Oct. 02--All those country songs about lying, cheating spouses and honest, dependable pickup trucks may need to be revised. It turns out you can't trust your ride either.
Last week, Ford recalled nearly 37,000 new F-150 pickups because they may slam on the brakes for no reason. The problem is a glitch in the high-tech cruise control, a fancy form of automatic pilot that detects slower cars in front and reacts. The F-150s can get confused when passing large, highly reflective trucks and think there is an obstacle in the lane ahead. Suddenly, you've got a pickup on the highway hitting its brake lights.
At least one accident has been attributed to the phenomenon. Blame unreliable software, which Ford said it can fix.
This feels like the year we realized our vehicles are not just solid, mechanical objects -- they are computers on wheels. Which makes them wondrous and sophisticated, but also capricious and vulnerable.
The biggest reason we're thinking about the computing power rather than the horsepower in our driveways is the Volkswagen scandal. In trying to unravel what happened, The New York Times pointed out that a new, high-end car contains 100 million lines of computing code, compared with 50 million lines for the Large Hadron Collider.
So yes, complex.
The mischief at Volkswagen took place in the electronic control module, the computerized brain of the engine. Like other vehicles, VWs distinguish between road driving and a lab setting. There's a reason for this, as several industry publications explained: Vehicles undergoing emissions tests sit on a kind of half-treadmill -- a dynamometer --so the VW's front wheels spin while the rear wheels remain stationary. Without this test mode, the VW could think the spinning front wheels mean danger and activate stability or traction control.
That gives you an idea of how smart and dumb an automobile is at the same time.
Volkswagen exploited the design with a defeat device that allowed its diesels to recognize when they were being emissions tested. They'd behave properly for the testers, but out on the highway they would spew up to 40 times more noxious fumes. That produced better gas mileage.
Modern vehicles are packed with computer controls: for the engine, the anti-lock brakes, lights, windows, collision alert system, horn, tire pressure monitor. They have video cameras. The F-150 pickup with fancy cruise control uses radar. Are we still talking about cars, or are they fighter jets? Infiniti's Q50 gets close to blurring the lines between automobile and airplane with a computerized steering system that eliminates the physical connection between steering wheel and tires. The car erases bumps in the road the way a computer keyboard erases typos.
With all this, there are vulnerabilities to understand. Computers can malfunction. They can misbehave if programmed to do so. And, because cars are increasingly likely to have a communication link, they can be hacked. Wired magazine proved that when it reported this summer how two computer experts commandeered a Jeep on the highway. From a location 10 miles away, the hackers fooled with the windshield wipers and blasted the radio, then cut the acceleration on the SUV, whose driver was a participant in the experiment.
Car companies say they've learned their lesson and are teaming up to create an industry lab to work on cybersecurity. They were late to get started. "The encryption and password protection we use in financial matters has not yet made it into cars," one expert told Tribune Newspapers.
So don't expect all this cheating, hacking and malfunctioning to slow advances in technology. Sorry, we're not going back to the days of the Pontiac GTO. Instead, we'll root for the technologists to get their act in gear.
Because probably coming soon: automatic braking, using cameras and radar, as a standard feature.
Maybe after that: vehicle-to-vehicle communications, so your car can detect and react to dangers far ahead or even around the corner. Eventually, the driverless car.
What could go wrong?
