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Volkswagen's CEO Was Told About Emissions Software Months Before Scandal, Says Report (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Volkswagen Chief Executive Herbert Diess was told about the existence of cheating software in cars two months before regulators blew the whistle on a multi-billion exhaust emissions scandal, German magazine Der Spiegel said. Der Spiegel's story, based on recently unsealed documents from the Braunschweig prosecutor's office, raises questions about whether VW informed investors in a timely manner about the scope of a scandal which it said has cost it more than $27 billion in penalties and fines.
Responding to the magazine report, the carmaker reiterated on Saturday that the management board had not violated its disclosure duties, and had decided to not inform investors earlier because they had failed to grasp the scope of the potential fines and penalties. Citing documents unsealed by the Braunschweig prosecutor's office, Der Spiegel said Diess was present at a meeting on July 27, 2015 when senior engineers and executives discussed how to deal with U.S. regulators, who were threatening to ban VW cars because of excessive pollution levels. Diess, who had defected from BMW to become head of the VW brand on July 1, 2015, joined the July 27 meeting with Volkswagen's then Chief Executive Martin Winterkorn to discuss how to convince regulators that VW's cars could be sold, a VW defense document filed with a court in Braunschweig in February, shows.
Responding to the magazine report, the carmaker reiterated on Saturday that the management board had not violated its disclosure duties, and had decided to not inform investors earlier because they had failed to grasp the scope of the potential fines and penalties. Citing documents unsealed by the Braunschweig prosecutor's office, Der Spiegel said Diess was present at a meeting on July 27, 2015 when senior engineers and executives discussed how to deal with U.S. regulators, who were threatening to ban VW cars because of excessive pollution levels. Diess, who had defected from BMW to become head of the VW brand on July 1, 2015, joined the July 27 meeting with Volkswagen's then Chief Executive Martin Winterkorn to discuss how to convince regulators that VW's cars could be sold, a VW defense document filed with a court in Braunschweig in February, shows.
Gambling going on in this establishment? Why I never imagined!
I hope Germany is troubled by this and will figure out a proper punishment and corrective action. Big businesses need to be feared more than big governments
These bozos deserve everything they get. Corporations and bankers only ever learn by losing money and in cases like this the perfect learning mechanism is being slapped with great big massive fines. One good thing to come out of VW's shenanigans, however, is that the 'using fossil fuels is patriotism' and 'there should be an environmentalist hunting season' crowd has been purged from VW leadership and replaced with people who are sinking EUR 34 billion into electric vehicle technology and are planning to take that to EUR 72 billion by 2022. Same is probably true for a whole other bunch of car companies that didn't get caught but did notice the massive fines VW got. I'm no fan of the VW leadership but at least this is a move in the right direction.
They knew from the beginning the objectives were unattainable. Decisions were taken at the highest level. CEO didn't sign papers of course, but he can not not have been aware of the situation from the onset.
The idea that this great fraud was perpetrated by some rogue engineers never made much sense.
Even if we assume this is an accurate depiction of when the CEO was told, there almost had to be some degree of lower management complicity in this from the outset, even if it was in the form of setting impossible goals for employees, much like the Wells Fargo fake accounts debacle.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Maybe the engineering is impossible to meet the expectation.
So they're in a meeting about how to avoid being banned from selling in the entire U.S. market and we're to believe they weren't certain the problem was serious enough to tell the stockholders about it?
I smell pants burning.
The guy is an engine expert with a reputation of wanting to know all the details at all times. He could probably have looked at the AdBlue numbers and immediately know what was going on. Also has a reputation as a control freak, so nobody will have dared to make these changes without checking with him first. As basically every other car maker with diesel cars (except for the the Japanese, it seems) had this fraud-device in their diesel cars, they will have coordinated on it. Makes sense, because one brand doing much better sticks out and could raise suspicion. I expect this was a coordinated decision a year or so before they started doing it and all the CEOs did sign off on it. No paper-trail, of course.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Everyone, everyone has cheated sometime in their life. Anyone that says they haven't is a straight-up liar. Peeps here really quick to dish out fines, jail time and punishments out of parity. Be careful holding others to a higher standard than yourselves.
