My personal suspicion goes way beyond VW in this case. Look at it this way. If someone in your domain of expertise would put out a feat, that according to your experience is just so far beyond the state of the art that it seems to realy violate the rules of what you think possible, and you work in a highly competitive field, then your competitive intelligence will be all over it. Every diesel engine R&D center at any auto maker would have inspected, measured, tested and dismantled these engines to the very last detail. And they would all have discovered the simple truth they suspected all along (benchmark cheating through test cycle detection and software manipulation is nothing new in the industry. Automakers have been caught en fined for this at least since 1998). Yet, none of these competitors spoke up about it. Why?
Jacques, the previous date is based on this document from 1998 ( http://www.transportenvironment.org/sites/te/files/media/T&E... ), which states: "Car manufacturers can use modem electronic equipment to adapt the engine to any type of test cycle. They can even tell the computer of the car how to recognise when the car is being driven according to a specific test-cycle and adjust the combustion accordingly. It was this kind of software that six truck manufacturers, including two European firms (Volvo and Renault), recently used in the United States to defeat the EPA's pollution control. As a result emissions of nitrogen oxides from highway driving increased by 300 per cent. "
That takes this from 'damning' right into 'criminal' territory. Wow. That document should get a lot more visibility. I will update the article to include your link.
Not comfortable with this "don't blame the engineers" angle, which sounds like some developers are taking the fall for execs.
We are talking about engineers, yes, but, guys like the research and development chiefs of Audi and Porsche, Ulrich Hackenberg and Wolfgang Hatz, or Hanno Jelden, head of the company's powertrain electronics.
These guys are top execs. Likely substantial performance incentive packages.
Such execs, like any CTO anywhere, could run a "special project" like this off the radar, to hit projected metrics, and bonus targets.
Don't take VW's word for it, here is the German prosecutor's take:
> The number of Volkswagen employees that orchestrated the diesel-emissions scandal that's rocked the automotive industry was likely fewer than 10, according to the public prosecutor's office in Braunschweig, Germany.
Over the course of my career 3 times someone wanted me to do something illegal. All of those times I handed in my walking papers. In one case I was asked to directly do something that would cause me to be acting in an illegal way, in two of the cases it would result in a company doing something that was illegal.
Yes, CTO's can run a 'special project' but the engineers are quite aware of the situation with respect to emission targets in this specific case and must have been very much aware that they were doing something that was fraudulent. The people mentioned there certainly had incentives but did not have VW in their pocket to such an extent that they could interpret their mandate as carte-blanche to commit fraud. These are not stupid people, on the contrary. My interpretation is that they were told to do this 'in whatever way possible' and that they interpreted this possibly as 'and that includes illegal but don't tell me about it'. Plausible deniability are the key words.
Whether that's the case or not will come out in due time, it always does. See Oliver North, Watergate and countless other scandals where you can only throw so many people under the bus until someone does a tell-all.
I note that the prosecutor hedges his words carefully ('likely' and 'orchestrated') and I also note that on the VW org chart it would not take more than 10 people to go from the CEO level all the way to a single programmer to insert this code.
That would also still require someone to either cooperate with this scheme at the auditors side, especially given the nature of the Bosch memo and the document linked by user PeterStuer which you may take as common knowledge within the automotive industry. In such circumstances a source code level audit of the software that ends up in the shipping devices to make sure everything is above board would seem to be indicated at a minimum.
It might not be perfectly obvious to everybody working on implementation that something is illegal. 'Our American lawyers tell us this is legally in compliance with EPA standards. Go forth and implement'. What are you going to say? You might have misgivings but you're probably also not an expert in regulations and their enforcement.
pvg is not calling them dumb. He is saying that they lack an understanding of the laws, regulations, and regulatory environments of different countries. And faced with this lack of understanding relied on their company and boss' judgement.
I don't consider myself an idiot but there are many times I read about actions taken by companies and go "S&*t that's legal!?!?!?". Many times unscrupulous and gray areas in the law aren't technically illegal. In addition the the Milgram experiments shows that even very smart people feel enormous pressure when when confronted with an authority figure. These two effects and I can imagine how hard it would be when the V.P. comes in and has a talk with you about how he had talked with legal counsel and they had looked over the regulatory rules and decided this was allowed, and other automotive companies were doing it.
The engineer could easily rationalize this away thinking "surely VW wouldn't do something illegal. They could get in so much trouble. I imagine I just misunderstood the laws."
The 'engineer' here is a C level exec, not some programmer stuck in a basement below VW's offices somewhere.
The best explanation so far of how this may have come to pass is that the compliance department and the engineers that actually wrote the code report to the same person but not the CEO. That would allow the CEO to claim he and the board didn't know anything about this. That still leaves you to wonder how they could have been duped so easily, after all 'tremendous problem solved by magic' normally does not pass the smell test.
> It might not be perfectly obvious to everybody working on implementation that something is illegal.
Now you're calling them dumb. That's probably even worse than malicious. This is one of the reasons why I am bothered with the VW explanation they actively picture themselves as incompetent because it looks better on your resume than 'criminal' and they are not at all worried about throwing VW as a brand under the bus.
I'm not calling them dumb, just trying to point out that a scenario in which there is a very small number of people with direct and explicit knowledge of the cheating (or at a minimum, with no plausible deniability) is at least possible. An ECU is a big, complicated thing, much of it closely-guarded trade secret. So it's at least conceivable that it's developed in a compartmentalized way and that the bits and pieces that when combined enable cheating can be developed legitimately and independently.
There can be a legitimate reason to develop test cycle detection. And obviously, any ECU has the capability to put the engine in different regimes. Combining these two specifically for the purpose of cheating on emissions tests is not some major engineering project, if the pieces exist. In fact, you can make a decent argument that if you wanted to be maximally sneaky and evil, that's exactly how you'd do it. You'd keep the number of people without plausible deniability very, very low.
It has been noted elsewhere in this thread that Martin Winterkorn was 'hands-on to the point of being a control-freak' and that there was no way in which he would not have been aware of this. Note the amount of technical knowledge present in the VW boards and at the C level is such that they could have cut through all the secrecy and other red tape if they had wanted to. It would have also been impossible to hide this from the auditors if they had simply been of the 'trust but verify' mentality that one would expect of seasoned auditors and I find it hard to believe that a company like VW (which apparently has been caught cheating before when it comes to emissions testing) would be so incompetent at this that it could have gone on for so long. All this besides the fact that 'miracles' simply don't exist and if there is one thing that sets an auditor off it is 'too good to be true'.
An ECU is not a 'big complicated thing', there is a ton of software in a car but the ECU itself happens to be one of the more easily understood parts where anything that does not have an obvious and direct function stands out like a sore tooth. There is also a very distinct point in time where the problems magically disappeared and of course it would be a simple thing to review the changes committed around and prior to that time. (Let's at least assume they have some kind of source code control system.)
If anything the auditors are more trusted than the programmers and they would definitely have had insight into the ECU code.
It is not conceivable that there is some kind of 'the cube' like conspiracy where the parts each individually look clean because one fairly large chunk of code was contributed by the Bosch company and contained a fairly explicit piece of code to detect the test cycle. If it's labeled 'process bananas' and an auditor is not able to figure out what it does it is their duty to actually dig until they understand that piece, that is what they are paid for.
So I believe that you are principally right that besides one exec and a bunch of people down from there in the org chart they kept the number of people as limited as they could but there is no way the compliance department was this incompetent unless a rookie was specifically tasked with auditing that particular engine to make sure the cheating stayed hidden. A seasoned auditor would spot this in a heartbeat and no rookie should have been able to sign off on these changes on their own.
And 'plausible deniability' is a very very thin fig leaf away from being culpable, all it takes is a single email or confession to pierce that veil and with the number of people VW is throwing under the bus (and at ever higher levels) it is a matter of time before someone decides to come clean about the whole thing.
Well... I imagine we are more in violent agreement than anything else - I might have some quibbles with the notion that ECUs are that simple and, having done a bit of work in that industry in that part of the world, I have some trouble following the notion that 'compliance departments' are so rigorous and independent.
To me, VW's story is at least somewhat plausible because it is not difficult to intentionally and specifically set it up to be that way. I don't have any trouble believing that they deliberately went to great lengths to ensure that and that outside of a small group of crooks (culturally and otherwise encouraged and enabled from above), it was borderline enough that nobody stood up and said 'this is illegal and effed up, I'm going home'.
If the engineers read the documentation of the code they were using it was explicitly spelled out what they were doing was a "bad idea". You're also arguing that automotive engineers don't have a basic idea on what emissions regulations exist.
As an aside, this same argument could also be used as justification for NSA programs that violate civil rights.
That's a good point, and it is likely that if they did not 'play ball' that they might have been thrown out. But in such a situation you could consider becoming a whistle blower. One thing is for sure, the moment you play along with a scheme like that when the chickens come home to roost you won't be able to deny you were involved and thus likely culpable. Some things are not worth any amount of compensation. Going to jail for some company or ending up holding the bag because everybody else pretends they have no idea why you did what you did would really suck.
Just imagine. Some German engineer was pressured into doing this. I guess it only counts when your decisions materially affect your own situation, in all other situations principles are free. Engineers should stick to their oath, and should use their fraternity to block stupid decisions such as these, even if that leads to individual hardship.
After all, what's next? Bridges that collapse? Buildings that you can't trust? Aicraft manufacturers? You have to draw the line somewhere and it is generally recognized that the engineering profession needs to be trusted by the rest of society if society is to continue to function. You can make mistakes as an engineer but you simply can not be caught even accessory to fraud, that's risking the reputation of the profession as a whole.
Sorry, but whistleblowers, at least in the US, get screwed. Playing along or quitting is the smarter play; there's at least a chance you won't be badly hurt.
Examples abound. Do you know who is the only person sent to prison for waterboarding prisoners (and to be clear, torture)? The guy who told the press about it [1]. Hell, just yesterday there was a JPMorgan whistleblower on here who got fucked out of his job; they made sure he had 3 complaints on his record then lied under oath about who wrote the complaints so he can't find a new employer.
The upshot is, at least in the US, only fools report on their employers because there's a very real chance you lose your ability to earn a living. The anti-retaliation laws may be very pretty but appear to have zero teeth.
I wouldn't be surprised if the situation in Germany is similar. I'm not saying engineers should do this sort of stuff, but imagine for a second the costs to telling various governments what they were busy not seeing. So if the price of being honest is you have to quit one of the largest employers in Germany, who is quite possibly the sole employer of what you do where you live, it may well require you and your family to move. At minimum! Not to mention a backchannel negative reference if your boss feels like hurting you.
Yes, whistleblower is not an easy path but there are many ways in which this could have been done without direct danger to the people involved (too many people knew about it to figure out who sent that anonymous package to the top 10 German press outlets). There are also some pretty powerful unions that could have helped with this.
And on the other side is the local government concerned about the largest local employer and the national government concerned about a systemically-important employer and industry.
I think (but hope otherwise!) that you're totally wrong about how the power structures in Germany would have reacted to this very unwelcome news.
We also don't know how many, if any, engineers were asked to be a part of this, refused, and quit or were fired as a result. And possibly pressured in various ways to not say anything about what they were asked to do.
This happened in Germany. Believe me that no executive wants to fight with Bernd Osterloh and there isn't a single engineer who doesn't now how to fight back with the labour union as a backup.
When Kirk says "more power" and Scotty says "you cannot change the laws of physics", maybe Kirk should listen. But instead Scotty is forced to do something unsafe.
This is a metaphor for any engineering department given unrealistic performance targets. Engineers find solutions, so make sure they are targeted at the right problems.
Are you aware, that the german prosecutor you quote works across the hall of the biggest share owner of VW? Thats right, the ministry of the sub-state that owns most of the shares and which is not completely independent is what? Somebody here should be prosecuting his own boss.
It's not "don't blame the engineers", it's "don't shift all of the blame to the engineers". That doesn't mean some engineers weren't responsible, just that they don't deserve all the blame.
Just looked at it briefly, but it seems to be about the European test cycle not covering all driving conditions -- to my knowledge, this is something that has been the case for a LONG time, and all manufacturers as well as regulators are well aware of this. Vehicles are designed to conform to the specific standards, and the test procedure is just as much a part of the standard as the actual measurement at the pipe.
