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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.
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.
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.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
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.