Why is there so much concern on diesel cycle engines? As heat engines go they are quite efficient devices. As far as providing a lightweight and compact power source for transportation these things are close to miraculous. So, where is the problem? It's not the engine, it's the fuel.
Right now diesel fuel is primarily petroleum. I use the modifier "primarily" because there are places that burn bio-mass derived diesel in their engines, either pure bio-fuel or as a mix with petroleum fuel. The US Army has been burning 20% bio-diesel in their trucks on bases all over the world for at least a decade. I can say that because I saw the fuel pumps on an Army base while serving and I have a friend that works for the National Guard. The trucks the Army uses on bases at home and in "friendly" nations are just commercial off the shelf stuff. The battlefield vehicles though will run on just about anything. I had a conversation with someone about this and he told me those Army helicopters will run on just about anything that is liquid and flammable. I asked if that included Wild Turkey and cheap perfume, he said it might not like it but that will get you home if you are in dire need.
I hear people claim that electric cars are the future, charged up by electricity from wind, water, and sun. But has anyone done the math on what it would take to make that happen? It turns out that people have and the math does not work out for such a world.
Here's how we start with that math. The world uses about 2.3 TW of electricity. That's the consumption if we were to average out all the use in the world. Citation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In 2008, the world total of electricity production was 20.279 petawatt-hours (PWh). This number corresponds to an average power of 2.31 TW continuously during the year.
So, let's do the math on everyone in the world driving an electric car. First thing is to do the math on how much in resources we'd need to just make up for the electrical use right now and replace that with wind, water, and solar. Looking at the page I linked to above we see that we are about 1/4 the way there, with most of that in water. A common one megawatt windmill takes one ton of rare earth elements in its magnets. Does it have to use rare earth metals? No, but then it's not as efficient, will need more copper and steel to make, and therefore will not be as cheap as it is now with rare earth metals. Windmills don't run all the time at maximum output, in real life they produce maybe 30% of their maximum rated output. So we don't need 2.3 TW of wind to replace what we need, we'd have to start with 3 times that, 7 TW. But, as I pointed out before, existing renewable energy has 1/4 of the total electrical supply already so, in round numbers we'd need about 5 TW of new wind, water, and sun to replace the coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear (if you believe nuclear is "bad").
Go figure out how much rare earth metals we'd need in windmills to replace even half of the current electrical production, assuming that solar and hydro would make up the rest. Then add in the rare earth metals needed for those electric cars. Then add in the steel and concrete needed, because those windmills need something to hold them up. Then do the math on how much silicon we'd need for the solar panels. Then compare all of this to current production of these materials worldwide. There simply is not enough of current production to switch over to anything "green", except nuclear power.
Can we improve our output of things like rare earth metals, concrete, steel, copper, silicon, and whatever else we might need? Sure, given enough time I would expect that to happen. Here's another thing to add to your calculations, how much dirt would we have to dig up, sift through, and process, to get these materials we need? You think mining for coal and uranium is bad for the environment, how muc
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Color me oh so surprised.
Begs the question. If they hadn't been busted, would anything have ever been done? I find it difficult to believe these people didn't understand the software was not legal.
Mwahahahahaa!
I am signing a presidential statement banning homosexuals from being able to be organ donors. Would you want to risk getting the gay that way? Also, NO COLLUSION!
new to Slashdot.
I'm absolutely shocked that in a large bureaucratic organisation senior management knew about and were complicit in what was going on, rather than the far more believable narrative that a single lowly engineer somehow conceived of the scheme entirely on their own and was able to secretly introduce changes (in collusion with other industry partners) into a diverse range of product lines in mass production without oversight.