Slashdot Mirror
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.
Hiding car emissions was not done by a couple of people. A large number in the people inside these companies were involved in pulling it off.
BMW engines were emitting nitrogen oxide levels that were 11 times more than the current limit set by the European Union. However, it later reported that there was no indication of tampering with the vehicles. Citing road tests by the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), it said that a model of the BMW X3 was emitting more poisonous gases than the Volkswagen car that is currently at the center of the emissions scandal. http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/24...
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?
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.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Buy a Harley! Their emissions are terrible too. But nobody cares enough to lie about it
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.
Do they? Frankly I have found the quality of Ford vehicles to have jumped leaps and bounds over 10 years ago. Their decision to start bringing in their European designs shows.
GM isn't there yet, but they are making progress. The stuff they build today is also better than it used to be.
The irony is the real fall off in quality is Japan. Toyota and Honda aren't what they used to be.
According to one article I read, the heuristic was "did the emissions testing technician put the car into emissions testing mode." Apparently, the cars need a separate setting for that to prevent the electronic stability control from going haywire when it starts reading the front wheels going 50 MPH while the back wheels are stationary.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Putting aside the debate about global warming, this it completely off-topic.
The WV scandal is not about global warming. Global warming is mostly about CO2 and CO2 is mostly about fuel economy.
Here the problem is that they cheated on NOx emissions, which are toxic (known to cause acid rains) but do not contribute to global warming. If anything, NOx cause global cooling.
I think that "fuck you" is a totally valid reaction to highly loaded and off-topic "information".
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.