US VW scandal is about going way further than just designing the vehicle to satisfy a specific test -- it actively detects that it is being tested and adjusts operation. It's one thing to, say, not try to optimize emissions while towing another vehicle if the standard does not measure emissions during towing, and quite another to cheat on a test that does.
That passage just refers to a well-known truck cheating incident (iirc a few US companies were caught doing this at one time too) -- it certainly does not imply that such cheating is an accepted practice at time of writing. It just makes a point that a better-designed test would be trickier to cheat in that way, in addition to being more representative of driving conditions.
No, but it is a published document that likely figures as required reading in the offices of those that are tasked with ensuring that such tricks don't pass out the manufacturing door given the possible penalties. In other words: actively look for defeat devices in software (that's real work but it is doable) and get the engineers involved to state very explicitly that no such devices have been implemented.
I don't know enough German to follow, but Google Translate helps me out a bit. Here's my question: We know VW had a cheat device to specifically detect the test and switch to a different map.
These other tests that show the cars pollute more in the "real world", is there any evidence that they actually detect the test and cheat like VW did? Or are they merely optimized for the speeds used in the test? These are two entirely different things. There's a huge difference between gaming the test and outright cheating. In one case, if you drive very very gently in the real world, you will get the test results. In the other case (VW) you could never hit those pollution numbers no matter how gently you drive (or how perfectly you replicate the testing drive cycle).
At the top of the NOx scale we have a VW TDI engine (albeit in an Audi Quatro application).
Near the bottom of the NOx scale we have... a VW TDI engine.
In other words, VW already had the capability to eliminate the emissions through design, but chose to cheat the tests instead. That is rather damning evidence, and serves as a rebuttal for those who think that VW is somehow being unfairly targeted.
Clearly, many other companies also need to lower their emissions, and regulators need to adopt meaningful tests. But to cheat the tests that do exist, and for no clear need (except possibly profit margins) is inexcusable.
What was at stake was to be able to sell into the US at all. For VW that may have been 'worth the risk', I think retrospectively they're happy to agree that it probably wasn't.
Indeed. And it is troubling to see only VW being targetted here, and with extremely high potential fines shown in the media.
If it turns out that other competitors did the same, VW – and even other German companies, due to the hit the brand "Made in Germany" got from this – might be able to sue the US via ISDS for lost sales in hundreds of billions.
The media focus has been solely on VW, despite others doing the same.
This is enough that VW can show to be unfairly targeted, as it’s standard market practice.
If VW can show that others did the same, but did not get the same media resonance, then VW can sue for the lost sales based on an estimation of the difference in reputation loss.
Hell, even other companies in Germany have reported lost sales due to the "German engineering = pollution" that US media have pushed recently.
> The media focus has been solely on VW, despite others doing the same.
That's because there is evidence about VW.
> This is enough that VW can show to be unfairly targeted, as it’s standard market practice.
No, it really is not.
> If VW can show that others did the same, but did not get the same media resonance, then VW can sue for the lost sales based on an estimation of the difference in reputation loss.
It's an interesting theory about how the law could work but unfortunately somewhat detached from what I know about how the law actually works. VW does not get to claim any 'lost sales' directly attributable to their own conduct, regardless of who reported on it and how frequently even if all their competitors did it too. If VW has evidence that other manufacturers cheat as well they're probably more than welcome to present it. (And if they had such evidence they probably would.)
> Hell, even other companies in Germany have reported lost sales due to the "German engineering = pollution" that US media have pushed recently.
Yes, and VW is to blame for that. Not the US media.
The report shown that results from the tests did not match the actual usage. It raised questions that those companies most likely are tampering with tests, but nothing incriminating. It was speculated that possibly that the tests were not reliable.
In case of VW, in addition to that report an actual device to fool the tests was discovered.
Or if you assume that you can just sue both separately.
(And, in reality, I’d say the US government is more influenced by the media than the other way around – as can be seen in the situation with Comcast, TWC, etc)
You keep making these grand claims about the constitution and the law and this whole VW affair that have absolutely no basis in fact. Please stop that it is just throwing up a huge smokescreen and it measurably devalues the discussion.
I'm sure that it fits your worldview but fwiw no matter how hard and how often you write this stuff it does not make it true. The constitution has absolutely nothing to do with this, VW was not 'singled out' and you are actively harming your reputation on HN. As a German student I understand that you feel that VW has been treated 'unfair' but they brought this on themselves, BMW was tested as well and passed the test even though they too emitted more NOx than they should have depending on the circumstances, they did not use a 'test defeat device'.
From what we have in terms of evidence to date no other company has engaged in such blatant fraud in this respect as VW has. If you have evidence (as in hard evidence, not just hunches) that another manufacturer also employs a cheating device then you could make headlines the world over by sharing that proof and I for one would be very supportive of you.
But all these statements that defend VW and even suggest that VW could recover their losses because they've been treated unfairly are not based in fact and make it seem like you are of good intentions but other than that do not appear to have much knowledge of how these things work. So a word to the wise: you have but one reputation, you build it up slowly over the years and you can lose and/or damage that reputation quickly.
Please don't let your sense of indignation get the better of you and hurt your interests in the longer term.
Have a citation or reference for that? Because I don't think it's true. Equal protection, adhered to or not, doesn't relieve you of criminal culpability.
Media Is independent in words but all the mainstream media outlets are controlled by handful of corporates (during 1990s, most of these outlets bought by few corporate houses). These houses have interests related to military-industrial complex. Victory of policies layed out since over 5 decades [0] for dividing and conquering middle east for greater profits can't be let to fail just because Russia decided to save Syria and Germany/France started pondering supporting Russia [1] upon confronting the enormous wave of refugees.
So we now have links between Syria, refugees, the MIC, Russia, Germany, France and somehow in the middle of that poor VW the victim of being used as the stick to push Germany back into compliance?
What do you think they would have used if VW had not conveniently committed fraud?
Simple searching on google showed me on the first page (third result).
The amount of truth we see is relative to the intension we're having. The rest just seems invisible to us.
Few more thoughts from Chomsky related to the theme of our discussion regarding truth:
“Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.”
(Exactly fit for responses I got re my geo-political remark)
“Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it.”
(Yay, so true. But we're more concerned about how perfect and moral our regulation structure is, that it punishes the right people with right evidence... but evidence can be shown when it's the most convenient time to show them)
“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.”
(Who likes truth anyway?)
“For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.”
("Hey, Germany ministers are towing the line and aren't repeating our propaganda, how can we show them their place?" "Well, let's call our regulatory depts., we must be having some violation reports waiting to be show light of the day at this opportune moment. Find the one with biggest potential impact, and, and we'll have the compliance of Germany without shotting a single bullet." "Yeah, this will also set example for other European vassals, who lately tries to have independent voice. They must be shown their right place before it's too late.")
That's only half an assertion. Can you say with certainty that the US government is not controlled by the media corporations either? Judging by the political "activism" regularly displayed by Fox and CNN, I think it's fair to say that the media exerts a lot of control over the executive and legislative branches.
For two entities to be independent, there needs to be little control in both directions.
>Can you say with certainty that the US government is not controlled by the media corporations either?
With certainty? No.
US Government is a collection of individuals theoretically bound by a (very-large) shared text, or program, if you will. Do media corporations have some measure of influence on some of those individuals? Undoubtedly.
I am fairly certain that the individuals who make up the US Government are not all on media corporation payrolls.
>Judging by the political "activism" regularly displayed by Fox and CNN, I think it's fair to say that the media exerts a lot of control over the executive and legislative branches.
This makes sense. US Government is structured such that it arises from the people it is governing. If that structure is to be used, it requires public communication (ie. media).
Undoubtedly there are ties. But you'd have to extrapolate to all media in all countries being in on this for this purpose. The VW scandal has been published widely outside the US. Even if the US government had simply fined VW and left it at that the thing would have been newsworthy.
This is silly. It's like a burglar suing the police for catching him while other burglars got lucky and did not get caught.
There's an actual evidence they that VW was cheating so they deserved it. What would be great is that if they could spill the beans on other manufacturers so others would be punished as well.
You might want to look a bit more into ISDS.. it's an international court which is agreed to in various trade treaties and allows corporations to sue foreign governments where that governments policies negatively affect the corporation.
One of the big concerns with TTP/TTIP is that they will expand the use and applicability of ISDS processes and this could impact things like environmental legislation.
Part of the concern about the use of ISDS is that the hearings are generally held in secret.
In this case I guess if it could be proven that the US government disadvantaged VW by applying fines to them whilst not prosecuting other companies who have done similar things, then if ISDS applies to this trade, it may be possible for VW to sue...
Only in those situations where the US government can be proven to have access to the same level of proof that fraud is being committed compared to the information they had on VW. Chances of success of such an operation: 0. Effect on the PR situation: -10000. Likelihood of engaging in such an action by VW: 0.
Anybody except for VW would be in a position to make a move regarding other manufacturers, according to a document linked elsewhere from a German auto magazine there is plenty of reason to suspect that other manufacturers are engaging in similar practices but nobody to date has proof.
Eh, the original document from WVU which the EPA used to go against VW also names evidence for several (I think 6) other manufacturers, by now, 9 are known to have done the same.
So, yes, it’s trivial to show that the EPA had the same amount of knowledge against others as they had against VW, because the original document already had that.
And if you want less easy to digest material go read the actual study pdfs (they're linked in the wikipedia article on 'dieselgate' and are very interesting reading but it will take some time there are 100+ pages there).
So you are way off base with the claims in this comment.
Note that the WVU report does not state that evidence of a cheating device has been found. It was merely the catalyst (pun intended) in the whole affair causing the EPA to put a much bigger effort into the VW engine than they had up to that point and this is where the cheating device was uncovered.
The I in ISDS is for "not in the US civil court system", so the big unknown is how it will work there. I'd still bet a lot on nothing in that direction happen in the current VW case, but some uncertainty remains.
There's a geo-political angle to this targeting. You'd find that the VW emition scandle and fine announcement came just during the time when Germany leaders were starting to get a bit cozy with Russia over sanctions ETC (I remember it was latter half of September, you can check these facts by searching Google.)
(couldn't reply to your other comments as it seems the comment depth is reached.)
Let me make one thing clear: I've not defended VW for the cheating they've done, not even once. I've just drawn attention toward the bigger picture within these events have unfolded and because commenters have raised questions as to why VW has been targeted so swiftly despite it's apparent that other manufacturers are having similar issues (more or less).
These are common ways of how back-door negotiations and arm-twistings occur. Neither Obama nore Merkle would publically admit to you in your face of these things. But we the public remain foolish to dismiss such an evident corelation as conspiracy. Or do you think we live in a utopian world where every official action is guided by altruistic motive? Well if yes, you may very well see what's happening in Syria, the whole of world's major power are flighting their airforces, just to defeat bunch of terrorist? who are anyway financed by oil smuggling to countries part of the coalition .... give me a break.
Well if you doubt that politics cannot plan and execute such policies for decades then you're fooling yourself. Evidence are right there just need to open our eyes.
> I've just drawn attention toward the bigger picture within these events have unfolded and because commenters have raised questions as to why VW has been targeted so swiftly despite it's apparent that other manufacturers are having similar issues (more or less).
But that isn't the case. There is 0 evidence that other manufacturers also included a defeat-the-test device, there is evidence that other manufacturers diesels exceed their permitted level of NOx in various circumstances but they do not employ a device that detects the tests and then re-programs the engine to comply with the test. It just so happens that under test conditions those engines more or less perform as advertised, there is no 'mode switch' based on the detection of a test in progress to reprogram the engine parameters. That's a totally different kettle of fish, the one is a narrow set of parameters where the engine will pass the test, the other means the engine will never perform as advertised except when under test.
HSBC was participating kneck to kneck with drug smugglers and making billions a week from that illegal and immoral trade. eventually they were fined only a few billion which they make from that same business within 2/3 weeks. Noone got jailed.
But what happened to the individuals who happened to run digital currency based platform for the same?
My point is that both were involved in similar illegal practices, but justice delivered to each was not equal. Surely justice was decided based on several interests, of which the law was mere one of the parameters (often an insignificant one when the convict is a powerful entity.)
actions of this magnitude are generally guided by multiple and often hidden interests/agenda. Only if we able to perceive the bigger picture by analyzing from different angles.
Sorry, but that's just a smokescreen (pun not intended, hard to avoid).
