What Do You Get When You Cross a Computer with a Car?


A computer! Porsche's beautiful high-tech sports car, the Boxster, has seven computers in it to help manage its complex systems. One of them is dedicated to managing the engine. It has special procedures built into it to deal with abnormal situations. Unfortunately, these sometimes backfire. In some early models, if the fuel level in the gas tank got very low only a gallon or so remaining the centrifugal force of a sharp turn could cause the fuel to collect in the side of the tank, allowing air to enter the fuel lines. The computer sensed this as a dramatic change in the incoming fuel mixture and interpreted it as a catastrophic failure of the injection system. To prevent damage, the computer would shut down the ignition and stop the car. Also to prevent damage, the computer wouldn't let the driver restart the engine until the car had been towed to a shop and serviced.

When owners of early Boxsters first discovered this problem, the only solution Porsche could devise was to tell them to open the engine compartment and disconnect the battery for at least five minutes, giving the computer time to forget all knowledge of the hiccup. The sports car may still speed down those two-lane blacktop roads, but now, in those tight turns, it behaves like a computer.

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In a laudable effort to protect Boxster owners, the programmers turned them into humiliated victims. Every performance-car aficionado knows that the Porsche company is dedicated to lavishing respect and privilege on its clientele. That something like this slipped through shows that the software inside the car is not coming from the same Porsche that makes the rest of the car. It comes from a company within a company: the programmers, not the legendary German automobile engineers. Somehow, the introduction of a new technology surprised an older, well-established company into letting some of its core values slip away. Acceptable levels of quality for software engineers are far lower than those for more traditional engineering disciplines.



Inmates Are Running the Asylum, The. Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy &How to Restore the Sanity - 2004 publication
ISBN: B0036HJY9M
EAN: N/A
Year: 2003
Pages: 170

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