Prime Stall Shut Down

How are you going to seal under the hood?

 

Most of the wiring harnesses are inside the car particularly the ones involving ECUs. From the OP of the rodent issue description he didn’t say where they chewed the wiring.


iPhone ?

 

Yeah, it would be harder, if not impossible, to wrap all the wires, but I strongly doubt trying to cover ALL potential entry points for mice is much easier. Obvious big openings maybe, but those rodents can chew throw plastic very easily. If they really want to get inside of the engine bay, I think all of those plastic parts has to be fortified. I often find a cozy nest of mice family inside of my beekeeping boxes. The opening I have for bees are only half inch wide, but mice can easily chew the inch thick pine wood to widen the hole for them to get inside.

I have a backyard small chicken farm. I think most mice find the chicken feeds and scratch grains much more palatable than plastic wire cover. We also have very large colony of feral cats around my house, so I really think the chance of any of the mice attacking my CAR is minimal. Oh, yeah, we have that big black thing too. I lost almost entire bee hives in a single night two years ago before I put up electric fences.

 

I'm kind of shocked to hear about the architecture of the Prius code - I had assumed that most of it was assembly on bare metal tied together with some higher level glue code as opposed to a monolithic glop. Toyota themselves have noted that software isn't exactly one of their strengths (I read something making reference to that because they had opened a new Silicon Valley office for just that reason).

I can however think of two likely situations of how the code came to be like that: 1. when prototype code becomes shipping code due to management pressure (happens more often than most people should be comfortable with) 2. very old-school programmers (who hadn't updated skills in a very long time) were in charge of architecting the system.

Sorry to hear about the issue you had with the wiring harness, but it's not necessarily true that your other cars are untouched. They may have incurred rodent damage that you simply aren't currently aware of. We personally had in excess of $7000 in rodent damage in one of our (way more than $34k) sports cars and I still have a hard time blaming the manufacturer. Because it's a car that doesn't see daily use, while it was in storage (where this happened) we had been infusing peppermint oil into the interior (to the point where it's kind of noxious) in an effort to keep away the rodents.

I really hope that Toyota figures out what is causing system shutdowns in the affected Primes.

 

I would have insisted that they show me the chewed wires to see for myself, then explain to me what part of the circuit that affected to cause the shutdown.

 

I was equally disappointed to hear that. Especially since at the time I was on my third Prius . I can certainly see either of the two above happening. I've worked on projects where both of those were issues. That said, it's still a bit unnerving that they can let safety critical code go out the door without sufficient code-reviews/testing. I have no idea what Tesla's code-base is like. With the speed and rapidity that they're developing and updating at I probably don't want to know...

I don't think people have a good grasp of the danger they put themselves in with these open-source copilot software. It's so easy to make a single simple mistake that can cost you your life. It's bad enough that Toyota makes crap code... and they at least have internal accountability (and external as they can be sued). But open-source... there's no one to sue. So if it kills you, oh well, should have read the disclaimers. I truly don't think anyone should be able to drive with them on public roads. There needs to be some sort of compliance testing before any (even the big manufacturers) are allowed to test on the roads. An individual should not be allowed to bypass those compliance tests.

 

Who is using open source code?

 

how do you know they didn't follow standard QA procedures for testing? or code reviews? If there is an article/document on Toyota's IT procedures I'd be interested in seeing that.

I havent seen any mention of open source here, but I'm guessing you are referencing something like this article. if so it specifically says the software is for the entertainment system, not mission critical processes. Admittedly it mentions in the future it may be used for cruise control but not currently. In my opinion (15 years in IT for a big retailer) open source is a good choice, especially for non-critical systems. The software mentioned in the article is being co-built by 10 different car makers, so it's going to get lots of people reviewing the code which should make for much better code, which is one of the big strengths of open source. I would trust open source cruise control software much more than a private, proprietary system.

Maybe someone who knows the law can jump in, but I doubt using open source software absolves a company from legal responsibility for any issues that result from using it.

 

First, I'm going to state that I think the current state of self-driving cars is fairly poor and I hate the way people abuse the systems that are out there. I think that at the current level of automation, it just lures people into riskier behaviors behind the wheel (for example the idiot who took at nap in his Tesla while running autopilot on the highway). Way back when autopilot was first introduced, I was seeing idiots on social media asking about suggested autopilot routes for their Tesla test-drives and warning them against using it anywhere but the highway.

All that said, I'd like to push back on your impression of open-source software. I'd argue that running a project open source does not necessarily imply that it is poor code, though auditing for a lot of projects run like that seems to relay on the principle of many eyes making bugs shallow. I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that individuals and companies are typically legally liable when actually using the code on public roads.

 

Had the exact thing happen. Driving the freeway and everything went black and blank. Coasted to off ramp and car restarted just like when you start it to drive. Scariest thing ever. Car is still at dealership. I won’t drive it unless they can find and fix what ever happened.

Where did you get your quote?

How did your trip go? Anymore problems?

 

Yes.

 

This happens to me fairly routinely, but generally only within the first few minutes after starting out - most often, I'll back out of the garage, drive a couple of blocks down the street to the first big intersection at the end of my neighborhood, and then it'll reboot. But after that it's typically fine.

Very strange; I hope the software update fixes it. I didn't think to inquire the one time I had mine in for service (it's a 2020 Prime with <10,000 miles).

 

Did the dealer find anything to explain the black out?