Yes, VW got hit hard, but there is only one party that could have taken action to avoid this: VW itself. If they cheated that's entirely their choice. If other manufacturers have in fact cheated (and the evidence seems to be mounting that they did but maybe not quite as blatantly) then their turn will surely come.
The reason a year passed is because the report does not indeed contain the sentence 'VW committed fraud', it simply notes some exceptional real-world performance issues for a specific vehicle under test and left it at that. The EPA then had to do a whole pile of work to figure out what exactly was going on and this led to the discovery of the defeat-the-test device.
"Would you believe it if you received a letter from
Mercedes Benz informing you that you had won a lucky draw
and your gift was a “FREE INSPECTION!!” but in actual fact
they intended to replace your turbocharger without
informing you? These and many more shocking practices were
carried out in absolute arrogance and with a view to keep
the third rate quality of Mercedes Benz Cars a secret."[0]
>My personal suspicion goes way beyond VW in this case.
You're right. Automotive companies are pretty notorious for these kinds of things.
That site does not exactly instill confidence (and I don't mean in Mercedes). Now, 'don't shoot the messenger' is good practice and it is easy to slide into an ad-hominem attack on that website when not intending to but the language ('the shocking truth about 'x''), claims that the evil media are ingoring them and such make me feel that there is a bit of an agenda at work here.
I also wonder why you post this anonymously, it's just another link.
My wife has a 2002 Mercedes vehicle. It has 82000 miles on it now but fewer than 65000 miles when it needed $5,000 worth of work to replace a stretched timing belt. Something that should never be a problem but especially on a low mileage vehicle that was driven gently. Her driver side seat heater also started to short, a known issue, never recalled. I consider Mercedes to be overpriced garbage.
Some people in this thread rightfully raising a valid question that this cheating would be present in models of other manufacturers so why VW was only targeted and that with such a big fine announced in media which toppled VW's stocks by 20% (effectively losing $100B of market value) and also causing irreparable harm to German auto industry.
SO, you need to see the bigger picture here.
There's a geo-political angle to it.
On sept12 [0] reported:
>>>
Germany is surprisingly quitting the anti-Putin Alliance created by the United States: Germany now officially welcomes Moscow’s readiness to engage with Syria and launches an initiative to end the war with the Russians and the French. Thus, the stream of refugees is to be stopped. Germany put thousands of soldiers on standby.
Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen told der Spiegel, they Welcome Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’s involvement in the fight against the extremist Islamic State. It is in the common interest, to combat the IS, she said.
A spokesman of the Foreign Ministry also said Germany would welcome a greater engagement of Russia in the fight against the IS. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier even announced, with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and the French colleague Laurent Fabius, a push to start to end the civil war in Syria. Lavrov and Fabius are expected in Berlin on Saturday.
<<<
Then within a week, this VW scandal suddenly comes into public thrashing Germany major auto industry. On 22Sept [1] reported:
>>> What you need to know about the Volkswagen scandal
Now you see the results: Germany France etc have now joined US coalition in the name of fighting ISIS. but there's more to it, which you can read in my comment [2].
I acknowledge that these geopolitical events are occurring at the same time as the VW scandal. But I find your (unsupported) assertion that the two are linked to be entirely and completely unbelievable. It seems to me like a baseless conspiracy theory.
>>> the whole thing was initiated by a European non-profit that contracted the WVU back in 2013/2014.
The EPA ignored the results for a full year.
The VW CEO already resigned in April, several months before the EPA went crazy, due to it.
You can join the dots now.
These are back-door negotiations and arms-twistings, Neither Obama nore Merkle would publically admit to you in your face of these things. But we the public remain foolish to dismiss such an evident corelation as conspiracy. Or do you think we live in a utopian world where every official action is guided by altruistic motive? Well if yes, you may ver well see what's happening in Syria, the whole of world's major power are flighting their airforces, just to defeat bunch of terrorist? who are anyway financed by oil smuggling to countries part of the coalition .... give me a break.
Other manufacturers (e.g. BMW -- pretty sure the same is true for Audi) do not have the same issue; in fact, the original report is very clear on that matter: the issue is specific to VW.
The reason is that other manufacturers rely on injecting a pollution-neutralizing compound at exhaust time (there is a separate tank for that stuff), whereas VW claimed that they have been able to design engines that do not require this (obviously costly and undesirable) step, and are clean all by themselves.
Because they did not want to. Because they were doing the same thing themselves, albeit to varying degrees. The same can be said about the 1990s baseball scandal. Suddenly, out of nowhere, there were dozens of players bulking up and hitting 60-70 home runs regularly. No one (except maybe Pete Rose) spoke up about this.
"The first rule of Fight Club is : You don't talk about Fight Club." -Tyler
You get into the gang by sharing an existential threat to the group. Be it killing someone to get into a gang, be it telling your life's secrets while lying naked in a coffin ( http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol... ), attaining seat at the MAD ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction ) table by stocking nuclear weapons, or signing on to a hot new scrappy startup for just enough to live paycheck to paycheck and keep frozen burritos on the breakfast table.
When the sharks circle, they tend to go after the weaker pray spices rather than those able to draw serious repercussions. The consumer as chum. Line employees are next. Then maybe a scape goat or two.
Lots of managers use the phrases 'by whatever means necessary', 'it must be done', 'just ship it', "we'll fix it later", and M.V.P. . The naive will say that "management just doesn't understand!". To someone who is paying attention this is building a cut out of responsibility.
In the Kabuki theater of corporate politics this often suffices for blame shedding. Remember the goal is to accept garner credit for good things and blame shed the bad things, helping things get done a product to be made or whatever is ancillary to the individuals goals in the modern company due to the average length of employment being so very low.
"All this has happened before, and will happen again." -cylon
If you assigned engineers to disassemble your competitor's product to figure out how it worked, you would put yourself at grave risk of patent suits if you let them use that knowledge in any way in developing your own products. There's a reason clean room design is used. With something mechanical like an engine, that means reverse engineering is probably not helpful enough to be worth doing.
One of my relatives worked for decades in the cost estimation department of a major auto manufacturer. They disassembled every competing vehicle to obtain competitive intelligence on profit margins and assembly techniques. Everyone does this.
The ECJ (European Court of Justice) even referred to the "Standard practice of disassembling competitors cars and using the gained knowledge in your own cars" while making a landmark decision that declared the right for decompiling non-negotiable.
Saying the compliance department exists to make sure the company adheres to the law is like saying the HR department is there for employees. That is what they say, but in reality it's the other way around: Compliance acts to protect the company against the law. This has clearly failed at WV.
Also the post assumes a big organisation operates as a whole. My experience is that management high up are either competent and evil, or ambitious and ignorant. That mix lends itself to all kinds of random organisational behaviour. I know nothing about WV, but I assume many people knew this but did not think too much of it (everyone cheats), thought it would help their career (hit that target), or wanted their company become the largest car manufacturer in the world.
> Saying the compliance department exists to make sure the company adheres to the law is like saying the HR department is there for employees.
No, it is explicitly meant to convey the message that the compliance department exists to protect the company from liability. I will update the post to make this more clear.
Very few people really think of themselves as evil.
But in my worldview most people (including engineers) cheat a little bit and then rationalize it so they don't have to feel bad about themselves. Big corporations and complex economical systems lend themselves very well for rationalizing your part in something evil away, especially for upper management.
> But in my worldview most people (including engineers) cheat a little bit and then rationalize it so they don't have to feel bad about themselves.
So, if we assume that is 100% accurate then maybe a company the size of VW should have a department that checks up on these sneaky cheating engineers to make sure they don't expose the company to liability.
The whole idea is that the company avoids - given the size of the penalties involved - to be caught cheating, especially not at this scale.
Then there is the matter that the ethical rules for engineers specifically state that an engineer will never assist or cause a company they work for to break the law. (For some this sort of an oath may hold more strength than for others, but it must have been very clear to the people involved they were doing this to break the law and they would have definitely wanted at a minimum indemnification from higher ups about the possible consequences of this if they didn't actually blew the whistle internally.)
This is the sort of thing that Germans tend to be big on and it is one of the reasons 'made in Germany' was seen as a source of trust and quality.
VW management is throwing all these values under the bus as if 60 years of brand creation are utterly worthless.
> This is the sort of thing that Germans tend to be big on and it is one of the reasons 'made in Germany' was seen as a source of trust and quality.
And this is a huge part of why I will never buy a Volkswagon, and possibly never buy a German car. Not even used, because that contributes to the predicted resale value of new.
Volkswagon has made great effort to position themselves as environmentally conscious, with lighthearted ukulele music, kids running through clean air, flowers and lots of white backgrounds. They said a specific thing, while they were doing an exactly opposite thing. A thing that is deadly in the small and in the large.
I bought a used car just before the scandal hit. I'm old enough to remember when American cars were seen as piles of junk. I was trying to be open while walking the lot, and I did sit in some American cars. But due to my prejudice, I ended up thinking "Japanese or German, Japanese or German, ..." while walking the lot. And the next time I buy a car, that chant will be much shorter.
If we are discrediting nation by a single incident, are you sure about the Japanese? The 2009–11 Toyota vehicle recalls didn't really help to keep the trust, did they?
In anyway, this kind of thinking is really harmful to the global economy and welfare. Please evaluate the companies on their own.
Well, it's a personal decision to be sure. The difference between the Toyota issues and the Volkswagon issues is that Toyota did not (as far as we know) engineer a part of their car to do something that they asserted it did not do, and didn't cheat on testing. They likely foot-dragged the investigation.
Volkswagon did exactly that, with malice aforethought. It was on purpose, by design.
Volkswagon owns other brands. Not all, but others.
I have read that the German auto industry as a whole has has been successfully heavy handed in influencing emission standards in Europe.
EDIT: And this refusal to buy is the only leverage I have in influencing corporate conduct. At the least, it's a personal decision not to award actual or suspected behavior. The German auto industry as a whole has been tainted, and this may be their chance to clean up their act and really be what they say they are. Rather than merely any set of corporations that happens to make cars instead of breakfast cereal.
Why exactly is the German auto-industry as a whole been tainted? I can understand avoiding the entire Volkswagen group (including non-German Seat, Skoda, Bugatti, Bentley, Ducati), but I don't see why this situation should give you a similar distrust for Mercedes or BMW.
Similarly, Chrysler was German-owned (through Daimler) between 1998 and 2007. Are Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge models from those years now tainted as well? What about the years after 2007?
Again, personal choice, there are an infinite number of choices on how to spend my time and money. I also don't watch Tom Cruise movies, because Scientology.
As for the German car industry as a whole, as I said, I've read that the industry has been successful at influencing emission standard and limiting testing. Volkswagon is part of that group, and everyone else in the group is part of that group.
I'm pretty sure Germany is not overly concerned about me. But they may be concerned about Volkswagon's 24% drop in sales in America in November, and as I speculated above, that may get enough of the industry's attention that they may feel compelled to execute in a way that shows without ambiguity that they are far and away the most honest companies in the world. I'd buy cars from that group.
Meantime, there's Japan, America, Britain, Sweden, France, Italy, and probably some that I haven't mentioned. You have to choose, so choose according to what you want to reward or change.
Fair choice. As for me, I don't go out to watch movies at all, because Hollywood.
But then I would guess your aversion against the car industry to be more general, and that the recent revelations about emissions cheating have done little to sway your opinion. You're basically using the actions of a single actor to reinforce your biases against an entire group.
I do hope you are aware enough not to use that same line of reasoning against racial, ethnic or religious groups though.
I don't know how VW gets audited but in US, when a company is audited by their accounting firm, one of the sections is a "Process Audit" - checking to make sure that regular business practices are followed.
In a perfect world, audits would catch these things, however, because there is a lot of pressure on accounting firms, usually, this step isn't given a lot of consideration.
In the event a company is caught, the accounting firm takes a hit on their reputation and have to go back, re-audit, and change their designation of company policy.
Source: my wife works at one of the big 4 accounting firms and recently explained how an unrelated company had similar issues in failed business practices etc. etc.
>sometimes these audits are people asking the managers "do you do this?".
I work for one of the large pro services firms that does internal audit, compliance/risk projects, strategy consulting, etc.
