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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.
It's the 1970s all over again.
Now the only way to get a diesel passenger vehicle is to buy a $30k+ Audi, Mercedes Benz or a massively overpriced crew cab pickup truck.
Is there really any more to it?
When Toyota had the audacity of becoming number 1, their CEO got dragged in front of the US congress about some acceleration issues.
VW just made the mistake of becoming number 1, and suddenly we discover they've been cheating at emissions. Expect a congress hearing and lots of demands for sanctions.
Was there a punishment when GM recently had a major oops?
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.
I suppose I'll have to get my firmware updated which will cut my performance down. I could decline the recall but then I probably wouldn't be able to pass the emissions here in CA to get my tag renewed.
Goodby 42 MPG.
You must be confused: the Nazis would never stoop so low as to lie about fuel economy...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The only remotely affordable passenger vehicle with a diesel motor, and bam. What a drag.
Do they do it?
If not, nothing was learned here. Either by accident or intentionally, it will happen again, eventually.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
No I didn't RTFS but exactly what would the criminal charges be in a case like this? There was something similar a while back in which some car maker used a distinct programing settings in the ECM which allowed fuel economy to be inflated but shipped a different version so the consumer didn't complain the car was a turd in performance. As far as I know, the only thing that came of that was a change in economy measurement standards and revised estimates.
But I'm guessing the apology was something along the lines of:
"We're sorry we were caught."
Why did they do this? Did they think they could get away with it?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The firmware changed to pass while it was being tested, so it seems the fix will be to leave the car in 'test' mode permanently. Apparently performance will suffer when that happens, but that doesn't really matter when you're stuck in a line of traffic on the freeway.......
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
that don't have a urea injection system.
I'm guessing that peeing into the gas tank isn't an option.
Saavik: On the test, sir... will you tell me what you did? I would really like to know.
McCoy: Lieutenant, you are looking at the only Starfleet cadet who ever beat the no-win scenario.
Saavik: How?
Kirk: I reprogrammed the simulation so it was possible......
Saavik: What?
David Marcus: He cheated.
Kirk: I changed the conditions of the test; got a commendation for original thinking. I don't like to lose.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
That settles it, Sir!
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.
Won't work unless you drive them around. Apparently, the VW hack looked at things like "is the steering wheel moving?"
Basically, the software tested to see if the car was moving and changed settings.
test it in a fashion that will not trigger the emissions mode features.
Just as an FYI Honda got caught doing this with the accords back in like '05 or so. They were doing it by watching for if the rear abs sensors showed the wheels not moving while the car was 'in motion' and if so running the engine in a special 'emissions profile' to make them appear cleaner than they were. If you had a 4 wheel dyno they wouldn't trigger as such and you could get the real emission readings.
There is one other possible trick left in that particular box, but I will leave it as an exercise to the reader :)
I recently passed over getting a TDI in lieu of a 2.5 gas. My initial reason for passing on the TDI was the known issues with failure of the High Pressure Fuel System (HPFS). A quick google on TDI HPFS will confirm, also see below. I live in california and am not a fan of the California Air Resources Board CARB and having to pay a premium for emissions components over other states - try $500 for a new CAT vs $200 in other states.This is a major blow as TDI were a nice alternative to Hybrids, especially with diesel averging $2.89/gl to gas' $3.30.
NHTSA Investication
http://www-odi.nhtsa.dot.gov/c...
They got caught with their dick in the pig.
I fail to see what the Clinton family reunion has to do with this.
This will be reduced to some completely unimportant sum like 18 million. Further its hilarious how the CEO is blaming rogue American engineers when it's clearly a upper management decision. Reading 'they launched an independent investigation' actually made me spit up my coffee it was so hilarious.
http://www3.epa.gov/otaq/cert/documents/vw-nov-caa-09-18-15.pdf
It has plenty of specific regs that were stepped on.
I wonder if the per-violation stuff is per car or per emissions test?
If per-car puts the penalty at 20% of VW, per-test might put it over 100% of VW.
At some point, this may be political between countries instead of simply regulatory actions.
I wonder if Germany can catch any of the big three doing something bad?
The day after Christmas will be a great time to buy a VW if you're in the market for one.
They'll be desperate for sales (assuming they're allowed to sell them by then.)
Is he sorry they did it, or sorry they got caught?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
No that will cause the sensitive hpfp to fail and a 10k repair.
http://www.edmunds.com/car-news/feds-close-probe-into-vw-audi-tdi-vehicles-for-high-pressure-fuel-pump-failure.html
Full text: "We're sorry we got caught!"
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Emissions are measured per mile, not per gallon.
