pushed. Granted, there will be circumstances when those are the best choices. Given that we are talking about two totally, and radically, different systems, that tells me that Toyota has a systemic problem. Bottom line, it might be time to short Toyota. That is always a gamble, but if they do have a coding quality problem, it is going to be expensive for them.