I'd argue that unless there are explicit sets of controls that HAVE to be tested as part of the project scope (which is usually defined by regulatory requirements), most audits are just people asking questions and ticking off boxes on a checklist. Most of the bigger firms even staff these projects with fresh graduates that often know absolutely nothing about what they're auditing.
Conducting an audit doesn't necessarily mean that you check everything. Often, auditing is looking for evidence as to whether a particular procedure was followed or not.
For example, say you're auditing a large company for compliance against a information security management system under ISO 27001, and you're checking to see whether the organisation you're auditing actually does keep its operating systems patched and its anti-virus software up to date.
You'll certainly ask questions about whether, how and how often the updates are done but you're probably not going to check every single server, desktop and laptop because that would be too expensive. What you'll probably do is check a sample, and if all the devices in the sample are all up to date, you'll tick that box and move on.
If, on the other hand, you find that half the desktops you check haven't been updated, then that's evidence that the updates policy isn't being followed, and would trigger further investigation, and probably a failure on that specific audit point.
The equivalvent check in the VW case would be to run a test of the engine's emissions. It's not unreasonable for the methodology used to be based on that used by the regulatory body, in which case, it would have passed the audit.
Nothing you're saying is wrong or theoretically unsound. But in practice, 'looking for evidence'-type activities are frequently glossed over, even by very reputable audit firms.
I think you hit the nail on the head with something that I've been wondering about for a while. I do audits (TDD) for a living and I actually take my job serious. I invest a lot of time into gathering all the information available on the company and try hard to figure out what the main issues facing a company are before I even go there. That means that when I go and look at a company I really look at it. This has two possible outcomes: the first is that the company is actually flattered that someone would take them - and their investors - serious enough to spend the time to make sure everything works and works well. They'll be proud to show someone that spent the time and effort to get to know their company and product how good they are at their jobs and how well their product is put together. If stuff surfaces that is not 'ok' they either know about it and have a plan of mitigation but simply not enough time or other resources and if they didn't know about it they're grateful for the sincere feedback and will fix things as soon as possible.
The second possible outcome is that a lot of stuff surfaces that the people running the company may not even have been aware of and would rather not be aware of.
This all in contrast to the same job being done by larger companies which tend to output super nice and glossy reports that are essentially 50% gray paper, there isn't anything you could do with a report like that except for pretending that you went through the motions of doing your job.
My reports by contrast are usually 20% the size of the competition without any graphs or other distracting elements but are full of actionable advice and clear guide as to whether or not I believe the investment is a good one or not and why. This doesn't make me a whole lot of friends but the results are there and I stand by every word I write.
For the life of me I can't imagine that VW with the budget they have and the amounts of money at stake would not give their compliance department the tools and the authority required to do their jobs. I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop, someone leaking a mail archive from VW internal correspondence (assuming evidence has not been destroyed, which would make them look even worse) or something to that effect.
This goes way beyond a single arm of VW, it just isn't possible and if it is then it is (counter-intuitively) actually worse for VW because it may mean they are not compliant with a whole bunch of other laws as well.
In that case essentially any VW vehicle would need to be re-certified for all aspects of a road worthiness certification because they have make it plain that their compliance departments are toothless paper tigers. And that might be a much worse path for VW than the one where they simply and openly admit to malice with respect to this one single aspect of their products.
>p.s. It has been shown that the psychological profile of top-criminals and CEO's are remarkably alike.
For very liberal definitions of "has been shown". It's been shown that CEOs score more highly on a diagnostic of psychopathology than the general public but those diagnostics were designed for use on people with presumed diagnoses of psychopathic disorders, scoring highly on them without a prior probability of having such a disorder is dubious way of finding people who are psychopaths.
OP is looking at people who direct and sustain a capitalist enterprise's internal processes. These people (managers, HR) are hired by the capitalists to optimize internally for profit. The only warm & fuzzy side-effects that these positions provide are the ones that don't get in the way of capital increasing.
It's not even about these individuals being evil or not. I'm sure most of them are torn to pieces (before they become numb) when they make decisions against the wellbeing of the workforce. The point is that the managers would not be in these positions if they could not fulfill these roles — they would be replaced. These positions self-select for "evil."
The people who optimize externally for profit focus not on squeezing the workforce, they focus on squeezing the public. These are the lawyers, the salespeople, the accountants, the marketers, the compliance experts. There's no point debating the evilness of the individuals, but their roles are necessarily evil. These roles tend to grow more and more evil as the capitalist enterprise grows. The enemy here, then, is capital, not these poor workers who fill necessary capitalist roles.
It's a good thing that states and state-owned enterprises always optimize for the well-being of their citizens and customers - after all, that's what they're supposed to do! It never happens that, being largely unaccountable, people working for the state and its enterprises act to maximize their own well-being and minimize their own effort at the expense of the citizens and customers.
This is why the enemy is capital, not human nature. All you need is employ people in properly-named organizations with properly stated lofty goals (the constitution of Stalin-era USSR is a good source of inspiration), and none of their bad traits will ever rear their ugly heads!
So towards the end of your post, I began to get the impression the tongue was somewhere in the cheek. But up to that point I was thinking there was some good insight there. The dichotomy of business vs the state. The roles of each: A business to make money; the state to look after her citizens, and the ongoing struggle for dominance between each - firmly skewered by the citation of the USSR, where "it was tried before". Poor businesses fail, whereas a poorly run state will limp along, but at the end of the day it is the businesses that fail into the state, and if a business is badly run it is the state (and her constituents) that have to pick up the pieces.
You got that "cheek" impression towards the end, and it was the USSR bit that did it? Meaning that the first paragraph, states always caring for their citizens, sounds sensible? Now that scares the shit out of me.
The State is not the only alternative to capital. Another is individuals.
Corporations (and the State) are mostly useless now that we have software. We're just in transition while we finish building AIs that usefully model the means of production and the body of available contracts.
An individual with a powerful AI partner that can do those two things is no more powerful inside a corporation than out. The AI makes the collaborative structures of public space just as reliable as the collaborative structures within a corporation, so the entire value of the corporation to the worker disappears.
AI is a factor of production, therefore it is a capital good.
The rest is delusional science fiction. "Ethereum contracts will magically grant every individual land, labor and capital goods for self-sufficient production." No.
The enemy here, then, is capital, not these poor workers who fill necessary capitalist roles.
I'm not sure how factors of production (including durable capital goods) can possibly be an "enemy" of anything.
That said, your idea that capitalists act as crude profit maximizers is an oversimplification. In fact, most firms don't do any calculation of prices based on marginal revenues and marginal costs. Instead, they usually administer a markup price based more on internal accounting practices and then do not strongly deviate from the markup, choosing to downsize production when profits are low instead of upsetting the stable price signal they've chosen even if it would be more profitable to do otherwise.
Marketing is often an enemy of markets and more a factor of destruction than of production: functioning markets require informed consumers making rational choices about what to buy; marketing is most often concerned with creating misinformed consumers and convincing them to make irrational choices about what to buy.
>I'm not sure how factors of production (including durable capital goods) can possibly be an "enemy" of anything.
I'm a Marxist. So in the aforementioned sense, capital is only wealth that grows over time through the process of exchange. I am referring to the process, not the assets.
As I mentioned before, I am not interested in analyzing the behaviors of individual employers. I am interested in analyzing the behaviors of the classes. You may call this oversimplification, but I call it cutting through the bullshit.
Do you accept the labor theory of value and the tendency for the rate of profit to fall? If so, then any economic argument you make will be on false premises.
Firms and markup prices are not at all individual employer behaviors. They're industry-wide behaviors that practically define mixed economies and thus, by your own definition, capital (though I think yours is overly vague).
I haven't yet read the last volume of Capital, so I am unprepared to take on the line of discussion in regards to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.
Nonetheless, I fail to see how the simple arguments I initially made are affected by this diversion, and I fail to see how your analysis of price-setting mechanisms refutes the profit motive.
I deny a) the normative claim of there being some form of malevolence in it, b) the idea that it's the only thing firms maximize for when in fact we clearly observe that firms will sacrifice some profit for both internal equilibrium and sending out consistent signals to consumers and c) that a profit motive will not exist in a hypothetical socialist or communist society.
Whether it's the manorialist collecting rent on land or the bartering farmer balancing their supply of wheat traded to remain at a surplus while keeping a stock of other consumer goods they've bought, there's always a profit motive. The manorialist profits either from use of a land title or the use of land as a factor of production. The farmer profits by having their supply of goods be at a state where the marginal product of each good provides increasing returns for satisfying their ends. In other words, the farmer profits from having a heterogeneous stock over a homogeneous stock because they can use the former to obtain further goods to diversify their portfolio, or trade so as to improve the serviceableness and efficiency of their factors for growing wheat.
I think your point a) about there not being malevolence involved is quite important, and not repeated enough. If you have a world organised around private property and exclusion from what you need, people have no choice but to look at each other as means to their own ends.
Regarding c), I believe a communist would say that in a state-less and money-less society, it is not possible to appropriate wealth in the abstract (there are no means to do it). So it's not the motivation for profit that is abolished, it's the possibility of profit itself.
a) To this end I agree that my simplification is too emotional.
b) I typically regard such actions as means to sustain profit, but I won't deny the exceptions to this rule.
c) I scrutinize the definition of profit here, but I won't disagree with what I believe to be your sentiment.
You go on to describe the feudal and individual capitalist (I think?) modes of production, which helps to define profit, but this is otherwise divergent from (c). In the communist mode of production, "profit" serves the community (ideally global), not the individual. I'm wondering what your profit analysis of the communist mode of production is.
I presume the communist mode of production is one in a stateless, money-less society where factors of production are cooperatively owned by workers and where the production process is based on some definition of "use" rather than "profit". Profit would be the surplus employed by workers to create more use value. Goods would be traded "in kind" as is without a lubricant of exchange like money.
The canonical argument against this is "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth". There's generally been two ways socialist thinkers have tried to get around this: a) calculation in kind, which essentially reverts us back to unscalable barter where there is no reliable unit of account, and b) the Lange model of a Central Planning Board, which immediately brings all the issues of public choice, bureaucracy and "state capitalism" as you derided it earlier.
It's not cynicism: it's the reality of a Compliance group in a regulated organization.
I used to work in the FDA-regulated field of medical devices. Because of my job position, I had frequent interaction with our Regulatory Affairs people. They are extremely conservative. Their job, as he stated, is to protect the company's best interests by making sure the FDA doesn't shut us down.
That may seem cynical, but enlightened self-interest works in everyone's favor here. If there is a perceived problem with a device, the first concern is going to be "is there a Patient Hazard?" because nothing will cause the FDA to show up unannounced faster than that.
The engineers' job is to keep Regulatory Affairs happy; Regulatory Affairs's job is to keep the FDA happy; the FDA's job is to keep patients safe. If everyone does their assigned task, the end result is exactly as desired.
Saying that people look out for their own interests and are not always competent is one of the most salient and truthful properties of the human world.
A famous sports mantra is: "if you're not cheating, you're not trying". (Mark Grace, 1B, Chicago Cubs)
Corp and individuals cheat all the time. However, in most cases, the cheating are little white lies. In Corp world, their big lies that stay high up - with intention of never seeing the light of day.
Isn't that quote itself just a false rationalisation - 'I cheat but so does everyone else so it's not immoral'.
Personally I never got anything out of winning at sports per se. What gives me a buzz is performing in a way I can be proud of. Sport requires adherence to regulations to work, I follow Kant's (2nd?) imperative in that respect.
(FWIW I'm fond of playing quite a few sports).
People cheat, corporations don't as they are just virtual groupings of people.
> Isn't that quote itself just a false rationalization - 'I cheat but so does everyone else so it's not immoral'.
It could be - Here's a moral question: If you are an athlete who is attempting to get into the professional league...would you use performance enhancing drugs to "break in" if you had a small chance of getting caught? (I don't think this requires an answer - people internalize this differently and it could spur a discourse)
> Personally I never got anything out of winning at sports per se. What gives me a buzz is performing in a way I can be proud of.
I can think of some particular situations in sports (Hand of God - Maradona) when the stakes are high and you'll do anything to win. Technically, he didn't cheat, but he sure as hell didn't come forward either.
> People cheat, corporations don't as they are just virtual groupings of people.
You're right. What would you call a grouping of people with C-Level titles who "cheat" a cabal? Seems too ominous. I used corporation to describe the high level officials who profit most by cheating.