Bearing in mind that one's financial prowess plays such a large role in the apparent seriousness of any degree of deliberate immorality at someone else's expense.
Requiem for the American Dream
It appears that all diesel VW and Audi vehicles do have a urea injection system, but some only enable it during tests.
Why didn't they just include the DEF injection system and offer an "economy"/low-power mode to drive without DEF, but with increased performance with the DEF reservoir filled? It's a whole lot better than having a diesel vehicle which refuses to start when you're out of DEF and the local filling station doesn't have any in stock.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
The lesson here is to use hardware to cheat the emissions testing. We have been doing that on most every car for about 40 years, injecting air into the exhaust to lower the ratio of emissions.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Have we learned nothing from the quack3.exe fiasco?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
My 2014 TDI at 80mph in 6th gear and no traffic gets 56mpg. In moderate traffic @ 50 - 65mph I get no less than 42mpg. I am a gear head and I know you would need to adjust the fuel injection (no spark it's a diesel) to occur a little before the power stroke to get a hotter burn and reduce NOx. The problem is this will reduce performance and mpg.. both the main reasons why I bought a diesel tdi. I want my money back. once the ecu is updated to be EPA compliant the car will not perform as well and mpg not as good. I want a refund + tax , title, registration, +6% of sale to cover taxes on my new non VW vehicle purchase since I won't have a trade and be subject to full sales tax.
I agree... my tdi gets 56mpg. with the EPA tune the car will perform worse and get @ 37mpg since I believe the fix is going to be retarding injection to be early for a hotter burn and more DPF regen cycles. reducing performance and mpg.
The firmware changed to pass while it was being tested, so it seems the fix will be to leave the car in 'test' mode permanently. Apparently performance will suffer when that happens, but that doesn't really matter when you're stuck in a line of traffic on the freeway.......
It's a compression/peak flame temperature thing. With the high compression of a diesel engine, max economy comes at the expense of NOxide emissions.
Here is a really nice explanation of the parameters involved. It''s an old pdf scan of typewritten pages, but very clear and understandable
http://web.anl.gov/PCS/acsfuel...
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Audi is in the recall too!
yeah.. you have to be careful with winter fuel. Not enough antigel on a cold winter day can cause frozen fuel in the HPFP and ice will be injected into the engine at 29000 psi. resulting in damage.
A3 and A4.. plus any other audi diesel that has a 2.0L TDI engine
if anyone's truly worried about vw/audi failing emissions... based on what the computers have to report about it, tailpipe-test them and see if they are lying.
Was a time a Volkswagen had no concerns. They were exempt from a California emissions sticker others had to get.
Older models weren't able to pass the test due to it's air cooling.
it's amazing what people think they can hide in code, on a chip, and in the wiring to that chip.
i am not saying they're all cheating on emissions..
i assume it's all wide open to "gaming"..
is it not?
"I'd piss on a spark plug if I thought it would do any good."
Peeing into the gas tank isn't even possible on a diesel vehicle, and peeing in the diesel tank is not good anyway.
You shall ensure that you never, ever mix the reagent with diesel - either diesel in the reagent tank or reagent in the diesel tank since it causes crystals to form that clogs the entire system causing a very expensive repair.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
No, our prime minister, the Right Honourable David Cameron MP, actually had oral sex with a pig. A farm animal. A dead farm animal. It's not even a joke, it's what he did for fun at university.
All the other heads of state are going to be bringing him pork platter gifts from here on out.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Volkswagen is not the first to write software that recognizes and adapts to the condition of being under test. Some 22 years ago my boss came downstairs and slapped an open copy of Infoworld on my desk. "How 'bout them apples?" He said. There was a gleam in his eye.
The article was the 8-Mar-1993 hardware column written by Steve Gibson (thanks Google!) and it created a novel scandal in the industry. Once again, a particular graphics card exhibited stellar -- even bizarre -- performance on the popular Winbench test.
Gibson and other had been tracking down and exposing a series of graphic benchmark cheats that turned out to be various tweaks in the software drivers that shipped with graphics cards, to exploit benchmark programs in various ways. He set his debugger on the driver but failed to find any point where the code branched during the test condition... and yet, his video hardware snoop clearly discerned that the card was deferring multiple writes of a certain text string "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back and sat on a tack." It turned out that this benchmark cheat had been written in as part of the microcode in the chip itself.
These days that might not seem so incredible, but remember. Flashable firmware is now the rule and chipsets are almost always designed with more than enough slack memory for field fixes and protocol upgrades, even (gasp!) malware. Many high level operations are pipelines to chip level directly. There's lots of elbow room, even double plus memory if you wish to keep the previous version in flash for a smooth rollback. But in the ROM days there was this unspoken assumption that such high-level antics as recognizing and adapting to test conditions at the chip level would be too difficult. This scandal swept that assumption under the rug. I especially like the manufacturer's sort-of confession, that those clever engineers of his were always coming up with new ways to get good WinBench scores. It was actually funny.
