Testing Doesn’t Catch Everything

 

We put things to the test, to discover their limits and minimize human error in their design. Yet sometimes the test itself is imperfect. Like the product it tests, it’s more prone than we’d like to admit to human error and inexperience.

One supremely stressful testing ground is preparing for war. Ricochet member Percival, who has good reason to know about these things, said in a recent thread, “When you test a new weapons system, you generally do it against a target that you have absolute control over. You don’t do it in or near populated areas. You set up a lot of cameras at different angles so you can record everything that happens”. Engineers know from generations of hard experience that tests don’t always catch everything, though, and the reasons are sometimes only obvious in retrospect.

Anti-nuclear people have long thought that Americans in WWII were cruel and reckless to unleash poisonous fallout via the A-bombings. But fallout, which is essentially radioactive burnt soot, was an unpleasant surprise to Manhattan Project scientists, who expected the vast majority of deaths to be caused by direct blast. Based on the well-instrumented, carefully done Trinity test, they didn’t expect much lingering residual radiation afterward. But that’s because Trinity vaporized sand and rocks, not cities of wood and fabric.

With the war over, and a worldwide economic boom slowly gathering strength, people were hungry for growth after decades of depression and conflict. New industries flourished, like electronics, chemicals, plastics, and a newcomer, atomic energy. In general, testing for medical safety was primitive by our standards. This would change.

Thalidomide was developed in Germany and almost exported to the USA until the FDA blocked it, because of an alarming number of birth defects and mutations. As many as 40% of babies born to women who took Thalidomide died within a year. There’d been no wide-scale human test, and none involving pregnant women. The test was, none of the rats died. In 1957 that was enough. By 1962, the uproar over Thalidomide ensured that pharmaceutical testing would be much more demanding. By the way, today it’s an approved, respected drug for certain serious conditions, such as leprosy; but it is kept away from women of childbearing age.

You’d think nothing like this could happen again. In 1975, ads proclaimed “Proctor and Gamble, and a woman gynecologist introduce a new tampon. Remember, we call it Rely”. Rely hadn’t been widely tested because legally, it didn’t have to be. It was classified as not much different from facial tissue, not as a quasi-medical product that required testing. It was, in the language of the time, “grandfathered in”. But despite its rosy, pseudo-feminist branding, Rely was a disaster that caused severe problems, called toxic shock, for thousands of women, with consequences that included amputation of hands and limbs. By the end of the ‘70s it was banned.

What about other industries? There’s a reasonable temptation to believe that Detroit’s half-century of quality problems have been caused by rushing out untested junk, but that’s seldom actually been true.

GM was always in a hurry to market this year’s flashy new stuff—“Patented C-Thru Glass, 20% More Transparent!”—and for decades, people traded cars in much more frequently than in our adult lifetimes. Few expected to hold onto them for long, so why prioritize better appearance and performance five years down the road? But the Germans, the Swedes, and the Japanese did. They didn’t have special testing or magic quality control technology that we lacked. They knew that avoiding rusting chrome, snapped torsion bars, or faded paint required long-duration tests that weren’t rushed.

One of the most notorious cases, the Chevy Vega subcompact, had a big test program by the standards of the dawn of the Seventies. But some of the key things GM needed to know were obscured by long-established testing procedures that babied the $100,000 a copy, hand-built prototypes. Drivers meticulously checked fluid levels and tire pressures before every drive in a way that few American consumers would. So something like the inadequacy of a one-gallon radiator wasn’t obvious until the car was sold to the public.

Ironically, GM’s wealth and size actually worked against it. Smaller manufacturers like Daimler-Benz built six prototypes of a new design and ran them for 80,000 miles each before signing off; 480,000 test miles in total. General Motors could afford to build 100 test cars, run each for 10,000 miles, and boast of a 1 million total mile test program completed in one eighth the time. Clever! But maybe not so clever, because time is exactly what was needed. Common sense tells you that the car with 80,000 miles gives you more information, more confidence about durability and wear than eight 10,000 miles ones put together.

Some gigantic investments were never tested before the money was spent. In a violation of the (then admittedly limited) traditions of the manned space program, the space shuttle’s first flight in 1981 was manned. Forty years later this decision still causes some head-scratching around NASA. The pilot and commander of that first flight later said flatly that they would have aborted it within seconds of liftoff if they’d realized that sheer sound pressure of the launch threatened to damage vital flight control surfaces, to an unexpected degree that the agency would mitigate in later launches. There was no compelling reason for this, except that at some point in the mid-seventies a test flight was chopped to help the budget make it through another year.