Let's not exclude the customers and the public at large. Does any significant number of people really care about this? In my personal list of the 100 biggest problems in the world today, it's not really a contender.
It may not be on the 100 biggest problem list, but it must be in people's minds, and there are lots of other brands to buy so it's an easy thing to do.
The roughest problems are those that emerge in interfaces between individual tribes within an organization. Information loss can be very easy and very pernicious in those cases.
> Volkswagen has suspended nine managers suspected of being involved in the fraud
> Volkswagen has replaced six executives since the beginning of the year and has switched leadership of seven of its dozen brands.
> Volkswagen also disclosed in November that employees had tipped management off to another unrelated issue, saying the company had understated greenhouse-gas emissions and fuel consumption on up to 800,000 gasoline-powered cars. After an internal investigation, Volkswagen lowered that figure to fewer than 50,000 cars.
Categorizing it as "blame the engineer" is sadly accurate in my opinion. That has been VW's stance from the very beginning. VW's US CEO said, while denying a corporate-level scandal, "software engineers who put this in for whatever reason," to a congressional panel back in October: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/volkswagen-pulls-...
Certainly doesn't get any more "blame the engineer" than that, unless they're supposedly somehow changing their tune now... which is not my impression.
With regards to middle management being laid off, it strikes me more as the C-level players insulating themselves from the taint.
At least two of the people fired were C-level engineering managers (chief engineers), and in fact they are the people often cited with hatching this plan in the first place.
I'll keep saying it -- there seems to be some belief that anyone sitting in the boardroom is not an engineer. That may be how you see it, but it's not the common perception.
It seems to me that there is plenty of blame to go around. Engineers, managers, executives should all shoulder some blame.
The engineers that are actual Professional Engineers (ie the P.Eng. folks) should lose their professional standing. If a medical doctor lied and deceived patients, they should face severe repercussions. Professional engineers share similar ethical responsibilities.
Didn't downvote you, but the CEO of VW America has nothing really to do with the company that actually designs and builds VW cars. He basically just sells their cars in US. So as such he probably has no idea about what is actually going on. The executives at the 'real' VW have been much more nuanced in their statements
I would imagine that a company's national/continental headquarters is also responsible for making sure each car is compliant with their respective localities as part of the process of readying it for sale (especially in the US, where individual states can have their own emissions standards that exceed that of the federal government).
Even if VW of America didn't design, build, or request the cheat devices, they're still partially culpable by either unknowingly offering the cars for sale (and not doing their own independent tests in advance of the third-party testing that detected the cheat devices) or knowingly offering cars for sale that didn't meet local emissions standards.
Probably not. But I guess it's difficult for some people to say "Not my department, so fucked if I know". So they make something up that sounds plausible and hope that it either happens to be correct or that no one ends up calling them up it.
The article talk about (and links to) a very specific article reporting what can fairly be seen as "blame the engineer"
> Volkswagen investigators have determined that engineers cheated U.S. emissions tests in part because they could not figure out how to meet the standards, the company said today.
> Volkswagen Group Chairman Hans-Dieter Potsch told reporters that engineers erred by developing manipulative software to fool regulators because they "quite simply could not find a way to meet the tougher" limits for nitrogen oxide pollutants in the U.S.
Deeper in the body, the article all but confirms that it wasn't a few engineers gone rogue with statements like
> Peter De Lorenzo, a former auto industry marketing executive and editor of Autoextremist.com, said Volkswagen cultivated a "culture of fear" that nudged engineers to "do whatever they had to do to say that they met the standards."
I do remember reading an article which made it sound like it was all the fault of a couple of engineers. I wouldn't be surprised if VW had a hand in the publication of these articles.
VW probably ended up tweaking their damage-control strategy after realizing that people just wouldn't buy it.
That seems to be a pretty common approach for PR damage-control; first you try to lay the blame on the most helpless people possible, if the public doesn't buy it, you have to shift the blame to progressively more senior people until the public is satisfied. That's pretty much what happened with the Watergate scandal.
But even those article were mostly about leaders of huge engineering departments. Here on HN (and in the article linked today), there seems to be much uproar about "blame the engineer" because "engineer" is read as the underdog "little guy in the trenches". But that uproar is completely beside the point because in the communication of VW, "engineer" has a very different meaning. There it may apply to anyone in a department that is not strictly manufacturing, marketing or organizational like finance our HR, no matter how high up in the hierarchy and no matter how little actual engineering they still do - provided they actually have the academic grade. In german, you do not get to call yourself "Ingenieur" because you are doing engineering. Academic grades take very strong precedence over job descriptions (and terminologal collisions between those two areas are strictly avoided).
The only source for "blame the engineer" in the way it is read here on hacker news are some completely clueless excuses made by the CEO of Volkswagen USA, but that guy is hardly more than a glorified car dealer.
Well, you would not expect their ad agency to get the blame for fraudulent engineering, would you?
Do you imply a dichotomy between engineers and "board people"? The car industry is one of the last areas where top positions are routinely given to engineers who raised through the ranks, so to most of the board, an engineer isn't a "one of them" but a "one of us". From what i remember about the careers of german car CEOs, being head of engineering (still "an engineer") actually seems to be pretty close to "next in line for CEO".
Exactly. So there is zero (and I really believe that is 0 to several decimal places) credibility to the story that they had no idea this was going on. Unless with 'a couple of engineers' they meant their board of directors... It is just about unthinkable that a C level exec would be able to tell the board and the CEO that they came up with something 'magical' that drops the emissions of that engine by a factor of 40 and it can only be done in software without someone asking why. So I fully expect them to be in on it.
Yes, but in this case compliance is quite difficult. Why would the compliance department go out of its way to develop a new mobile testing infrastructure when that isn't the industry standard? So it seems very plausible in this case that compliance might not have found the issue. It required a novel method of testing to discover the cheat.
I have to be honest, when I first heard about this, I suspected a genetic algorithm as the culprit. It's exactly the kind of result you'd expect when giving an impossible optimization without sufficient boundary constraint. AIs can and have been known to cheat, and because the fitness driver would have been compliance (V&V) the GA could plausibly have settled on methods that were undetectable (i.e. Not part of the fitness function).
Often the output of GA code is not understood formally by engineers, or reverse-engineered into a traditional algorithm, so it's plausible that it could have remained hidden in plain sight.
BUT, if that had truly been the case, the engineers at VW would have quickly suspected and publicized it. So the fact that VW blinked showed that in fact they lied and didn't have an honest technical explanation.
However, I think the GA scenario is good to keep aware of as we increasingly rely on machines to optimize solutions based on testing.
The "sin" they are accused of it explicitly detecting that certain test equipment is connected. That's a binary, if-then-else sort of thing. "The boss is looking; look clean."
A GA (or any machine learning ) within a controller is less about being able to cheat than it is ...rebasing something that would otherwise be a constant (from the frame of reference of the algorithm) in a control-feedback arrangement.
If the GA was part of a test stand and exhibited emergent... dishonest behavior :) then ... they did it wrong.
There are valid reasons to write code to determine if your vehicle is being tested. Modern cars contain all sorts of computerized safety features that would go active in the typical test scenario thereby preventing the static tests that the EPA and others do.
So the car detects wheels straight, only drive wheels turning, and so on, so it disengages the features that would active traction control, reducing engine power, and more. The key here is that VW engineers went further and used that as they indicator to run the full emissions process and only then. There is no viable reason to have any toggle on emissions processes except perhaps with regards to cold weather starts.
We think it's "run the full emissions process" but we're guessing. It's a very good guess, but it's essentially unsupported. It could have been an interaction with one of the other things that got turned of. This seems unlikely,. but it's not 0% probability.
Doing GAs right can be very hard. Like, I've seen cases where GAs hooked up to a certain type of physical simulation learn to exploit the ODE in play and find optima that are based on ODE artifacts, not reality. Eg wind turbine design and CFD modeling.
I remember one specifically learned in Quake to always strafe run because the dx+dy gave sqrt(2) max speed instead of just max speed.
What most people don't understand about GAs is that asking the question correctly and unambiguously can be harder than solving the problem. GAs can have a steep price, it's not magic.
> Yes, but in this case compliance is quite difficult.
Agreed. It's highly unlikely that the Compliance department could have detected what the engineers had done, short of having someone audit the code, line by line, or inventing a test to check the emissions while the car was moving. Based on my experience in the financial sector, Compliance departments don't work like that - if someone really wants to cheat or circumvent the rules, there's a good chance they'll be able to conceal it from Compliance, at least for a while.
People are responsible for their own actions, even when their job title is "engineer".
We're not talking 1.1 vs 1.2, we're talking a 40 fold increase. If the compliance department is not able to detect such a massive fraud then they should all be out of jobs. And if they don't audit the code then they should be out of jobs anyway. There is a big difference between process compliance (the kind that the financial world is burdened with) and product compliance. Independent laboratories would have been able - and in fact did - to find these discrepancies with comparable ease, further down there is a link to a magazine article where 9 cars were tested by an outside lab just to write an article.
The magnitude of the increase is irrelevant. The key question is whether it was reasonable to expect them to detect it, which is, in turn, informed by the question of how they could have done so. The obvious method to audit compliance against an emissions standard is to use the same test that the regulator does. Obviously, in this case, that wouldn't have detected the defeat device.
To detect it, they would have needed to either conduct a non-standard test, or audit the code. Both those solutions seem, to me, to be above and beyond what would be considered reasonable due diligence under the circumstances. Perhaps I'm wrong, though - perhaps other car-makers perform such tests as a matter of course? I'm happy to be presented with evidence that that's the case. Even if it is the case, however, that still doesn't absolve the engineers from blame.
The bottom line is this: You are suggesting that the engineers who created the defeat device should not be blamed for doing so because the Compliance department should have detected it. I'm saying that not only was it not necessarily reasonable to expect the Compliance department to detect it but, even that were the case, it doesn't absolve the engineers of responsibility for what they did.
I suspect the engineers were ordered to do this, not that they came up with this by themselves. (In fact, I find that suggestion totally unbelievable.)
I agree the engineers are culpable but if they were acting under orders from their managers then the buck has to stop somewhere, someone is going to be the last one 'up the chain' that decided it was within their pay-grade to make this decision. The internal organization of VW is such that that decision could have only come straight from the top given the liability in case of exposure.
If the only way to ensure compliance is to audit the code then that's what you should do. It basically says the testing regime is so easy to detect that it can be used to defeat the test itself, Bosch correspondence indicates that this software is expressly not meant to be included in the final product and VW knowingly ignored that information, something a compliance department should have been absolutely on top of.
The engineer who actually wrote the code was most likely ordered to do so, yes. ("write something to set a flag when the wheels are running but the hood is open, the GPS is silent and the accelerometers don't detect anything stronger than someone tapping at a window")
Most likely, that engineer was ordered by drumroll another engineer. If you trace up the the chain of command at VW, it's not unlikely that it is engineers all the way up until you reach the shareholders, and even there you will find a significant fraction of shares owned by engineers.
VW has drawn some fairly arbitrary lines on their org chart where the 'problem' is located, namely anything down from and including the head of engineering.
At some point, somebody came up with the idea and a decision was made, either individually or through consensus, to use the defeat device. Why do you find it so unbelievable that it was an engineer (or a group that included engineers)? Would it make a difference if it was an engineer who had been promoted to be a team leader? Promoted to "chief engineer"? "Engineering manager"? At what point would the person's title be far enough removed from "engineer" that you would find it believable? Does having the word "manager" in one's job description automatically make one less trustworthy than someone who has the word "engineer" in theirs? Shall we just adopt a policy of "Engineer good. Manager evil."?
You say that the compliance department should have audited the code. Do other car companies' compliance departments audit their code? I doubt they do. I suspect it would be cost-prohibitive.
If a single engineer developed the engine, including the software, it would be quite likely that he or she came up and implemented the cheating solution alone.
But that's not how things work.
Imagine being in the team that develops an engine. Some prototypes are built, measurements are done, way too high emissions are noted. Who gets the results from the measurements? The project lead, of course. Then the lead calls in folks from different parts of the team (or even different teams involved), and they brainstorm what to do. This becomes a big topic, because it puts the whole project at a risk.
If at some point the problematic values simply disappear, any diligent project lead has to investigate where the improvement comes from, if only to make sure there's no regression.
