EPA Finds More VW Cheating Software, Including In a Porsche (nytimes.com)

schwit1 writes with this news from the Times that Volkswagen's emissions scandal just expanded to include more expensive vehicles with larger diesel engines, including Porsche, and Audi sport-utility vehicles. According to the article: "The Environmental Protection Agency said on Monday that it had discovered emissions-cheating software on more Volkswagen and Audi cars than previously disclosed and, for the first time, also found the illegal software in one of the carmaker's high-end Porsche models. The German carmaker disputed the claims, however, saying it had not installed defeat software on the models in question that would 'alter emissions characteristics in a forbidden manner.' The company pledged in a short statement that it would cooperate with the E.P.A. 'to clarify the matter in its entirety.' The latest findings by environmental regulators put significant new pressure on Volkswagen and its new chief executive, Matthias Müller, who was previously the head of Volkswagen's Porsche division. E.P.A. officials indicated the latest violations were found during testing performed by federal regulators and their counterparts in California and Canada. The implication is that Volkswagen did not provide the information."

Comments

Damn it!

[rmdingler]

Evidently, those two or three cheating software designers had a buddy over at the Porsche complex.

Re:This is how they start.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I don't understand why they are even trying the 'oh, just a few lowly rogue engineers' excuse.

If it were true, that might absolve them on the defeat-device issue; but it'd be pretty horrifying on the 'software validation processes for a life-critical component going into millions of vehicles' front. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be in, near, or on the same road as, a car whose ECU firmware was built under such a sloppy process that some engineering peon could secretly slip easter eggs into it.

Aside from that, there's also the minor issue that the affected engine doesn't exist in isolation: VW has been making diesel engines for decades, has multiple product lines for various purposes, has ongoing R&D efforts, and so on. Are we supposed to believe that nobody raised an eyebrow when the revision N+1 engines suddenly started turning in far better NOx numbers than the revision N ones; and none of the mechanical engineers had touched anything and the software guys would only look away and mumble something about 'optimized the firmware'? Are we supposed to believe that the R&D people working on refining existing designs or creating new ones aren't wondering why their advanced prototypes are getting worse NOx numbers than years-old production models?

If you just have a single product; no predecessors, no successors, maybe you can rig the demo without alerting anyone not involved in the rigging; but if your rigged product is an adaptation of a prior version? Then you have to explain an impressive discontinuity in performance between the current design and the prior model; and somehow explain away why the research guys can't do as well as you can(or find research guys so dense that they only use EPA tests and don't wonder why none of their tweaks appear to change the results). That is a great deal harder and less plausible.