The Department of Defense is not exempt from human error either. During the Reagan buildup, smaller but appropriately lethal nuclear warheads were designed to fit shorter range and cruise missiles. The bombs worked just fine when they were carried in bomb bays inside the plane (modern weapons platforms have various jazzy new terms for this, but I’ll stick to familiar ones). Great! But somebody at DoD forgot that in certain uses, the missiles were to be carried underwing. They hadn’t been tested for extreme cold and needed to be redesigned to still work when it was 70 below with a wind blast of 550 miles an hour. Note that the test itself wasn’t faulty. They simply hadn’t asked all the right questions, and it ended up costing millions of dollars.

But those losses are nothing compared to the consequences of a test that was not only faulty, but outright fraudulent. Volkswagen, still associated in pop culture with hippies and love bugs, did something distinctly unlovable; they realized their diesel-engine cars couldn’t pass standard US pollution tests, so they gamed the tests, in essence creating cheating software that would recognize when a test was being done, and cut the performance of the engine just enough to pass it. Amazingly, they didn’t get caught by Big Eco, or the archipelago of federal and state agencies that monitor these things, but by students at a small, unfashionable college who couldn’t explain nagging inconsistencies in their attempts to verify the test numbers. Otherwise, they might well have gotten away with it.

This little stunt, gaming the test, will cost VW a cool $20 billion all told, in fines, lawsuits, and replaced cars. I’m not inclined to cry any Adam Smith tears for the poor Germans. They lied to America. But they’ll pass the one test that really counts: they’ll survive to be allowed to continue to sell cars in the American market.

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  1. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    WillowSpring (View Comment):

    Arahant (View Comment):
    That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to test, just that we need to be more creative in our test plans.

    And more skeptical of the results

     

    The results are what they are. They prove the requirements that they were designed to prove, and only those requirements. It is important to test all the ones that you used for your design.

    Sometimes, in the process of doing that, you will uncover “undocumented” requirements. Sometimes you will be fulfilling those requirements. Sometimes you won’t, and that is a huge issue.

    I don’t know what precisely happened in the case of the 737-MAX. I do know that the fleet is grounded. From other details that have come to me through the aviation press*, it sounds as if a sensor failure was causing the autopilot to believe that the airspeed of the aircraft was too low to avoid a stall condition. (Insufficient speed -> insufficient lift -> the aircraft assumes the flight characteristics of a large chunk of concrete) The autopilot attempts to deal with the situation by putting the aircraft into a dive. But there is noting wrong with the airspeed. There is something wrong with the sensor. The pilots attempted to pull out of the dive and the autopilot wouldn’t let them.

    Again, I emphasize that this isn’t my circus and those aren’t my monkeys. I cannot imagine a design where the pilot performing any input to the flight controls doesn’t immediately disengage the autopilot. Basically, pilot input means that the boss is on this and the autopilot should stay the hell out of the way. That did not seem to happen, and a lot of people died.

    The tests for this should have simulated an indicated airspeed sensor failure. The recovery procedure should have been run through on the simulator with real pilots and a real autopilot. What happened shouldn’t have been able to happen. But it (apparently) did.


    * I rip on journalists, though I make an effort to dial it back some because there might be a few who read what I write. Aviation journalists are generally far more knowledgeable about their beat than, say, the White House press corps is. If they spout nonsense, they will not merely be called on  it, they will likely be hounded back to covering high school sports for the Podunk Picayune.

    • #31
  2. Hank Rhody, Freelance Philosopher Contributor
    Hank Rhody, Freelance Philosopher
    @HankRhody

    Percival (View Comment):
    * I rip on journalists, though I make an effort to dial it back some because there might be a few who read what I write. Aviation journalists are generally far more knowledgeable about their beat than, say, the White House press corps is. If they spout nonsense, they will not merely be called on it, they will likely be hounded back to covering high school sports for the Podunk Picayune.

    I have an extremely low opinion of journalists, but a pretty high one on reporters. One of the two is performing a useful function.

    • #32
  3. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    EJHill (View Comment):

    The Reticulator: Are you talking about covid-19 vaccines here?

    Now that you bring it up… “Trials of the Oxford vaccine have been paused twice after two participants, both British women, sequentially developed transverse myelitis, an inflammation of the spinal cord that can cause paralysis.”

    Hadn’t heard about that. Thanks for the update.

