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History's Worst Software Bugs

Discussion in 'Prius, Hybrid, EV and Alt-Fuel News' started by brandon, Nov 8, 2005.

  1. brandon

    brandon Member

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    ... but not in the top ten, fortunately.

    "Last month automaker Toyota announced a recall of 160,000 of its Prius hybrid vehicles following reports of vehicle warning lights illuminating for no reason, and cars' gasoline engines stalling unexpectedly. But unlike the large-scale auto recalls of years past, the root of the Prius issue wasn't a hardware problem -- it was a programming error in the smart car's embedded code. The Prius had a software bug."

    Full article at:

    http://wired.com/news/technology/bugs/0,29...tw=wn_tophead_1
     
    #1 brandon, Nov 8, 2005
  2. wrprice

    wrprice Active Member

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    2016 Prius
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    Four Touring
    I was about to scream bloody murder. Thankfully, the Prius is only mentioned as a "hook" -- something to tie the article into recent news and bring the concept home to everyday tasks. It makes the Prius' glitch seem worse than it really is -- of however many thousand vehicles are affected by the recall, what's the percentage that encountered the problem? (Not that they shouldn't all be fixed, of course.)

    But there's no such thing as bad publicity, and the article is a good read. I'd read the case study on the Therac-25 before and while it's probably more technical than the non-computer or -medical types would care for, it really is interesting how all the assumptions and business decisions and good-but-not-great software developers came together to cause what was unfortunately a deadly defect.

    At least Toyota found the problem and is fixing it... which is more than can be said for other problems in other products.
     
    #2 wrprice, Nov 9, 2005
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