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VW Fiasco Puts Ethics In Engineering Under the Spotlight, CEO Steps Down
szczys writes: By now you've heard that VW has been accused of doctoring the software in their small diesel models to sidestep emissions standards. The thing that hasn't been talked about is engineering ethics. An algorithm in the code detects when the vehicle is under test conditions and causes it to perform differently. This couldn't have been accomplished by just one person. Brian Benchoff looks at the conditions leading up to the scandal and discusses the engineering ethics involved. Automotive engineers are held to a higher standard because mistakes and cut corners can kill people. This kind of suspected deceit goes well beyond concerns of environmental damage. Willing ethics violations challenge our trust of the engineering as a whole. Volkswagen‘s chief executive Martin Winterkorn has announced he is stepping down.
One thing is for certain. No whistles were blown. Which is pretty impressive considering how long this has been going on and the extent of who all must have been in the know. I don't think this falls into the category of one software developer tweaking some parameters. I mean the engine was designed without a urea injection system in the first place, which is pretty much necessary to make a diesel engine conform to emissions standards that strict. So it sure leans towards the falsification pathway going way, way back.
Better known as 318230.
But since VW is a foreign company, this is going to be blown completely out of proportion. When American companies are caught cheating, it's just fierce competition, and it gets them a slap on the wrist. That is an ethics issue.
I imagine the European engineers rationalized this "it's good enough for environmentally conscious Europe, why shouldn't it be good enough for the US? The US environment is shitty anyway, with all those SUVs and no trains! The EPA is just trying to make life difficult for European importers!"
Of course, the two problems with that way of thinking are that European environmental regulations are not as strict as American ones, and that VW is so important to the German economy that it gets a pass on pretty much everything.
This was a financial decision, pure and simple.
The engineers did the dirty deed. It wasn't ONLY an engineering decision but the engineers do not escape culpability here. Management cannot make this happen without the cooperation of engineering. I don't doubt for a moment that this was ordered by an executive somewhere but "just following orders" isn't a valid defense. The Germans of all people ought to know that by now.
Someone in a suit decided it would be more profitable to hide non-compliance, rather than spend the resourcing fixing the problem *with* proper engineering.
And someone with a pocket protector decided it was ok if they committed fraud. There will be plenty of people with their hand in this cookie jar. The real question will be how high up the food chain this reaches.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
This is what happens when you exempt corporate engineers from licensing standards. There are no repercussions, no sense of proper conduct, and no accountability?
Would you allow your doctors to skip board certification but still practice medicine if they worked for a healthcare company?
Would you allow lawyers to skip the bar but still bring court cases if they worked for a corporation?
Why do we allow engineers to practice engineering without a license if they work for a corporation? As with all the professions above, engineers must be registered and licensed to perform engineering work for the public - why does this change if there is an intermediary corporation who takes than work and then sells it to the public?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
If their ECU code had been Open Source and so reviewed by millions this would not have happened.
There is some speculation to be done on how this cheat actually came about. These things sometimes evolve out of something more benign rather than a dictum from above that the car cheat on tests. It could have started as a feature that does some internal checks and performance verifications before a test, then someone added a function that actually ensured certain parameters were in place, and so on. Incremental changes that on their own 'didn't seem so bad'.
No excuses for what was done. Just speculation on how VW got to this point.
Oh yes, by all means, lets discuss the ethics of lying, cheating, and stealing, not to mention willfully polluting the shit out of the atmosphere we all breathe.
Anyone that could possibly defend what VW here did is an idiot or a VW executive. This was corporate wrong-doing on a massive scale, and the fact that this made it into production means that it wasn't the work of some rogue engineer or even a rogue group.
This had to have been approved at the highest levels within the company- there is simply no other way this could have occurred.
It makes me long for the old days when all we could criticize Volkswagen for was building vehicles for the Nazis.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
This. Ever wonder why there is such a dearth of diesel powered vehicles? Because the EPA has screwed up royally. It is nearly impossible to get a diesel engine certified, and when it is, the reliability is worse than gasoline power because of all the emissions crap the put on it. Not only that, but the ridiculously low levels of sulfur allowed require that they start with light sweet crude instead of heavy crude, which drives the cost of diesel up. The acid rain problems were taken care of by putting SO2 scrubbers on coal burning equipment back in the 70's. But the EPA cannot see that. They do zero cost benefit analysis before imposing new regulations.