    • #33
  4. Brian Clendinen Inactive
    Brian Clendinen
    @BrianClendinen

    SkipSul (View Comment):

    Gary McVey: But those losses are nothing compared to the consequences of a test that was not only faulty, but outright fraudulent. Volkswagen, still associated in pop culture with hippies and love bugs, did something distinctly unlovable; they realized their diesel-engine cars couldn’t pass standard US pollution tests, so they gamed the tests, in essence creating cheating software that would recognize when a test was being done, and cut the performance of the engine just enough to pass it. Amazingly, they didn’t get caught by Big Eco, or the archipelago of federal and state agencies that monitor these things, but by students at a small, unfashionable college who couldn’t explain nagging inconsistencies in their attempts to verify the test numbers. Otherwise, they might well have gotten away with it.

    To be fair: the EPA diesel requirements had by that time been so constricted that they constituted, practically speaking, a total ban in all but name on small diesels.

    Which neatly illustrates one of the other problems with testing: setting standards that are pure bunkum, then attacking companies for “failing” them.

    You see this all the time with the crash-test “5-Star” racket ratchet. A car that earned 5 stars just a few years ago, and whose design hasn’t been refreshed yet, is suddenly rated 2 or 3 stars and sees its sales crate because the test itself has been made ridiculously harder. The crash test standards got to a point where crash fatalities for head on were cut, then side impacts, then various forms of obliques, but at no point are they ever allowed to be deemed “good enough”, even as visibility has been reduced severely by massive A-pillars and other design constraints. The standards are digressing from the incidence, and “protecting” drivers against increasingly unlikely scenarios (Our new system tests for 7200 degree rollover while falling down a cliff and catching fire after hitting a line of bicyclists on a blind mountain hairpin during a car chase…).

    I see this in my own line of work, where our solid-state electronic components are pitched head to head against electro-mechanical standards of build and performance, nevermind that what we make is often utterly unlike what we’re up against. We end up getting dinged at some customers because our stuff “failed” some arbitrary bench test that not only does not actually resemble the real world we’re in, but was designed to test relay contacts, not MOSFETs, microprocessors, and power re-direction.

    Yay Car seats for kids over 2 is similar. They only test front end crashes. Car seats compared to be buckled in,  is less safe for side crashes. So its actually a bit less safe for a toddler to be in a car seat than bucked in the seat. However in most states you will get a ticket and major trouble for doing  what is actually safer.

    • #34
  5. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    SkipSul (View Comment):

    Gary McVey: But those losses are nothing compared to the consequences of a test that was not only faulty, but outright fraudulent. Volkswagen, still associated in pop culture with hippies and love bugs, did something distinctly unlovable; they realized their diesel-engine cars couldn’t pass standard US pollution tests, so they gamed the tests, in essence creating cheating software that would recognize when a test was being done, and cut the performance of the engine just enough to pass it. Amazingly, they didn’t get caught by Big Eco, or the archipelago of federal and state agencies that monitor these things, but by students at a small, unfashionable college who couldn’t explain nagging inconsistencies in their attempts to verify the test numbers. Otherwise, they might well have gotten away with it.

    To be fair: the EPA diesel requirements had by that time been so constricted that they constituted, practically speaking, a total ban in all but name on small diesels.

    Which neatly illustrates one of the other problems with testing: setting standards that are pure bunkum, then attacking companies for “failing” them.

    You see this all the time with the crash-test “5-Star” racket ratchet. A car that earned 5 stars just a few years ago, and whose design hasn’t been refreshed yet, is suddenly rated 2 or 3 stars and sees its sales crate because the test itself has been made ridiculously harder. The crash test standards got to a point where crash fatalities for head on were cut, then side impacts, then various forms of obliques, but at no point are they ever allowed to be deemed “good enough”, even as visibility has been reduced severely by massive A-pillars and other design constraints. The standards are digressing from the incidence, and “protecting” drivers against increasingly unlikely scenarios (Our new system tests for 7200 degree rollover while falling down a cliff and catching fire after hitting a line of bicyclists on a blind mountain hairpin during a car chase…).

    I see this in my own line of work, where our solid-state electronic components are pitched head to head against electro-mechanical standards of build and performance, nevermind that what we make is often utterly unlike what we’re up against. We end up getting dinged at some customers because our stuff “failed” some arbitrary bench test that not only does not actually resemble the real world we’re in, but was designed to test relay contacts, not MOSFETs, microprocessors, and power re-direction.

    I hear you, brother Skipsul. In my own line of work, the boldest stuff we did in the Eighties and Nineties for anti-Communist filmmakers in Eastern and Central Europe, was once considered tributes to breathtakingly brave artists, but is now considered…well, not exactly retrograde, but certainly Eurocentric….monochromatic, not by intent, but by…today’s standards, where were the women, McVey? (plenty were on that screen) Where were the gays? (only a handful, as in real life, but it took guts in Communist 1988 to even allow a hint). Where were the Blacks? What Blacks? Other than a handful of warily tolerated university students on “internationalist scholarships”, there were none.  