The next version of Winbench wrote random gobblegook to the screen instead.
Volkswagen shouldn't be laughing though about how easy it is to cheat, on the eve of self-driving cars. Neither should lab technicians testing for salmonella at peanut butter manufacturing plants.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
"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."
Who wrote the software, who told him to write the software, why aren't criminal sanctions being applied?
No, the 2.0L 4 banger 2008-2015 models don't have urea injection. The 2016 models supposedly have it, as well as all V6 diesels.
If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
It appears that it includes any VW and Audi vehicles that don't have a urea injection system.
Piss on that.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
I mean even just in terms of pragmatic emotionless corporation logic.
They introduced a series of cars that were WAY ahead of anything the competition could produce in terms of price/power/efficiency and seriously did not expect that somebody would want to analyze that magical engine to see how it works? (and find out it's cheating and drop the bomb in a couple of years to maximize the damage). Even if none of the competitors have anything to do with the reveal (which I find unlikely), that should have been the first thing VW execs should have expected!
I was going off this article, but I really should have known better than to trust the Daily Fail.
Criminal charges (and convictions and prison time) are the only real deterrents to such misbehavior. And not just for a scapegoat or two.
"I personally am deeply sorry that we got caught.” Winterkorn should have said in the statement.
My first thought was that German billionaire that committed suicide over his failed VW short position. Just a handful of years too early. http://www.reuters.com/article...
That's what I figured. So I can't understand why VW doesn't keep on obfuscating to the regulators. Say that it isn't designed to beat the tests, it just happens to perform great on the tests, tough luck your tests aren't as representative as you had hoped. Go pound sand. Giving up and admitting everything is very odd to me.
If VW had any sense they would shrug their shoulders and say, oh those clever engineers and their over-zealous algorithms.
an Article on CNN stated that the probe has widened and now may include 11 million cars worldwide.
500k in the USA - but 11 million globally? New York Times has a better article. Wow - they tried to fool the world.
The 2007 and newer standards (phased in from 2007-2010)
The emission standards included new, very stringent limits for PM (0.01 g/bhpÂhr) and NOx (0.20 g/bhpÂhr).
The preceding 2004-2006 standards:
The goal was to reduce NOx emissions from highway heavy-duty engines to levels approximately 2.0 g/bhpÂhr beginning in 2004.
From a Vox article with actual details ( http://www.vox.com/2015/9/21/9... ):
On the road, VW's Jetta was emitting 15 to 35 times as much nitrogen oxide as the allowable limit.
Assuming they mean the 2010 limit, that puts it at 3.0-7.0 g/bhp*hr
The VW Passat was emitting 5 to 20 times as much.
Or roughly 1.0-4.0 g/bhp*hr
So the NEW Passat is capable of meeting the OLD Passat's emissions rate, some of the time.
The NEW Jetta never comes close to meeting the OLD Jetta's emissions rate.
Somehow, not only did they not improve on power or mileage over the last 8 years, they also are doing worse on emissions?!?
I love my '06 Golf, but I've got to wonder what the hell they've been doing for the last decade...
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
This CEO does not seem to know much of anything about getting away with illegal activity.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Behind every great fortune there is a crime;
Casteism
who's there?
diesel
diesel who?
diesel probably pass emissions now.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Voting systems, cars, refrigerators, whatever - if you take a simple task like regulating a fuel mixture, or counting votes, and rather than use a simple methodology or circuit to accomplish the task at hand and instead use a re-programmable Turing machine, you introduce the certainty that the owner of the device - who is not the same as the person who bought the device! - will change the code at will to do whatever makes the owner a profit. Change the code in the engine, beat emissions tests. Change a few votes, keep a reconstruction of a country to your advantage going. Put an AI in charge of driving a car, and police or dictators will use that AI to control people they don't like. There is no judicial solution for this, as you cannot jail a corporation. The solution is to de-complexify the systems, reintroduce simplest-possible solutions that do not use Turing devices to accomplish tasks. Fuel mixing do not require AI and a telematics system networked to the internet. Though it is inevitable that a generation born to complex IT solutions be blind to the downsides of those solutions. Rule of thumb: if you can't control what it is doing, don't trust it.
Henry Ford was a fascist-admiring Nazi admirer, yet somehow, no one seems to recall that come epithet time.
So, even after we see practical fusion power? That's always 25 years out.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.