How would the scenario look like so that the project lead never even noticed? The environmental testing reports directly to a software developer (but why would they?), who implements the cheating part. Without first asking the rest of the team if there are legit ways to accomplish lower emissions. All documents regarding the first test runs vanish (but why would they? it's not the tester's job to make sure the emission standards are being met), and the problematic emissions never become a topic.
Somehow that sounds not realistic at all.
So, I'm pretty sure the project lead knew about it. the project lead might have been an engineer by training, but his role was that of a manager.
> At some point, somebody came up with the idea and a decision was made, either individually or through consensus, to use the defeat device.
What should have happened:
Hey boss, there is no way that this engine is going to pass emissions. What should we do now?
Manager: sorry, but if there is no way, there is no way, I'll communicate that up the chain.
What possibly happened:
Hey boss, there is no way that this engine is going to pass emissions. What should we do now?
Manager: let me confer with upstairs.
Some time passes.
Manager: there is no such thing as no way let's find a way, cheat if you have to (but don't tell me you did).
Or something even more damning.
Now, the big question is what happened during 'some time passes'.
Whether the buy-in went all the way to the top or whether that person made this up all by themselves. VW wants us to believe the second. Knowing a bit about German corporate culture I sincerely doubt that. If there is one thing that Germans excel in it must be strict adherence to process and authority.
> Why do you find it so unbelievable that it was an engineer (or a group that included engineers)? Would it make a difference if it was an engineer who had been promoted to be a team leader? Promoted to "chief engineer"? "Engineering manager"? At what point would the person's title be far enough removed from "engineer" that you would find it believable? Does having the word "manager" in one's job description automatically make one less trustworthy than someone who has the word "engineer" in theirs? Shall we just adopt a policy of "Engineer good. Manager evil."?
Engineer is a title that comes with a whole bunch of responsibility. Manager and Engineer are not mutually exclusive titles. But clearly there is a line drawn on the VW org chart that supposedly insulates those higher up from any fall-out from this other than some 'formal responsibility' while using the old and tired 'but I didn't know about it' line. I don't buy that for a second, you just can't have a thing like this going on in a car company that has the ambition to be the worlds largest supplier of vehicles and not be in control of the product that is being produced. That spells 'corporate cultural rot' to me at a level that would be far more damning than outright malice. Of course outright malice might end with direct culpability for management which is why we get this other spiel.
> You say that the compliance department should have audited the code.
Yes.
> Do other car companies' compliance departments audit their code?
I would bloody well hope so. If they don't they ought to get other jobs. Reviews are there for a purpose, it is not that this stuff is so different from one version to another that you could not spot the commit that is tagged 'added test cycle detection and defeat code' (or even if it is mis-labeled on purpose to spot that someone inserted a bunch of code with a description that does not match).
I worked for a bank for a bit and there was absolutely no way that I'd be able to get away with a trick like this without being caught.
> I doubt they do.
That could be right.
> I suspect it would be cost-prohibitive.
This would hold true for Morgan (who buys their engines from BMW and they're not diesels) but it certainly would not be true for VW, the cost of a thorough audit would be an extremely small fraction of the cost of the fines they are now incurring and on the budget of VW it would be next to nothing.
I've worked with quite a few German companies, none as large as VW but this is absolute SF (entertaining though it is). The Germans have a word for their way of working 'gruendlich' ('thorough') and they (usually!) mean it. How this happened will be the stuff of endless case studies when - and if - the truth will finally be on the table. At a guess that will not happen before all the current board members and the former CEO are well in their graves.
BTW the whole scenario outlined in your link is bunk. The code came integral from Bosch and was definitely not developed gradually. It basically is designed purposefully to do an end-run around tests and Bosch explicitly warned against inclusion in the production version of the software saying 'this would be a very bad idea'.
> The obvious method to audit compliance against an emissions standard is to use the same test that the regulator does.
Sure, but those folks also have common sense, and experience. If engines with comparable power have 40x more emissions, you'd do well to understand where such a huge change comes from.
I've done some measurements as well as simulations in physics, and one of the first things you learn is to be suspicious of outliers, both of results that look like total garbage but shouldn't, and of "too good to be true" results.
The only way not to raise a red flag would be if all of the compliance engineers were new at their job. And that itself would be suspicious too.
In my experience compliance departments make sure you're compliant within reason. They aren't going to go out of their way to determine if you're cheating unless they've been mandated to due to prior internal or industry incidents. Even in companies where they have to audit controls because of regulatory obligations they're only going to audit what they're required to. If you find a way to outsmart the controls or checks and balances they're not going to notice until you slip up or you're otherwise caught.
>...and all outside verification labs being in cahoots.
Does this have to be true? They would only need to apply the cheating behavior for the lab testing the way they did for regulatory testing.
And VW suspended nine middle managers. I think it's less about blaming the engineers and more about deflecting blame away from senior management.
> They aren't going to go out of their way to determine if you're cheating unless they've been mandated to due to prior internal or industry incidents.
This is about limiting the liability the company is exposed to. The number of products sold * the maximum fine per product when found not to be compliant is such that it could be an existential threat even for an entity as large as VW so normally speaking a manufacturer will do everything they can to make sure they are (well) within the law. It's not uncommon at all for a large company to have the compliance department nix a product or send engineers back to the drawing board to fix any issues detected.
In a serious automobile manufacturer to have a 40 fold increase in the gas output specifically regulated and subject of serious penalties in the case of a mishap the compliance department should have raised several red flags on this or at a minimum require an internal test more stringent than the external one to create a margin of error.
> they're only going to audit what they're required to.
Yes, they are required to audit that the company products are legal to sell as advertised.
Fair points. I do wonder how gradual the 40 fold increase was however. If it was slowly increased over a long enough time period perhaps it could have fooled even the most suspicious person who isn't a trained and experienced engineer.
It's pretty much a binary affair. Test detected -> engine reprogrammed instantly to comply with the test. The reason for that is that they don't know ahead of time which vehicle the EPA will pull off the line to do their testing on so they had to ship it in all of them.
I suspect it is a matter of time now before someone leaks an email to the press indicating that the previous CEO did know about this (they'll be thrown under the bus), and the board will then try to wash their hands of it.
It's a classic fall-back action, first sacrifice some lieutenants, General admits ignorance but admits to no wrongdoing and is pensioned off.
If the bad weather blows over that's where the story ends. But if it doesn't then sooner or later the eyes will focus on the General again, what he knew and when he knew it and then the inquiry will begin in earnest.
There hasn't been anything surprising in this whole affair to date.
Well, the first CEO, who resigned in April, admitted already to personally pushing the whole issue.
It was his personal project (he’s been involved with some engineering for quite some time) to use that specific type of engine, which provides mileage of up to 270mpg in real world usage, but produces NOx in amounts that Satan would be jealous of.
Perhaps they are all scared. I'm sure many, if not most, CEOs would gladly hand over a golden parachute to avoid criminal (or even civil liabilities that can interfere with getting another executive position).
That's overly pessimistic. In many heavily regulated industries, businesses run internal audits that are not officially mandated because they realize that changing things at your own pace for your own reasons is a lot easier and looks better to the public than being forced to change something in 3 months because you failed a required audit.
I'd say they run internal audits in nearly all heavily (or even moderately) regulated industries. They may not be a mandatory obligation but it certainly seems to be frowned upon if they go missing. But they do seem to perform mostly the same audits as the official ones–only more frequently. With a primary emphasis on being prepared and in compliance for the next audit.
That said, I think you're right. Happy employees always think of new ways to improve things and I'm sure there are plenty of innovative compliance people that are out to do their jobs to the best of their ability.
Bottom line: real world use should be tested, but this is expensive and neither side wants to pay for it.
Regarding compliance department complicity, the biggest factor in my mind is two-fold: You test for compliance with regulations and you have limited time. You ensure that the internal test parameters match the external regulatory test. You don't have funding to do real world tests. You don't have funding to do static code analysis. You believe the documents you are given, as they have been signed by responsible adults. You use the tools you are given, because they have been developed by professionals.
Regarding what competitors knew and when: I haven't seen a discussion of exactly how much better these engines were than competitors.
Regarding the scandal in general: The public has been demanding better and better automotive safety and quality represented by government regulations, voting with dollars, and lawsuits. It takes time for these lessons to be internalized, and different corporations and internal groups do this at different speeds. If you are the largest automaker in the world it is kind of natural to think that everything must be ok! (See also: GM, Toyota)
I can imagine this as not totally different from software dev and QA. Many times the development team puts in some feature that doesn't have any visible output for the testers to test - rather it is some internal change or improvement.
The QA department, then responsible for testing this new "feature" will most likely go off of a script that was sent to them by the developers to verify the old and new behavior, going on some metric that perhaps they don't really understand.
In some cases, the QA may actually have to rely on a tool actually built by the developers to test the feature. So in some cases the QA, not being software developers and not responsible for actually reviewing the code, will have to somewhat go on faith that the scripts and tools provided by the developers are accurate.
I'm not saying that means the engineers were responsible at VW, but it does explain how something could slip through the checks-and-balances that have been set up.
> The QA department, then responsible for testing this new "feature" will most likely go off of a script that was sent to them by the developers to verify the old and new behavior, going on some metric that perhaps they don't really understand.
That's wrong right there. If you do this properly the people writing the QA test script work from the same spec the programmers used to implement the feature but they are actually different people and the test gets written first.
Obviously in smaller shops that won't work but anything the size of newsworthy should be set up like that.
Thank you for this comment (one of the more valuable ones in the whole thread).
> Bottom line: real world use should be tested, but this is expensive and neither side wants to pay for it.
Agreed, but it would be good for a company the size of VW to at least test one car with a new engine platform in real life conditions especially after major upgrades to the emission platform. If a magazine can afford to test 9 vehicles then you'd think that VW could afford to test at least one.
> Regarding compliance department complicity, the biggest factor in my mind is two-fold: You test for compliance with regulations and you have limited time. You ensure that the internal test parameters match the external regulatory test.
Ok for the during-the-production-run case but also for the very first time a new platform comes online? Wouldn't you want to know what the engine does in real life rather than just on the test stand? In other words, does the actual real life impact matter so little to companies that have 'green' written all over their brochures that they'd rather not know if they were cheating?
Would the compliance department at your employer take this as a wake-up call and at least run a single sample through an actual road test to see how their theories hold up in practice?
> You don't have funding to do real world tests.
How expensive would real world tests be for those engines that are 'the most suspect' based on the measured values during the simulated cycle?
> You believe the documents you are given, as they have been signed by responsible adults.
The word 'believe' is not in my vocabulary when I do an audit. I tend to take a very dim view of people that ask me to believe stuff and with the kind of money riding on your average deal I'd be a very sore loser indeed if I ever had to use the defense 'I believed what they said' when reality is found out to be contrary to what I was told. Trust but verify.
> Regarding what competitors knew and when: I haven't seen a discussion of exactly how much better these engines were than competitors.
Depending on the make and model, there are even some that are worse but they pass the tests as well and apparently - what we know to date - do not contain software that outright detects the test cycle and then runs the engine under a different regime.
> Regarding the scandal in general: The public has been demanding better and better automotive safety and quality represented by government regulations, voting with dollars, and lawsuits. It takes time for these lessons to be internalized, and different corporations and internal groups do this at different speeds. If you are the largest automaker in the world it is kind of natural to think that everything must be ok! (See also: GM, Toyota)
Yes, that's the kind of thinking that got other manufacturers in trouble already. Surely such a thing would not happen at our company... I've seen this mentality in practice and it always puzzles me. There is no such thing as 'too big' when it comes to stuff like this, in fact, when you're big the multiplier is larger so the incentives to color outside the lines are larger.
I should have been more clear about the bottom line: It is up to the consumer to demand that car companies provide real world test results; EPA and NHTSA have to provide the format for these tests so that the tests can be compared.
This is almost certainly coming; provided that Reagan-style deregulation does not come back into vogue.
>Yes, that's the kind of thinking that got other manufacturers in trouble already. Surely such a thing would not happen at our company... I've seen this mentality in practice and it always puzzles me.
"Reality Distortion Field" - every organization has one, the bigger you get, the stronger it is.
The funny thing is that the engineers that wrote the code don't actually work at VW. If I am not mistaken, their engine control sytems for their Diesel engines come from Bosch.