    • #35
  6. Hank Rhody, Freelance Philosopher Contributor
    Hank Rhody, Freelance Philosopher
    @HankRhody

    Gary McVey (View Comment):
    Where were the gays? (only a handful, as in real life, but it took guts in Communist 1988 to even allow a hint).

    Good way to get yourself ‘recruited’ by the KGB.

    • #36
  7. Boss Mongo Member
    Boss Mongo
    @BossMongo

    SkipSul (View Comment):
    We end up getting dinged at some customers because our stuff “failed” some arbitrary bench test that not only does not actually resemble the real world we’re in, but was designed to test relay contacts, not MOSFETs, microprocessors, and power re-direction.

    I just hit “like” and nodded sagely, like I knew what all that meant.

    • #37
  8. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Boss Mongo (View Comment):

    SkipSul (View Comment):
    We end up getting dinged at some customers because our stuff “failed” some arbitrary bench test that not only does not actually resemble the real world we’re in, but was designed to test relay contacts, not MOSFETs, microprocessors, and power re-direction.

    I just hit “like” and nodded sagely, like I knew what all that meant.

    Think vacuum tubes vs. solid state computers. It’s not what it is, but it illustrates it well enough.

    • #38
  9. iWe Coolidge
    iWe
    @iWe

    Gary McVey: Volkswagen, still associated in pop culture with hippies and love bugs, did something distinctly unlovable; they realized their diesel-engine cars couldn’t pass standard US pollution tests, so they gamed the tests, in essence creating cheating software that would recognize when a test was being done, and cut the performance of the engine just enough to pass it.

    I have never understood why people believe this version of the story.

    EVERYONE gamed the same tests, the same way (which is why diesel cars are now going kaput the world over). VW was just the poster child.  But every engineer designed to the test. It is what engineers do.

    • #39
  10. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    iWe (View Comment):

    Gary McVey: Volkswagen, still associated in pop culture with hippies and love bugs, did something distinctly unlovable; they realized their diesel-engine cars couldn’t pass standard US pollution tests, so they gamed the tests, in essence creating cheating software that would recognize when a test was being done, and cut the performance of the engine just enough to pass it.

    I have never understood why people believe this version of the story.

    EVERYONE gamed the same tests, the same way (which is why diesel cars are now going kaput the world over). VW was just the poster child. But every engineer designed to the test. It is what engineers do.

    Big differences. Everyone designs to the test in the sense that they go right up to, but not over, the ethical line in getting the best favorable results for the company’s product. Manufacturers know, for example, that consumer auto testing will start early in the morning, when the air is coolest and densest, so they account for that. Nothing illicit about it. 

    What the Germans did was outright cheat. Europeans bragged that their small diesels were a superior technology, which is why they had a great market share in Europe. Their software recognized the prescribed, distinct timing of the start up of testing protocol and changed the engine’s behavior for the duration of the test–delivered crappier performance, the only way they could meet the standards–and used the deceptive test results to claim a technological advantage, thereby winning customers who paid extra for what they were told was a premium product. They weren’t forced into doing this by the EPA or anyone else; they could have admitted the cars ran dirty and taken their chances with buyers. They didn’t, because key executives were crooked. 

    • #40
  11. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    iWe (View Comment):

    Gary McVey: Volkswagen, still associated in pop culture with hippies and love bugs, did something distinctly unlovable; they realized their diesel-engine cars couldn’t pass standard US pollution tests, so they gamed the tests, in essence creating cheating software that would recognize when a test was being done, and cut the performance of the engine just enough to pass it.

    I have never understood why people believe this version of the story.

    EVERYONE gamed the same tests, the same way (which is why diesel cars are now going kaput the world over). VW was just the poster child. But every engineer designed to the test. It is what engineers do.

    Big differences. Everyone designs to the test in the sense that they go right up to, but not over, the ethical line in getting the best favorable results for the company’s product. Manufacturers know, for example, that consumer auto testing will start early in the morning, when the air is coolest and densest, so they account for that. Nothing illicit about it.

    What the Germans did was outright cheat. Europeans bragged that their small diesels were a superior technology, which is why they had a great market share in Europe. Their software recognized the prescribed, distinct timing of the start up of testing protocol and changed the engine’s behavior for the duration of the test–delivered crappier performance, the only way they could meet the standards–and used the deceptive test results to claim a technological advantage, thereby winning customers who paid extra for what they were told was a premium product. They weren’t forced into doing this by the EPA or anyone else; they could have admitted the cars ran dirty and taken their chances with buyers. They didn’t, because key executives were crooked.

