Occam's Razor, Toyota, NASA and Gremlins

OI Ventures ^ | 3/30/2010 | J. Williams

[CriticalThinking]

I spent a good part of my career as an engineer involved in complex aerospace systems. When I think of all the complexity that goes into aircraft design, I am impressed that our engineering process deliver such a high quality and safe solution. I have always thought a great deal of Toyota and their talent. The loss of life from unintended acceleration is a great tragedy. Frankly its amazing there are not more automotive deaths given the range of drivers and capabilities.....

[zipper]

I can picture it now — late-night infomercials selling retrofit Faraday cages for cars, to protect from induced electrical events caused by solar flares!

Now all they need is Algore and a cheesy slogan to sell millions of them to Obama voters and other students of the “liberal” arts!

[MissEdie]

It was Mars.

[Da Coyote]

I wrote pretty much the same to a number of my friends regarding the Toyota problems. This author was too nice - the simplest solution is probably the driver.

In any case, even given NASA’s engineering problems, each and every one of those engineers utilize skills and intellect far, far beyond ANY of the Obamaloon idiots.

After all, the engineers got into college by their grades (not their race), they took hard courses, and passed them.

Following graduation, they actually used their knowledge - and things actually worked.

Consider the Obamaloon’s appalling demonstration of law imbicility during his times away from the prompter. Harvard passed him? Unlikely, methinks a bit of the old liberal quota system was in action there.

See above regarding hard courses and intellect.

[Wooly]

Here is how great NASA is, the latest module to be added to the space station was built in Italy. When it arrived at Cape Kennedy it was found that critical piping connections were on the opposite side from where they were needed. At a cost of almost one million dollars this was corrected. Then when it was delivered to the Space station id still did not fit correctly.
Maybe NASA needs Toyota’s advice and not vice versa

[kosciusko51]

Or maybe you don’t farm out your equipment to Italy! :-)

[Hillbillary]

Funny how Toyota is being trashed in the media just after Soetoro's takeover of GM and Chrysler. Cars have had defects and major recalls in the past but it seems like there's a lot of piling on in Toyota's case.

Have there been any deaths yet from these sudden accelerations? Do you think Toyota will ever "find the problem"?

[diogenes ghost]

"NASA's safety record is that about 2% of space shuttles blow-up, killing all aboard."

Nope....expect 3,333,333 exploding Toyotas.

Six shuttles built, two destroyed....so far.

Fully one third....great record.

[cpdiii]

The combined safety record of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo is ZERO catastrophic failures in >20 flights.

There was on catastrophic failure but this was not in flight. Grissom, Chaffe and White were burned to death on the launch pad in the capsule. At that time NASA was using 100% oxygen in the apollo capsule. This led to engineering changes and procedures and capsule design.

[ArrogantBustard]

I consider Apollo 1 an R&D or training disaster.

And the Apollo 13 crew avoided a catastrophic failure by the skin of their teeth.

[bert]

the government has an employee policy known as TAD. It is Temporary Area Duty. As in.....

“He is employed at the department in DC, but is now TAD to Hurlbert to conduct the runway concrete tests”

We now have a situation where General Motors engineers are TAD to Houston to go over all the Toyota internal documents to resolve the acceleration problem. Lacking automotive engineers, NASA requests some TAD from General Motors, the auto manufacturing agency of the Federal Government.