Data Exhaust: Toyota Still Has its Head up Its Tailpipe
Toyota's (TM) problem right now is how to find a needle in a haystack before it draws blood again. Of the millions of cars the company has sold in the United States, only a few hundred have experienced dangerous bouts of uncontrolled acceleration. But James Sike's Toyota, which sped out of control in California yesterday, shows just how poorly the company is handling its search.
The Sikes family actually brought their 2008 Prius to the dealership a few weeks ago because they noticed a strange hiccup in the accelerator. Instead of taking the car in for extensive testing, the dealership told them they weren't covered by the most recent recall, and sent them home. This is a frightening inability to recognize a valuable resource amidst a deluge of bad information.
This same challenge of too much information is increasingly going to be a problem for companies across all industries. As computer technology becomes woven into the fabric of our everyday lives, companies will be able to monitor and collect information on everything from our stoves to our socks. This "Internet of Things" is a double edged sword. Companies can use the data to monitor their products, spot errors and customize solutions. At the same time the flood of information, known as exhaust data, can be overwhelming, making it hard to perform analysis on the important problems.
In the Sikes case, and that of another Toyota crash yesterday in Westchester, NY, the acceleration to not seem to result from faulty floor mats or sticky pedals. This leaves another possibility, a malfunction in the electronic system, a scenario Toyota has vehemently denied. As I've written earlier, that's because an electronic problem has no quick fix. Over at Slate, Farhad Manjoo dreams of the day when all cars will be outfitted with electronic sensors that would monitor cars for this kind of problem and alert consumers to the fix. But in that world Toyota would have more data, and even less of a clue.
That's because the company has yet to learn an important lesson. Information which seems to be out of place or "virtually impossible," as Toyota labeled early customer complaints about sudden acceleration, is often the most useful. Even if the Sikes' Prius wasn't part of the official recall, it was displaying the trademark sign of a quirky accelerator.
Had the company pounced on the problem when the Sikes first brought their car in, they could have seen yesterday's accident play out in the laboratory, not the freeway. That would have saved them a lot bad publicity, and likely taught them something about exactly how and when this malfunction occurs.
Google is probably the best example of a company that knows how to turn bad data into a useful tool. Each day they deal with millions of mistyped, misspelled search queries. Far from being frustrated, Google used this wealth of errors to create the world's best spell checker, an algorithm that operates in hundreds of languages and improves itself every time another mistake is made. In Google's case the nickname data exhaust no longer applies. For Toyota, the fumes are just getting stronger.
Image from Picasa user jdpoc