    What Gary said. Design-to-test is a principle, and a sound one. It means to provide the mechanism to verify proper functionality. What the Germans were doing is cheating, altering the performance of the unit-under-test (UUT) to bring it’s performance for the test into line with the desired parameters.

    Whether the parameters were achievable wasn’t part of the testing regime. Governmental bodies have the quaint notion that they can legislate the laws of physics.

    • #41
  12. iWe Coolidge
    iWe
    @iWe

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    EVERYONE gamed the same tests, the same way (which is why diesel cars are now going kaput the world over). VW was just the poster child. But every engineer designed to the test. It is what engineers do.

    Big differences. ….

    What the Germans did was outright cheat. Europeans bragged that their small diesels were a superior technology, which is why they had a great market share in Europe. Their software recognized the prescribed, distinct timing of the start up of testing protocol and changed the engine’s behavior for the duration of the test–delivered crappier performance, the only way they could meet the standards–and used the deceptive test results to claim a technological advantage, thereby winning customers who paid extra for what they were told was a premium product. They weren’t forced into doing this by the EPA or anyone else; they could have admitted the cars ran dirty and taken their chances with buyers. They didn’t, because key executives were crooked. 

    Please check the history more closely!

    Mitsubishi did it!

    Denso did it!

    Mercedes did it!

    I am sure EVERY diesel automaker did it, too – which is why they have all been quietly withdrawn.

    But somehow VW gets all the blame.

     

     

     

     

    • #42
  13. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    iWe (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    EVERYONE gamed the same tests, the same way (which is why diesel cars are now going kaput the world over). VW was just the poster child. But every engineer designed to the test. It is what engineers do.

    Big differences. ….

    What the Germans did was outright cheat. Europeans bragged that their small diesels were a superior technology, which is why they had a great market share in Europe. Their software recognized the prescribed, distinct timing of the start up of testing protocol and changed the engine’s behavior for the duration of the test–delivered crappier performance, the only way they could meet the standards–and used the deceptive test results to claim a technological advantage, thereby winning customers who paid extra for what they were told was a premium product. They weren’t forced into doing this by the EPA or anyone else; they could have admitted the cars ran dirty and taken their chances with buyers. They didn’t, because key executives were crooked.

    Please check the history more closely!

    Mitsubishi did it!

    Denso did it!

    Mercedes did it!

    I am sure EVERY diesel automaker did it, too – which is why they have all been quietly withdrawn.

    But somehow VW gets all the blame.

     

     

     

     

    Somebody is going to get caught first. Having caught one, the Europeans were bound to retest the rest.

    • #43
  14. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    I certainly didn’t mean to claim the VW was alone in this, but they were a particularly hypocritical case. Exemplary penalties can be overdone, but there’s a reason why it’s useful to make an example of them. I did go out of my way to add “the Germans”, which Mercedes does qualify as. I don’t know of any case where the Americans did it, because here we know that if you get caught, the lawsuits are going to be horrendous. 

    Now, if you want a perfectly legal case of US interests taking advantage of perfectly legal loopholes to dupe themselves and the public, look no further than the 70s-90s boom in “gasohol”, which we now call ethanol. Farmers loved it. We were told that the Brazilians were ages beyond us in exploiting it. Million dollar ads from Archer Daniels Midland ran on every Sunday talk show. “If we need more fuel, let’s grow some more. It’s a no-brainer”. Except it turned out to be a brainer. Ethanol takes enough energy in processing to qualify more as a relatively inefficient energy storage medium than as a fuel. GM and other US manufacturers made a big deal of their FlexFuel vehicles. On the surface it “works”, until you do the cost/benefit math. But it was seemingly in everyone’s interest, but the consumer’s, to keep the bandwagon going. 

    • #44
  15. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    I certainly didn’t mean to claim the VW was alone in this, but they were a particularly hypocritical case. Exemplary penalties can be overdone, but there’s a reason why it’s useful to make an example of them. I did go out of my way to add “the Germans”, which Mercedes does qualify as. I don’t know of any case where the Americans did it, because here we know that if you get caught, the lawsuits are going to be horrendous.

    Now, if you want a perfectly legal case of US interests taking advantage of perfectly legal loopholes to dupe themselves and the public, look no further than the 70s-90s boom in “gasohol”, which we now call ethanol. Farmers loved it. We were told that the Brazilians were ages beyond us in exploiting it. Million dollar ads from Archer Daniels Midland ran on every Sunday talk show. “If we need more fuel, let’s grow some more. It’s a no-brainer”. Except it turned out to be a brainer. Ethanol takes enough energy in processing to qualify more as a relatively inefficient energy storage medium than as a fuel. GM and other US manufacturers made a big deal of their FlexFuel vehicles. On the surface it “works”, until you do the cost/benefit math. But it was seemingly in everyone’s interest, but the consumer’s, to keep the bandwagon going.

