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Volkswagen Diesel Scandal Spreads To Porsche and Audi
New submitter sumanareddyraval writes: The fallout from the Volkswagen diesel scandal is spreading fast to the company's other famous brands, including Porsche and Audi, and across the Atlantic to the U.S. The scandal reached down into the company's engineering corps as the CEO of Volkswagen's US business, the research and development chief from Audi and the engine chief from Porsche, which are part of the Volkswagen Group, are said to be following Volkswagen's CEO out the door of the company, according to multiple reports Thursday. The impending departures are a sign that the Volkswagen scandal is ready to grow to much larger proportions.
Fuck you.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
when the suits don't listen to the nerds, I'll bet. I'm sure at some point someone in engineering said that this was wrong, that they shouldn't cheat like this. I'm sure he/she was quickly told to drop it or start looking for a new job.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
My guess is that what happened is that Engineering was told to do something that turned out to be impossible. They built a diesel engine and determined what was the maximum performance and efficiency they could achieve. Then management told them they needed to hit those numbers while still passing emissions requirements. Eventually they realized that the only solution to meet the requirements was to game the tests.
The really sad thing is that I have seen a lot of people, in a lot of places, suggest punishments in the extreme.
"Ban them from selling cars here for 5 years"
"Require them to buy back every car at the full sales price"
And so on. At some point you just bankrupt the company, which is stupid, it'll put millions of people out of work, destroy a lot of wealth, and then when it files for bankruptcy, it won't be able to fix the cars in the first place.
Do you want vengeance (against millions of people who didn't do anything), or do you want solutions?
Volkswagen own Audi and Porsche? Do we get another article tomorrow telling us that Seat and Skoda have been dragged into it? Any other crazy Volkswagen 'news' from the last 15 years? ;)
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
There is a reason Consumer Reports does most of its car tests on the road and the track -- it's more realistic. So I expect that the rules will change to de-emphasize lab testing on dynomometers and emphasize road testing using several different modes (in-town, highway, and off-road where applicable).
It's not an American company, so of course they want it destroyed. VW make better cars than American companies. NSA really needs to step up its efforts on that front.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Give them a slap on the wrist. Do we really stand to gain more by dragging these guys over the coals.
I suppose it depends on how you feel about car emissions. If VW gets little more than a slap on the wrist, then why wouldn't every other automotive company do the exact same thing? AFAIK, this is just for their diesel engines, what Toyota decided to do this with their gasoline engines? That would be a hell of a lot of cars. I would guess that would start a domino effect, and all manufacturers would do the same.
At some point you just bankrupt the company, which is stupid, it'll put millions of people out of work, destroy a lot of wealth, and then when it files for bankruptcy, it won't be able to fix the cars in the first place.
Do you want vengeance (against millions of people who didn't do anything), or do you want solutions?
The fines need to cost the company more than they made/saved by implementing this scam OR the people who perpetrated this scam need to be held personally responsible, especially the executives overseeing the operation. Nothing else will deter companies from repeating this kind of behavior. Otherwise they will just make some lowly engineer the scapegoat and write off whatever symbolic fine that gets handed down as the cost of doing business.
Since the higher ups are usually able to use the corporate veil to protect themselves from the latter option, we're left with he former: punitive fines that force shareholders/boards to police themselves.
Theoretically possible perhaps, but what incentive would "lone wolf" coders have for making the mechanical engineers look good? Even if the mechanical engineers who designed the engine and pollution control systems didn't know about the code changes, they should have had a good idea of what the approximate test results should have been, and if they were way better than expected it should have raised major red flags. Same goes for QA. Even if the change wasn't caught in a code review, the too-good-to-be-true results alone should have raised questions. I bet lots of people knew about this and either didn't want to risk their jobs by asking about it or were told "don't worry about it, it's a decision made above your pay grade". Unfortunately, we live in a world that demonizes whistle-blowers.
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Try reading his whole post; that's pretty much precisely what he said he believes. He is just pointing out what is possible.