Also, if you talk to an engineer you will quickly hear that there is a connection between fuel efficiency, power, and emmissions. If you drive the engine with parameters tuned for low emissions, you'll get less efficiency etc.
But the engineers don't seem to care that the engine stats claimed by VW are not actually possible...
The hardware and low level stuff comes from Bosch, but the higher level code would be VW. Source: Friend is EU car analyst and has spoken to engineers.
The Bosch software was designed mainly for testing purpose not to be used on real cars. It's perfectly legitimate to build this sort of software and give it to your customers. When someone use a debug tool to crack a software you don't tell that people who have made the debugger are "not altogether innocent".
From your first link:
Citing unidentified sources, Bild said Bosch had warned Volkswagen
as early as 2007 that its software should only be used in company tests
and not for normal driving.
> Wasn't it Bosch that recommended to VW that this is a bad idea. So Bosch is not all together innocent.
Emissions are a function of the software configuration of the engine, and engines can be tuned based on the needs of the vehicle they're put in. Bosch having built in that flexibility is what'd be expected from them, I don't see why they'd be at fault for a manufacturer misusing it and misrepresenting the profile they've set up.
> If you drive the engine with parameters tuned for low emissions, you'll get less efficiency etc.
Can you explain that further? Given a specific power output, lower emission levels would to me indicate that the engine is doing more with a smaller amount of fuel, indicating better efficiency.
Your argument mainly applies to CO2. Generally, Diesel engine reach better efficiency at higher temperatures, but higher temperatures also lead to more NOX being created. So in the case of NOX, it really is a trade-off.
Unless you use ammonia (from heated urea solution) in a catalyzed reaction, to react with the NOx to produce N2 and H2O. In that case, the trade-off is that you need to add a separate urea tank to your vehicle, and distribution infrastructure at all diesel fueling stations.
NOx is produced by dissociating N2 (primary component of air) which then recombines with O2 (secondary component of air). The engine does do more with a smaller amount of fuel, but a side-effect is to crack N2 and have it recombined with the leftover O2. Furthermore, dissociating N2 occurs at high temperature and pressure (which is why that happens significantly more in diesel engines than in gasoline engines), and the higher a diesel engine's efficiency... the hotter it runs, increasing the dissociation rate of N2 and thus the production of NOx.
I think there's a perception problem here. What the press and VW management has said is that this project was knowingly commissioned by VW's chief engineer. Yes, this guy's title is "chief engineer," and he has the bona fides to prove it, but you should focus on the "Chief" part -- he's a C-level executive whose day to day activities and demeanor would be indistinguishable from a CFO or CEO.
There's this reflexive reaction on Hacker News that has come up again and again of, "don't blame the engineers, they are just the nerds in the basement hacking the code, some evil management type put them up to it."
What we know so far is that the evil management type who put them up to it -- was an engineer. The chief engineer in fact. So, in fact, it's highly likely that "the engineers" designed and implemented this entire scheme without telling anyone else. In my mind, that's an entirely plausible explanation.
I'm not an expert on VW corporate structure, but it's entirely possible that the Compliance/Quality departments report into the Chief Engineer. They do at other companies where I have worked. If that's the case, then they could have been in on the job and it wouldn't have changed the fact that "Engineering" was responsible for this implementation.
I don't think a blame group size of 10 (the number thrown around by VW execs) denotes a systematic problem, which you would expect with a C-level executive being called out. That's a ridiculously small chain for a company of VW's size.
Here's the question that you need to ask yourself: The cheating that VW did allowed them get an emissions score that is an order of magnitude lower than the truth. Now, if everyone else was being honest, either A) their performance would be an order of magnitude lower than VW's, or B) everyone else has discovered magical technology that VW lacks. Neither of those things is happening. The conclusion is obvious: everybody is cheating, and they always have been. I mean, a hack of this magnitude wouldn't be performed without management approval from top to bottom, and let's face it, the only way management would have the balls to do something like this is if it were industry standard practice.
That's not the whole menu of choices. The other option on the menu is: VW found that cheating software was cheaper than actually doing something about emissions. The other manufacturers are not that much better than VW at engineering they simply threw more money at the problem. VW tried to do an end-run around both solving the problem and passing the tests.
Another reason why VW has the spotlight on them is because they are the largest player. If VW were given a free pass and a lesser manufacturer would be taken to the cleaners it would be a different situation altogether. I think there will be more manufacturers that will have to own up to 'gaming the tests', maybe even some that actually have a similar device but the majority of the cars are not nearly within the range of test:regular that that particular engine is. 40:1 is a bit more than an oversight or a small error.
You're right, that is possible. But given that VW is the largest player, why would they be the one to throw less money at the problem than anyone else? But VW being the largest is a good reason to make an example of them.
I suspect because of timing. If they had not been fully invested in that particular engine at the time they would have had a way out. But given that they already had made a commitment the choice was to drop the US market for their small diesels or to cheat and they - unfortunately - chose the latter. It was both cheaper and the only solution that worked under time pressure. Someone probably thought they were very clever when they thought of this.
I would blame an engineer, but those who designed and ran emission tests.
US suddenly discovers that a few million imported cars do not meet their requirements, despite passing all tests and paperwork. Good way to collect a few billions on fines and damage competition.
If EU would enforce their laws on US products similar way, there would be an economical war.
The regulations require certain levels of emissions to be met under all conditions. The tests exist to verify compliance, but the regulations don't merely require passing the tests. When you optimize solely for the test and lie on your paperwork, you shouldn't be surprised when you get smacked down. I strongly doubt that if a US company did this and got smacked down by the EU that any "economical war" would ensue.
And the different measurement procedures and conditions are exactly how the "discrepancy" was found.
It seems there was, up to that point, no interest in doing the tests "under the real driving conditions." And then there is a "shock" that the engine during the test runs optimized for the given test.
I am not fully convinced by the compliance argument.
People from other industries, for example the financial, have written very candidly on how easy it is to side step and circumvent the rules leaving their compliance departments in the wishful dark.
Yes an in-house compliance department, like a private auditing firm, leads inexorably to agency problems. They don't work for the general public or for investors; they work for the management of the firm. Generally it's best to just live with these agency problems, since we don't want to shut down corporations entirely, but in cases like this the government might need to do more.
I also believe that in some [limited] cases, compliance departments are intentionally neutered but not eliminated. Then, if it hits the fan, the company can show an appearance of trying to be compliant, and it was a simple mistake, thus seeking to avoid stiffer penalties for intentionality.
Even in the best of cases, compliance departments can't be omniscient.
I don't buy this from VW for a second. I am not sure what the work environment is in Europe but in all the corporate places I have written code for in US if I pulled a stunt like this with no backing from managers the best I could hope for is getting yelled at. Most places would have fired me on the spot. The possibility of this being a rogue engineer is extremely remote. This screams management cover-up.
Right. You know who else has compliance departments? Financial institutions. Did any of those prevent or foresee or had any clue at all about the financial crisis? Nope.
You know why? Because compliance departments don't have teeth.
In an ideal world, compliance departments should be staffed with asshole anal geniuses.
In reality, they are staffed with dopes and yes-men.
They shuffle papers and cover themselves, asking questions such as "are you following rule A and B as stated above"? and all you need to do to get them of your back is answer "yes".
They never have any further question because they're not sure about what the regulation actually says and they fear you'll find out if they start to dig deeper.
> You know why? Because compliance departments don't have teeth.
Unless they do of course.
> In an ideal world, compliance departments should be staffed with asshole anal geniuses.
That's the (legendary) IBM Black Team option. That's not the only one though, the (almost as legendary) "on-board shuttle group" did that with friendly rivalry and an absolutely anal process (which, importantly, is solely blamed and amended whenever problems occur).
> They shuffle papers and cover themselves, asking questions such as "are you following rule A and B as stated above"? and all you need to do to get them of your back is answer "yes".
Yup, and this is how you end up with "rouge traders" and "cheating engineers" – the company just claims deniability because they asked nicely if you were cheating, then pin all the blame on individuals.
I spent a large part of my career in the global automotive arena supplying products to VW. Martin Winterkorn was a frequently in attendance at meetings where technical proposals were presented for consideration. He typically led the way in asking tough questions related to form, fit, and function. VW invested billions and bet the future of the Company on clean diesel technology and performance. Martin Winterkorn is hands- on to the point of being a control freak, and it's impossible to believe that he didn't exert influence to bend the rules.
Yes, that is my impression as well. That's why they've decided VW as a brand can be thrown under the bus as well as long as they get away with this. But it is getting so large now that I doubt this strategy is going to work they are clearly reaching for straws to be able to claim plausible deniability.
They give you 2-3x the work you can complete, then tell you "you get paid the big bucks" (which we don't) so you need to work as many hours as necessary to get it done. Oh, and don't get behind on any of your other work as well.
It's why my last day is coming in the next week or so.
Having worked in highly regulated environments, I would characterize the role of the compliance department more as enabling business operation and development while keeping the regulatory risks acceptable. Often times I found out technical staff had a far more black & white view on rules and regulation than was warranted by compliance.
Ditto. I would add that Compliance only really works when they are given accurate information.
If the engineers asks "is it OK if we do X" and Compliance says "No" but engineering goes ahead anyway, that will likely be the end of it unless something bad happens. The reality is that a lot of questions & answers end up not being documented so even an internal audit later won't discover them.
What bothers me is they fail the reguntaltions for such a high margin that i cant belive all other auto makers complay with them. I mean, can X be 400% better than VW. Are their engineers 400% better? This is atonishing at least, hardly belivable. There is no such a difference with the state of the art in any industry.
Other manufacturers don't have 400% better engineers, the difference is other manufacturers didn't globally bet on diesel.
The US has very, very stringent NOx regulations, much more so than Europe (VW's cheating was in fact discovered through european clean diesel advocates pushing for tighter US-style regulations): EPA Tier 2 / Bin 5 has a 0.043g/km limit whereas EURO5 is 0.18g/km and the new (2014) EURO6 standard lowers that to 0.08g/km (still twice EPA)[0].
Diesel has plenty of advantages but is a big producer of NOx (compared to gasoline) because NOx is formed at high pressures and temperatures, and gasoline engines have much, much lower pressure and temperatures than diesel[1]. Also importantly, increasing diesel engine efficiency runs them hotter, which increases NOx production.
VW bet on a all-diesel strategy worldwide, and that included a "clean diesel" push in the US.
[0] for what it's worth, VW engines don't pass EURO5 either (in fact they don't even pass EURO3, the first EURO standard including NOx) which is why they're also in the shit EU-side, just to a way lower extent than in the US (their engines exceed EURO5 limits by a single-digit factor versus double-digit for EPA limits)
[1] EURO standards reflect this (though whether they should is debatable), EURO5 has a 0.18g/km NOx limit on diesel engines but 0.060 on gasoline
Thanks for your explanation. But i think the problem here is not the strategy. We are talking about individual car performance. This is not about the NOx produced by the whole VW cars. Every other single manufacturer car is at least 4000% better ? Incredible. This is the question.
> But i think the problem here is not the strategy.
The problem is the strategy.
> We are talking about individual car performance. This is not about the NOx produced by the whole VW cars.
We are talking about the NOx emissions of diesel engines in general, and of VW's decision to base their US and global strategy around diesel.
> Every other single manufacturer car is at least 4000% better ? Incredible. This is the question.
What's the point of praising my comment if you didn't fucking read it? Other manufacturers don't have 4000% better cars, in the US other manufacturers sell gasoline cars which intrinsically produce significantly less NOx.
No other auto maker sells diesel in us? Is VW the lonely seller? I read your comment, it seems you not. Or VW is the lonely seller and you are right :) Anyway drawk has a point on this
Most of the other manufacturers are using a urea injection system to neutralize NOx emissions. VW was able to skip that (up until the 2015 model year, around when the initial report made its way to VW) because of the cheat. It's at least plausible that cars with a urea injection system are compliant.
If the design requirements state: "engine must meet emissions during test" and the tests show this to be the case, how do the compliance department argue otherwise?
The compliance departement is supposed to test independantly for exactly the same reason you software testers should actually test the product and not just believe the software engineer when he says: "it works".
Part of the job of the compliance department will be to write the requirements that ensure the design and engineering teams build something that's actually legal to drive around on the road. If they wrote a requirement than "engine must meet emissions during test" then they have failed to do their job properly because there's a very obvious flaw in that requirement.