    The bandwagon is still going. You can’t win in the Iowa primaries without making obeisance to ethanol.

    • #45
  16. Hank Rhody, Freelance Philosopher Contributor
    Hank Rhody, Freelance Philosopher
    @HankRhody

    Boss Mongo (View Comment):

    SkipSul (View Comment):
    We end up getting dinged at some customers because our stuff “failed” some arbitrary bench test that not only does not actually resemble the real world we’re in, but was designed to test relay contacts, not MOSFETs, microprocessors, and power re-direction.

    I just hit “like” and nodded sagely, like I knew what all that meant.

    Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor. MOSFET. What’s not to understand?

    • #46
  17. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    The Reticulator (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    I certainly didn’t mean to claim the VW was alone in this, but they were a particularly hypocritical case. Exemplary penalties can be overdone, but there’s a reason why it’s useful to make an example of them. I did go out of my way to add “the Germans”, which Mercedes does qualify as. I don’t know of any case where the Americans did it, because here we know that if you get caught, the lawsuits are going to be horrendous.

    Now, if you want a perfectly legal case of US interests taking advantage of perfectly legal loopholes to dupe themselves and the public, look no further than the 70s-90s boom in “gasohol”, which we now call ethanol. Farmers loved it. We were told that the Brazilians were ages beyond us in exploiting it. Million dollar ads from Archer Daniels Midland ran on every Sunday talk show. “If we need more fuel, let’s grow some more. It’s a no-brainer”. Except it turned out to be a brainer. Ethanol takes enough energy in processing to qualify more as a relatively inefficient energy storage medium than as a fuel. GM and other US manufacturers made a big deal of their FlexFuel vehicles. On the surface it “works”, until you do the cost/benefit math. But it was seemingly in everyone’s interest, but the consumer’s, to keep the bandwagon going.

    The bandwagon is still going. You can’t win in the Iowa primaries without making obeisance to ethanol.

    Ted Cruz did. The lobby makes a lot of noise, but they are better at that than they are at making ethanol.

    • #47
  18. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    In the World War I era, Britain had a series of steam-powered submarines, the K Boats. IIRC, they had an interesting human/machine interface issue. It used a set of glass tubes with floating indicators to show basic information like water level in the ballast. It worked great when operated in the normal range, and was approved for production. Then they discovered something obvious, with alarming results: when the tubes were completely full or empty, the floating “cork” was out of view, and water being more or less transparent, you couldn’t even be sure if the tubes were operative. 

    • #48
  19. RushBabe49 Thatcher
    RushBabe49
    @RushBabe49

    And then, there are the MIL standards.  Many manufacturers build components to existing mil standards, so as long as you are building to the standard, supposedly any manufacturer’s part will work.  In my former job, I purchased a complicated little circuit card assembly, that was assembled into a control panel for a military airplane.  One day, when assembling the CCA into its next-higher assembly, it did not fit.  The assemblers jiggled and fussed, but could not get the CCA to fit.  So it was rejected, and sent into our MRB (material review board) as “defective material”.  After further study by our engineers, the CCA was found to be built exactly as specified.  So the engineers went out to the assembly area and took a look at the next-higher assembly the CCA was supposed to go into, and they found what the difficulty was.  On the panel there was a big, circular, mil-spec connector with a flange around the bottom for mounting to the panel.  The flange on the connector was found to be just a little too wide, and was interfering with the CCA.  A connector like it was found in stock, and measured to the mil standard, and was found to be in spec, but at the wide end of the standard width.  So both the CCA and the connector were built within specified limits, but when put together did not work.  The connector buyer did some more research, and found that one connector manufacturer was building their connectors with a flange just under the mil width, and another was building theirs with the flange at the high end of the mil width standard. So now, we were forced to specify a particular manufacturer’s part for the connector, and of course they had a long lead-time.  In the meantime, our electrical engineer determined that the CCA slot where the connector fit could be widened so the board would fit with the current connector on the higher assembly.  Parts in stock were sent out to be altered to the new width, and our CCA manufacturer sent us the bare boards they had so we could send them out for alteration.  Beware standards, and measure!