The fines need to cost the company more than they made/saved by implementing this scam OR the people who perpetrated this scam need to be held personally responsible, especially the executives overseeing the operation. Nothing else will deter companies from repeating this kind of behavior. Otherwise they will just make some lowly engineer the scapegoat and write off whatever symbolic fine that gets handed down as the cost of doing business.
I'm not at all convinced that even the above will deter companies from doing this.
Why? Because the people who profited from this don't care if the company is fined into nothing in 5 years, they got theirs today.
The CEO is leaving, he has his money from the past X years. What difference does it make to him what happens in the next X years?
You need to find the people who actually did this, and punish them, not the millions of employees of a huge corporation who had no idea it was going on.
Its not just VW. Its not just the auto industry. It's all over the corporate world and our governments. Everywhere there is closed source software, your stuff that uses that software is being used in anti-consumer ways. I wish people would wise up and say enough is enough. If 99% of the source code for the stuff we use every day were suddenly made public, there would be nothing short of riots in the streets. I'm not advocating that people and companies who write firmware or software should not be compensated, but I am absolutely advocating that the public be allowed to see and change the software for the stuff we purchase.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
"Ban them from selling cars here for 5 years"
"Require them to buy back every car at the full sales price"
Don't equivocate these two. Banning them from selling cars here for 5 years would harm the public, auto dealers create a lot of jobs. Requiring them to buy back every car at the full sales price if the customer isn't satisfied with a reflash is only reasonable. Anyone should have to do this if they defraud the customer. Anyone. A person, a corporation, a co-op, anyone.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Hmm... how about, a big message telling the rest of the free market to not fuck around with regulation and try to cheat the system. Someone, somewhere, probably many times, will say to themselves 'Well.. I could shortcut x,z,y... not legal but...' And then 'well... then again, remember what happened to VW'
I blame the long history of governments 'letting it slide' with the banks, Intel, Microsoft, and numerous other big companies for a lot of the major corporate abuses we are seeing today.
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I suppose it depends on how you feel about car emissions.
No it depends on how you feel about fraud. The reason this is a big deal isn't the pollution though that is not a trivial part of it. No the big deal is that this company intentionally defrauded millions of customers. They promised their technology worked in a way that it didn't.
In my opinion the people who ordered and the people who carried out this fraud should see some time behind bars. They committed a crime that cost customers and taxpayers many millions of dollars.
Except it's not because of the ludicrous amount of fuel you burn to move that hunk of steel a mile.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
One thing I'm convinced of, based on my experience working with German companies, is that the audit trail *will* eventually lead one of two places -- the actual person who wrote the "benchmark mode" code and checked it in, or a black hole where records have mysteriously disappeared. German companies are fastidious record keepers, especially engineering companies. The CEO leaving is just to appease the shareholders -- the other departures are more telling, and if it got up to the VP of engineering level, there could be a lot more heads rolling.
Honestly, without trying to sound like a finger wagging do-gooder, this is going to be a really good case study in engineering ethics, or the lack of them. Especially in the software world, this is seriously lacking. Over-stressed corporate managers or crazy inexperienced 23-year-old Silicon Valley startup CEOs have software engineers over a barrel when it comes to ethical behavior. Without PE-style personal liability, every engineer is subject to the uncomfortable conversation that goes like, "Look, we need this feature in or the product can't ship/won't pass regulation tests/won't let us do something nefarious with customer data. And if you don't want to put it in, I have 500 H-1Bs and other hungry engineers who will be happy to."
It's too bad - most people can't afford to take a stand, and a lot just don't care enough to even if they could. They have families to feed, or debts to pay, or are worried about being blacklisted from the industry. I see a lot of posts saying the EPA was too strict with their limits -- VW has less than 3% of the US car market; they could have easily just expanded sales to China where emissions controls just don't exist at the same level. Unfortunately, the temptation is always there, and corrupt corporate executives always get away with these things, so I can see how some people think that if they just act like these guys they can join the party too.