IMHO that does not matter. If they knew about the software, they are the ones responsible, not the engineers. And it seems unthinkable that engineering just went ahead and put in the software hack, without getting a go from management or the compliance dept. It's about who signed this off.
I just want to say, as an Engineer this is why you don't willingly break the law for a company. I had a job where I stayed for less then 3 months because they wanted me to use the community version of Visual Studio. Except it broke the terms of service and I could be liable if they tried the "blame the engineer game." Otherwise it was a great company that was doing innovative and fun things. They just wanted me to break the law, and I said no.
P.S. This was innocent on the companies part, they thought it was OK and didn't read the TOS, when I brought this to their attention they entered "talks" with Microsoft to get a new set of licenses, I just wasn't willing to accommodate them in the short term. I also didn't know what the talks were so I had to cover my butt and get out.
Part of what I did was point that they didn't fall into that category out to them. And that because of that they couldn't use Community edition for anyone.
The testing capabilities of government labs are handily outstripped by industry capability to create differentiated products. The cost burden of regulation testing is to some extent pushed back to the manufacturers with a big 'comply or else' warning to make sure they take it serious. The 'or else' bit translates into a fine per product sold which means if you get caught cheating that will eat up a very large chunk of your turnover for that market making getting caught something you will want to avoid so much that compliance is the easier way out. And if you can't be compliant then the better idea is probably not to try to sell your products into that market.
This. Almost all regulatory bodies, whether CARB, OSHA, EPA, USDA have been pushed into a mode of "self-certification", where the regulated effectively police themselves. Compliance bodies rarely have the staff or the budget to audit more than a scant fraction of the test results that are submitted to them.
For this to work, the punishment, when caught, has to overwhelm the profit from the deception by not just a little, but by a large multiple. Otherwise, companies will realize that they can just take the risk and will only have to pay up in the unlikely case that they are unmasked.
Generally speaking regulators aren't actively testing that consumer products meet regulation. The way it works is that the government sets standards that should be met by industry, and then the industry takes care of meeting those standards. If they don't and they get found out they're in big legal & financial trouble, which is what's happening with VW now.
Think of requirements vs implementation. One groups designs the tests, and the other who implements them. The test designers don't really know a lot about how the systems work. The implementors are ordered to follow the design... no matter what.
It doesn't even matter if it was the engineers, the fact that management is not taking the blame itself is utterly despicable. I'm certain the claims of this article are true, but let's pretend it was a bunch of rogue engineers' and compliance people's conspiracy. It is the responsibility of the company to take responsibility for ALL actions of ALL employees, whether they were known at the time or not. That's the whole point of being an executive. That's the whole point also for people who are not executives. Most engineers could start their own firms but choose to work for others for a number of reasons, not the least of which is minimizing risk. One of the major risks that one minimizes through employment is that of being sued or holding blame in exactly a situation like this.
VW knows this, yet they're still trying to make it seem like this wasn't the fault of their upper management and executives. They're still trying to shirk the blame when they should be firing their whole upper management employees and executives. There is no excuse for not doing that, and the CEO quitting is not enough in this case. To blame it on engineer and compliance workers is absolutely despicable and irresponsible.
What do you mean that "management" is not taking the blame? The CEO resigned. The two chief engineers who reportedly hatched the scheme (who are as upper management as you get, they reported to the CEO) were fired. The head of US operations was also fired.
What more are you expecting? And how does this make it sound like it's not the fault of upper management and executives?
This is exactly what happened with Enron and the backlash against that level of cheating -- the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
I refuse any argument that a line-level IT staff member cooked the books there on their own, yet the response - draconian controls placed on access to production data - does nothing to stop that from happening again.
All it did was make maintaining IT systems far, far more difficult to the pool on call schlep who has to delete a bad file at 3 in the morning when they have to involve 6 different people and levels and levels of approval (which takes until 10am to do). SOX and its ilk does nothing to stop unscrupulous top-level execs from hiding things.
The Automotive engineering culture is very much an optimising one - constantly squeezing to reduce R&D lead times and engineering costs to somewhere just below the bare minimum. This works fine when it is balanced by objective measures of quality, so you know when the job is done and when you are being lied to, but as complexity increases, so the risk of operational ignorance and plain-old self-deception proliferate.
The more complex the system, the greater the reliance upon the integrity and professional ethics of the engineers working on it, and on the correct functioning and sophistication of the checks-and-balances within the organisation.
"The only alternative explanation (and one that is even more worrisome) is that the entire compliance department and the entire management of VW were so dangerously incompetent that they allowed a situation like this to come into being, exist for several years and required an outside party to bring to light."
Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
That being said, it really doesn't matter if it was on purpose or on accident, both indicate a company which should not be able to sell cars in the U.S. There are plenty of other cars to choose from.
Of course, they could have fooled the compliance department using the same techniques used to fool regulators in the U.S., i.e. the exact same capability they'd built into the software. And they could probably have managed to trick engineering into creating that capability in the software by labeling it with a different and seemingly legitimate reason for existing. So I think you could plausibly get it down to just upper management, but I agree that there is no way engineers knocked this off by themselves.
Never attribute to conspiracy what you can attribute to incompetence.
I work on a software product that's very hard to test. IMO, it's harder to test the product that I work on than to implement the product.
In VW's case, I think it's safer to assume that emissions testing is harder than we realize. The engineers might need to make assumptions that, in practice, require a very complicated test situation to verify.
Therefore, the real problem is playing the blame game.
We're all working with partial information, but my guess, based on the reporting, is that the basic engine design didn't work out as expected, so they tried to "fix it in the mix" with the ECM.
I'm still waiting for the smoking gun of actual code that detects a testing cycle and changes the operational parameters in a way different from the way parameters are adjusted normally for different operating ranges.
Optimizing for test cases is rampant in the car industry. Nobody who has owned a GM car in the OBD II era has ever said "Wow, I get better MPGs than the EPA rating!" Heck, I'd be thrilled if any GM I'd ever owned came close on the highway doing 55 with the cruise control on. One of my GM's had something called Active Fuel Management. Cylinder deactivation. In normal driving it rarely comes on, but when it did there would be an annoying vibration and hum from the exhaust that would make you give the car more throttle in order to make it stop. My real-world MPGs sucked but apparently that anti-feature boosted GM's numbers for MPG and CAFE purposes.
Another GM car I currently own with a manual transmission forces a 1 -> 4 shift if I attempt to shift from 1st below certain throttle position and RPM thresholds. Out on an actual road, even with a giant V8, lugging around in 4th gear at 1,000 RPM is an undesirable condition. Naturally I do my best not to let that happen by applying my foot to the throttle, but somehow, again, this anti-feature improves the government numbers while I average 18MPGs on a mostly highway cruising commute and much less in stop-and-go city driving.
How are these GM anti-features any different from what VW has admitted? In the GM case the cars very obviously are detecting conditions within a test cycle and causing the car to operate in a manner undesirable to the driver, and which will cause the driver to alter their behavior to avoid them.
Is what VW did so blatantly obvious to a driver? What's the legal distinction? Where's the smoking gun code piece of code that makes their actions a "Defeat Device"?
On the premise of this article, the whole automotive testing industry is optimized around testing to the government standards. Just like No Child Left Behind has our teachers "Teaching to the Test", the automotive industry is "Testing to the Test." Nobody has any motivation to care about, or even look at, what happens outside of the test parameters. No grand conspiracy is necessary for this to have gone undetected or ignored. If the government considers this a problem then the solution is to create more tests that better simulate real-world driving conditions.
The legal distinction is that the code in the VW ECU actively detects the testing regime and then switches the engine to a mode of operation it would never use during real world conditions.
That's no longer optimizing for a test, that's simply fraud. Other manufacturers performance deviates gradually the further away you get from the test parameters. The VW would never have the performance it has during a test in any real world conditions, not even those matching the test (because the vehicle is moving and it can tell the difference).
I see speculation that there exists code that detects the test and activates a special mapping mode. I haven't seen that anyone has actually found the code or map. The map ought to be easy to find, VW ECUs appear to have as many freely-available DIY tuning tools as other platforms.
I've also seen it speculated that the code to detecting testing is based on determining that the car is on a dyno, and that all manufacturers perform that detection in order to disable the stability control systems. If it were as straight-forward as VW switching to a different map on a dyno I'd have expected that VW tuners would have blown the lid on this thing long ago. Tuners use dynos.
If an engine does not meet the requirements and because of this, cannot be sold on a market as large as the US or Europe, this is a big thing.
Unthinkable, that this has been measured and not been reported, but instead quickly and silently hacked. Indeed, even with a new head, there is still something wrong at VW.
Even more unthinkable that there now is a 'quick fix' that costs very little money per vehicle and will magically make the car meet emissions standards and will not lead to loss of power or increased emissions. If it was that simple you'd think those bad boy engineers would have implemented that right from the get-go rather than to go this somewhat harder route to the goal.
By the way, as a reaction to this issue, a german motor magazine has measured real life compliance to the Euro-6 norm for a couple of popular cars: VW Golf, Opel, Audi, Mercedes c-class, Fiat 500 etc.
All, and I mean ALL of them emit 2-8 times as much as allowed by Euro 6. The heavier the car, the worse the result. All SUVs like the Audi Q3 or BMW Xx have terrible measurements. The best - was the VW Golf with the 2 litre engine. The worst was the Audi Q3, which emits 5 times as much as the Euro-5 norm (which it was adapted to) and thus 10 times as much as Euro-6. Shame.
If I understand correctly, all of the cars tested (including the petrol one) exceeded their NOx ratings by at least 60%. Of these, the VW was actually the second best after the petrol one. The older Audi model they tested didn't fair as well, but it still did better than the BMW, Opel, Volvo, or Fiat. Going off of that, it would seem that VWAG was unfairly singled out.
"it would seem that VWAG was unfairly singled out"
If you look at the true numbers, yes. But VW has been targeted for intentionally cheating. And don't forget, some Audi engines are also inherited from VW.
oh yes! This I also do not understand at all. They replace the software and all of a sudden the emissions are ok and the unsolvable problem has been solved.
It's ridiculous, how they've tried to shift blame. But forget compliance departments and everything else, the situation is actually very simple: the company made money on the cars they sold, so the company is responsible for how the cars were built.
Another pertinent question for the techies here: how come we have secure boot loaders and signed drivers for tablets locking them down, yet chipping or remapping the cars ECU to negate any 'environmental restrictions' seems to be unrestricted?
In a word, California. Because of the geography and climate there, smog forms very easily in large parts of the state. So, California emissions regulations have been focused - since the mid-20th century - on smog precursors. NOx is a major smog precursor, so they have a very good reason to minimize it.
This is where we get into politics. The US as a whole wants to adopt somewhat tougher emissions regulations, and car manufacturers want to minimize the number of different standards they have to meet in a single market. It turns out that everyone's on board with "just make the California standards the national standards" and so that happens. Then California tightens their standards again and the cycle repeats.
Europe doesn't have a comparable political subdivision with such a high natural propensity for smog formation and the ability to make their own standards. The regulatory differences emerge from a combination of geography and political systems.
No. The engines were (re-)tested at 0.62g/km, EURO5 allows 0.18g/km, EPA Tier 2 / Bucket 5 allows 0.043g/km.
> Why US Standards are different?
US standards are much more stringent on NOx, I expect because historically they regulate gasoline engines which produce relatively little NOx, and the standard bodies could thus easily clamp down on that.
The EURO standards actually have two profiles, one for gasoline and one for diesel, with the diesel profile allowing significantly higher NOx emission than the gasoline profile. Though even with that, the US EPA standard remains more restrictive than the EURO6 gasoline standard.
US standards are more stringent with respect to NOx emissions. NOx are harmful to health, and their products are also. In addition they form smog which is a blight on many urban areas. Perhaps the problem is worse in USA than in Europe, or perhaps Americans just care more about it.
EU standards reflect the reality that diesel engines are far more common than in the US, so they are less strict with regards to NOx emissions to begin with. About half the km (or miles, or furlong) driven in Europe are on diesel.
Diesel gets better mileage and tends to be cheaper than gas (depending on local taxes), which can make a significant difference with the high fuel prices in Europe.
The oversight is also much more fragmented because it is less centralized than in the US. As I understand it, the oversight is left to the member states, so manufacturers tend to shop around for the most lenient one.