    • #49
  20. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    RushBabe49 (View Comment):

    And then, there are the MIL standards. Many manufacturers build components to existing mil standards, so as long as you are building to the standard, supposedly any manufacturer’s part will work. In my former job, I purchased a complicated little circuit card assembly, that was assembled into a control panel for a military airplane. One day, when assembling the CCA into its next-higher assembly, it did not fit. The assemblers jiggled and fussed, but could not get the CCA to fit. So it was rejected, and sent into our MRB (material review board) as “defective material”. After further study by our engineers, the CCA was found to be built exactly as specified. So the engineers went out to the assembly area and took a look at the next-higher assembly the CCA was supposed to go into, and they found what the difficulty was. On the panel there was a big, circular, mil-spec connector with a flange around the bottom for mounting to the panel. The flange on the connector was found to be just a little too wide, and was interfering with the CCA. A connector like it was found in stock, and measured to the mil standard, and was found to be in spec, but at the wide end of the standard width. So both the CCA and the connector were built within specified limits, but when put together did not work. The connector buyer did some more research, and found that one connector manufacturer was building their connectors with a flange just under the mil width, and another was building theirs with the flange at the high end of the mil width standard. So now, we were forced to specify a particular manufacturer’s part for the connector, and of course they had a long lead-time. In the meantime, our electrical engineer determined that the CCA slot where the connector fit could be widened so the board would fit with the current connector on the higher assembly. Parts in stock were sent out to be altered to the new width, and our CCA manufacturer sent us the bare boards they had so we could send them out for alteration. Beware standards, and measure!

    That deserves a post of its own. Plus, I bet @skipsul could tell a few similar tales. 

    • #50
  21. RushBabe49 Thatcher
    RushBabe49
    @RushBabe49

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    RushBabe49 (View Comment):

    And then, there are the MIL standards. Many manufacturers build components to existing mil standards, so as long as you are building to the standard, supposedly any manufacturer’s part will work. In my former job, I purchased a complicated little circuit card assembly, that was assembled into a control panel for a military airplane. One day, when assembling the CCA into its next-higher assembly, it did not fit. The assemblers jiggled and fussed, but could not get the CCA to fit. So it was rejected, and sent into our MRB (material review board) as “defective material”. After further study by our engineers, the CCA was found to be built exactly as specified. So the engineers went out to the assembly area and took a look at the next-higher assembly the CCA was supposed to go into, and they found what the difficulty was. On the panel there was a big, circular, mil-spec connector with a flange around the bottom for mounting to the panel. The flange on the connector was found to be just a little too wide, and was interfering with the CCA. A connector like it was found in stock, and measured to the mil standard, and was found to be in spec, but at the wide end of the standard width. So both the CCA and the connector were built within specified limits, but when put together did not work. The connector buyer did some more research, and found that one connector manufacturer was building their connectors with a flange just under the mil width, and another was building theirs with the flange at the high end of the mil width standard. So now, we were forced to specify a particular manufacturer’s part for the connector, and of course they had a long lead-time. In the meantime, our electrical engineer determined that the CCA slot where the connector fit could be widened so the board would fit with the current connector on the higher assembly. Parts in stock were sent out to be altered to the new width, and our CCA manufacturer sent us the bare boards they had so we could send them out for alteration. Beware standards, and measure!

    That deserves a post of its own. Plus, I bet @skipsul could tell a few similar tales.

    And then, the bare board had to be re-designed with a wider slot, a new part number issued, and customer approval obtained to be able to make the change in the first place.

    • #51
  22. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    There are all kinds of MIL-STDs. Bus protocols, computer languages, even chip instruction sets.

    • #52
  23. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    I’ve got a MIL spec story involving Star Wars that almost nobody knows. That ominous, hovering hum of the light saber and the way it changes in motion to a snarling buzz was based, Ben Burtt said, on his and Lucas’s memory of a particular movie projector in film school. That was then called a JAN projector, WWII era jargon, Joint Army-Navy. These were Bell and Howell projectors stripped of decoration, painted light gray, and incredibly rugged for overseas use. Later it would be called a MIL projector. Every film school in America probably had them. 

    The internal electric motor was overridden by a Selsyn motor, electrically synchronized with big, industrial strength 16mm “dubbers”, sound players. When locked in sync the whole system would go forward, slow, stop, and back up in perfect synchronization for screenings and mixes. When I was a teenager, that ominous hum reminded me of Lionel trains. That’s the sound they used initially for the light saber. Later, it was synthesized with more control over its “drama”. 

    • #53
  24. TBA Coolidge
    TBA
    @RobtGilsdorf

    Hank Rhody, Freelance Philosop… (View Comment):

    Boss Mongo (View Comment):

    SkipSul (View Comment):
    We end up getting dinged at some customers because our stuff “failed” some arbitrary bench test that not only does not actually resemble the real world we’re in, but was designed to test relay contacts, not MOSFETs, microprocessors, and power re-direction.

