Welcome to our engineering research office in San Jose, California.

On March 8, 2010, Toyota recalled 8.5 million cars worldwide due to the problem of unintentional acceleration. While this was a failure of engineering judgment, it also sparked a broader industry conversation about product reliability and long-life-cycle design.

At the ISQED 2010 conference, a panel titled “Long Life Cycle Product Design… Is It Really Different from Traditional CE?” addressed this exact question. The contrast is striking: NASA’s Mars Rover was designed for 90 days and lasted over 5 years. Consumer electronics products are often designed for 5 years and fail within 90 days.

The consumer electronics industry has grown accustomed to an “adaptive-life-cycle” model — frequent product updates with planned obsolescence — but this approach carries hidden risks when applied to safety-critical or long-service-life applications.

Companies like TRW have long used radiation-hardened electronics and triple redundancy to achieve high reliability in aerospace and automotive systems. The question is: can consumer electronics manufacturers adopt similar principles without sacrificing cost competitiveness?

The complexity of a brake pedal override system — balancing driver intent, sensor reliability, and fail-safe fallback behaviors — illustrates how difficult it is to achieve both high performance and high reliability simultaneously.

Environmental factors such as temperature cycling, humidity, vibration, and electromagnetic interference all affect long-term reliability in ways that short product validation cycles may not reveal. A rigorous systems architecture approach, informed by field data and lessons learned, is essential to improving both quality and longevity.