I have the last Ford diesel pickup made with no emissions equipment. No cat, DPF, DEF, EGR, etc. I put a chip in it that gives me more power and better fuel economy. This does not break a single federal law. The EPA may not like this, but guess what, *I* own this truck, not them. It passes emissions testing with flying colors.
I will never trade this truck in. The new ones have horrible reliability problems. For example, many new diesels "make oil". The amount of oil in the engine crank case goes up as you drive. How does that happen? The diesel particulate filter (DPF) in the exhaust pipe gets filled up, so they pump diesel into the exhaust pipe through the injectors/cylinders to burn it in the DPF to make the particles into ash so it will go through the filter. This is called "regeneration".
Some of that diesel fuel gets past the rings into the crankcase and dilutes the oil. The diesel pumped into the exhaust does nothing to provide motive power. This is only one of many very stupid ideas, brought to you courtesy of bureaucrats who wield the power of government, who you cannot vote for or against, and never have to provide a cost-benefit analysis. We are way, way beyond clean air and water.
Given VW's relatively small market share in the US they could run on coal and their pollution would be a rounding error compared to what trucks (both the kind that actually deliver things and the kind with 27 lamps on the roof) spew out.
And you know it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The car needs to know it's under a test. Emissions tests are usually run on a dynamometer. If you don't tell the car it's being tested, its traction control / anti-skid system will go nuts trying to compensate for the drive wheels spinning at full speed while the other wheels are stationary.
The conditions which allowed this to happen go far, far beyond VW. A test by definition simulates the actual driving conditions. The cheating was detected by measuring emissions under actual driving conditions. That raises the question - why not just measure emissions under actual conditions? See, pulling each car off the road and testing it only makes sense when a large number of cars are not in compliance or in borderline compliance (i.e. might drift out of compliance before the next test). If a test costs $45 and 90% of cars are in compliance with emissions standards, you're paying $400 to detect each car out of compliance. And the test is worth it.
Now what happens when 99.9% of cars are in compliance? You're now paying $40,000 to detect each car out of compliance. At that point (actually long before it) the testing isn't cost-effective anymore. California reached this threshold where the testing was no longer worth it in the early 1990s. Most cars were in compliance, and most of the air pollution was caused by about 1 in 1000 cars (mostly older models) which were spewing out hundreds or thousands of times more emissions than a compliant car.
The companies which make the emissions testing equipment suggested a much more elegant and cost-effective solution. Stop testing each car every year. Put the emissions measuring equipment at various chokepoints on the road like free off-ramps. The equipment would then sniff the air as each car drove by, and when it detected an excessive amount of emissions it would snap a picture of the violating car's license plate. If a certain set of plates was flagged by multiple measuring stations, the State could then send the owner of that car a letter requiring its emissions be tested.
Sounds great! It would've caught the cheating VW cars immediately. So why didn't it happen? The emissions testing itself had become a billion dollar industry. The gas stations and auto mechanics lobbied heavily to keep the mandatory testing in place. For them, a billion dollars a year were on the line. The companies making the detection equipment only stood to make a few tens of millions of dollars selling it to the state. You can guess which side won. So we ended up with testing which wastes money and isn't as effective at detecting cheating as other solutions.
Ostensibly: The offending ECU code will have to be removed and it'll probably mean that they'll have to add a urea injection device meaning you'll have another tank to fill up and a limp mode (like 10mph) if that tank runs out of fluid. All of this creates financial problems for VW but it also creates a dilemma for customers who have the cars; your new efficient eco-friendly car is a dud. When I tested a Blue TDI a couple of years ago the salesman touted not having the Diesel fluid issue and the high efficiency and if I'd bought one I'd cerainly be looking up a lawyer right now to argue to VW to buy the car back.
From what I've been reading the disabling code increased MPG so the trade-off of lower CO2 emissions isn't a saving grace for higher NOx emissions. That means if you own one of these, your mileage will go down and Diesel fluid will most likely be in your future creating less contentment with the vehicle you purchased.
It'll probably be one of the biggest class action suits in recent memory.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Expecting corporations to act ethically isn't unreasonable
I completely disagree. It IS unreasonable. Corporations are sociopathic by nature, and are run by sociopaths. Expecting them to act ethically is pure lunacy; it's like expecting a hungry predator not to eat its prey. The only thing you can do to counter this is to have a legal system that harshly punishes corporations for actions which society considers "unethical". Expecting them to do it on their own, out of the goodness of their hearts, is ridiculously naïve and downright insane considering corporations have proven over and over that they do act unethically.