    I just hit “like” and nodded sagely, like I knew what all that meant.

    Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor. MOSFET. What’s not to understand?

    I use them in my flux capacitors. 

    • #54
  25. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    TBA (View Comment):

    Hank Rhody, Freelance Philosop… (View Comment):

    Boss Mongo (View Comment):

    SkipSul (View Comment):
    We end up getting dinged at some customers because our stuff “failed” some arbitrary bench test that not only does not actually resemble the real world we’re in, but was designed to test relay contacts, not MOSFETs, microprocessors, and power re-direction.

    I just hit “like” and nodded sagely, like I knew what all that meant.

    Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor. MOSFET. What’s not to understand?

    I use them in my flux capacitors.

    Bob Gale was on our board of directors. Utterly great guy, more of a curmudgeon than you’d think but a friendly and unpretentious one. And a stone cold, diamond hard conservative. I mean, MAGA to the max.

    I once met his dad, also a great guy, and I’m sure he knew what was running through my mind: “Is this the real George McFly?”

    • #55
  26. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    TBA (View Comment):

    Hank Rhody, Freelance Philosop… (View Comment):

    Boss Mongo (View Comment):

    SkipSul (View Comment):
    We end up getting dinged at some customers because our stuff “failed” some arbitrary bench test that not only does not actually resemble the real world we’re in, but was designed to test relay contacts, not MOSFETs, microprocessors, and power re-direction.

    I just hit “like” and nodded sagely, like I knew what all that meant.

    Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor. MOSFET. What’s not to understand?

    I use them in my flux capacitors.

    All you gotta do is put a little dab of silicon oxide* between the gate and the channel.


    * Silicon oxide, silicon dioxide, whatever it takes.

    • #56
  27. SkipSul Inactive
    SkipSul
    @skipsul

    RushBabe49 (View Comment):
    Beware standards, and measure!

    Your story reminds me of one a friend told me. He’s a QC engineer in charge of a big auto plant, and while this didn’t happen on his watch, or his plant, it was in his organization.

    Company puts out a V6 engine.  They start to have cylinder head failures in the valve stem seals.  The failures, when they happen, ruin the head as the loose valve stems rattle around.  Thousands of cylinder heads had to be replaced under warranty. 

    But the failures are not everywhere.  In fact, they are only occurring in certain states, and in certain seasons, when certain additives are added to the fuel to meet EPA requirements – these are fuel blends that not all states use.  And the head failures are limited to only certain sportier models of vehicles, with more eco-friendly builds (which used the same heads but had other differences in cams, air intakes, etc.) not failing at all.

    So the scenario is that people who are driving more enthusiastically are the ones having the failures, but only if they live in certain states and drive this way during certain seasons.  Well, the fuel additive made the engines combust a bit hotter, and soon QC was honing in on the old devil of tolerances.

    In every failed head returned they checked all the seals that had not yet failed, and they found a curious statistical distribution.  They were getting a statistical donut – seals either at the high end or low end of the tolerance window, but none of the ones in the middle.  And the failures were all in the lower range.

    They demanded an explanation from the supplier, who told them that a certain large Japanese OEM used this same seal, but had much tighter tolerances, so they got the donut hole, and the Americans got the donut.  After all, the seals were actually within tolerances.  The Americans had to change allowable tolerances, and reconsider the use case scenarios for the engine too.

    • #57
  28. SkipSul Inactive
    SkipSul
    @skipsul

    TBA (View Comment):

    Hank Rhody, Freelance Philosop… (View Comment):

    Boss Mongo (View Comment):

    SkipSul (View Comment):
    We end up getting dinged at some customers because our stuff “failed” some arbitrary bench test that not only does not actually resemble the real world we’re in, but was designed to test relay contacts, not MOSFETs, microprocessors, and power re-direction.

    I just hit “like” and nodded sagely, like I knew what all that meant.

    Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor. MOSFET. What’s not to understand?

    I use them in my flux capacitors.

    You mean magnets?

    • #58
  29. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    When I was nine, I loved The Absent Minded Professor. I guess I’m a sucker for small town science fiction comedies involving flying cars. 

    • #59
  30. Stad Coolidge
    Stad
    @Stad

    SkipSul (View Comment):
    Which neatly illustrates one of the other problems with testing: setting standards that are pure bunkum, then attacking companies for “failing” them.

    I’m waiting for the Department of Energy to come up with appliance efficiency standards that exceed the theoretical maximums . . .

    • #60
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