Volkswagen CEO Issues Apology Over Emission-Cheating Software

cartechboy writes: Last Friday we learned that Volkswagen got caught cheating on emissions testing via software programming. The punishment? It could get slapped with up to $18 billion in fines. While the company has yet to admit to any wrong doing, the CEO has now issued a formal apology and said the automaker will cooperate fully with any and all investigations. It's issued a stop-sale on all new and used TDI vehicles until further notice. VW's currently in talks with the EPA and the California Air Resources Board in regards to these allegations. It's also ordered an external investigation of its own into the matter. Whether criminal charges will be filed is yet to be seen.

Comments

Re:Another 40 years before we see popular diesel c

[Dzimas]

The Audi A3 is one of the models implicated in this scam. It appears that it includes any VW and Audi vehicles that don't have a urea injection system.

Re:That'll teach you...

[Tailhook]

Was there a punishment when GM recently had a major oops?

Sept. 17, 2015: GM will pay $900 million to settle the U.S. Justice Department case, which charged GM with wire fraud and scheming to conceal a deadly safety defect from U.S. regulators, according to a criminal information filed by federal prosecutors ..... GM separately Thursday said it planned to take a $575 million charge in the third quarter for settling nearly 1,400 lawsuits arising from the defective switch.

Blaming American Engineers

[BenJeremy]

In the German press, the CEO is already painting this as a bunch of rogue American engineers doing this.

One problem: If there was any engineering in the US, it was probably only to tweak the existing calibrations. It's pretty rare to see the actual source to ECUs, which is mostly unchanged over long periods of time. Most of the adjustments made are in the calibrations - a checksummed block of mapped constants in the ROM image file where the symbolic map has been exported by the compiler.

As somebody who has actually authored calibration tools used in the automotive industry, and worked on some of the software used to provide version control, I have a pretty clear idea of what is going on here.

In this case, the code itself - the algorithms used in the ECU, specifically disabled emissions controls (either by an alternative set of calibrations, or by skipping entire routines) when in Emissions Test Mode. If it's using an alternative set of calibrations... it still demands an answer to why it would need a second set of calibrations to begin with.

Sadly, the press and many of the investigators involved in this will probably not understand the techical aspects of this, and why this is a fundamental cheat that could only have been created by the team that engineered the ECU.

Re:Blaming American Engineers

[toonces33]

I call BS on that. There is no way that a rogue engineer would do such a thing on their own - they would only do it because management wanted them to.

For that matter, you can't even sneeze in the auto industry without there being a paper trail. Once the investigators start digging they will find all kinds of stuff about the requirements and specifications documents that preceded the actual software changes. You will find the actual engineers who did the work, and you will find the people who signed off on it when the work was done...

Re:Blaming American Engineers

[toonces33]

Yes, because of work that I have done in the past. I have seen the level of process audits that the automakers require of their suppliers, and I have seen the kind of process management software that is used to track requirements/specifications/changes and all the rest of that. That being said, I have no recollection/memory of how VW does things.

When all of this is in place, you can't change a single line of code without it being justified, specified, written, tested, and finally signed off on, and *everything* is traceable. Could one hack the database? In theory, I suppose, but doing so would elevate this to a whole new level of fraud, and if you screw it up and corrupt the database then the whole company could be dead in the water.

Google "Automotive SPICE" to learn more..

Re:CRAP! I have one of those.

[Khyber]

Well, with "Paleo" in your name, I'm quite guaranteed you don't have a clue what you're talking about. As if you had a fucking clue what "Paleo" really means.

The apology

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Full text: "We're sorry we got caught!"

Re:What? "We're sorry we got caught"?

[pixelpusher220]

There's a reason that Pelosi, Reid and Obama had to ram that law through using procedural shenanigans

Indeed and that reason is the not so latent racism in the GOP base over a black president and the lock step opposition to *anything* he proposed. Every major piece of the ACA was *favored* by the GOP, just not 'Obamacare'.

Also note, the meeting with all the GOP players on the night of Obama's inauguration to 'oppose anything he did'. They knew that if they cooperated at all, Obama would get credit for saving the country from depression and become a transformative icon of history; and of course discredit the GOP agenda for decades to come.

So they played politics with basically everything. The extreme of which was Sen. Cruz voting against funding for Hurricane Sandy relief money...and then demanding quick aid when Texas was hit by floods. His argument? The pork in the Sandy Relief bill. While laudable policy wise, playing political football with people's lives to make a point is exactly what's wrong with the GOP these days.