In July, France 2 (the #1 public national television channel in France) released a documentary [0] that showed to which extent the French auto manufacturer PSA lied about NO2 emissions.
At 1h19s [1], Pierre Macaudière, head of emission control systems at PSA, admits that the model tested emits 1700 ppm of NO2, after measuring 200 ppm (the legal limit) with their own machines.
At 1h17m11s [2], the researchers commissioned by the EU shows the journalist that not one manufacturer respects the legal limits of 200 ppm. He's frightened to tell the journalist that it's all just a widespread fraud.
never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence...
I work at the French auto Inspection facility. I'm not keeping up with research done by some people in Brussels because I'm busy living my life. A car rolls in, I check for defeat devices of the kind previously found.
Because the organization is reactive, not proactive, I don't find any newer kind of defeat device (also, I'm not Sherlock Holmes). Car gets approved.
This is frequently not bribery. There are a few other mechanisms. One of them is regulatory capture. The other is what I'd call the 'boiling frog'-effect, where, if everyone is doing it and it has been going on since before you got into the business, your moral compass readjusts and you tolerate more wrongdoing than you should.
Which calls for decentralized inspection, instead of relying again and again on governments to do the right thing. The only thing they are good at is accepting bribes.
Kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater there, no? I was in and out of publicly-run hospitals as a child, I wouldn't be alive today if not for socialized medicine.
That's incorrect. You wouldn't be alive today without medicine; the fact that it was provided by a socialized system is almost certainly irrelevant. There exist other, better and fairer mechanisms to provide healthcare, especially to those in genuine need.
Edited: to put it another way, imagine if you lived in a country with socialized car mechanics. You could easily make the claim that the only thing keeping you on the road was your good comrades at State Autoworks ...
That's right, the capitalist-libertarian answer is always "Fuck you, pay me", or in this case, "fuck you, die".
We have insurance. Its a great way to leverage the group so that all get a low rate. That given, "socialized" medicine is a group policy population wide: which should give the lowest rates split equally between all. Certainly makes the most sense.
“Dear [socialists], our objective, like yours, is the welfare of the poor, more general wealth, and a higher standard of living for everybody—so please let us capitalists function, because the capitalist system will achieve all these objectives for you. It is in fact the only system that can achieve them.”
This last statement is true and has been proved and demonstrated in history, and yet it has not and will not win converts to the capitalist system. Because the above argument is self-contradictory. It is not the purpose of the capitalist system to cater to the welfare of the poor; it is not the purpose of a capitalist enterpriser to spread social benefits; an industrialist does not operate a factory for the purpose of providing jobs for his workers. A capitalist system could not function on such a premise.
> This last statement is true and has been proved and demonstrated in history
On the contrary, that last statement is false, which has been demonstrated in history, and is largely why the system for which the term "capitalism" was coined is no longer the dominant system of the developed world, having been replaced by mixed economies -- which transition Rand was part of the rear guard arguing against, and to reverse -- which retain in outline the property structure of capitalism, but import many aspects of socialism to deal better with exactly those problems than capitalism ever did.
"... which retain in outline the property structure of capitalism, but import many aspects of socialism to deal better with exactly those problems than capitalism ever did."
That's a contradiction. You can't have both the property structure of capitalism, and state socialism. You have to violate the former to achieve the latter. I'd argue that current systems claim to keep the structure of the former, but violate it at will.
In terms of dealing better with the provision of healthcare than capitalism ... have you seen the state of the American healthcare system recently?
Yes, US healthcare sucks, but is still-- despite being less universal and less efficient than that of any other modern advanced economy (all of which are also mixed economies) -- better than anything that existed anywhere when capitalism was the dominant model, and not just due to (non-social) technical advances.
Of course, the US has adopted, in many areas and healthcare particularly, less elements of socialism than other advanced mixed economies. So maybe there's a reason US healthcare sucks so hard, and its not insufficient devotion to capitalism.
"So maybe there's a reason US healthcare sucks so hard, and its not insufficient devotion to capitalism."
The list of problems that the previous poster provided were almost all (especially cronyism and cartels) characteristics of systems other than capitalism.
Is it possible we're using different definitions of capitalism, here? I think you might mean crony-capitalism, a.k.a. fascism.
I mean the real economic system that was dominant in the developed world from the late 19th to early 20th Century, which certain of its socialist critics created the word "capitalism" to refer to, since criticising it without a name was problematic, and it was an economic system by which property arrangements, policy, etc., were organized around the interests of the capitalist class.
Cronyism and cartels were certainly not infrequent features of that system.
I'm tempted not to reply to such an obvious straw man argument, but: take a look at the way mutual societies worked prior to socialised medicine. That's the sort of approach people opposed to socialized medicine would prefer. It provides cheap health care and looks after those incapable of doing so themselves, all without coercion.
I know a good deal about the Middle Ages, being part of the SCA. And indeed, it did work pretty well.
The problem is now is that it's not just 1 or 2 people involved with health of the area. It's the doctor, the 2 nurses, the 2 receptionists, the x-ray techs, the lab techs, the pharmacist, the pharmacist techs; all for a call to the doctor.
In hospitals, it's so crazy how billing works, that most hospitals do not actually know how much X costs. instead, they just bill exorbitantly to anyone without insurance, and insurance gives them the agreed upon price.
Drug companies are also really messed up: the US ends up subsidizing the rest of the world's drugs, all the while biasing on maintenance based drugs over cures.
The FDA also has its fair share to blame. They control which universities are accredited, and directly control the flow of doctors purely on the say-so from the AMA, a doctor union.
Considering the complicated nature, insurance covering the nation, aka socialized care, makes the most sense. Tearing down systems like I said above really isn't sustainable.
It's not insurance if you're compelled to buy into it. I believe those are more commonly known as 'protection rackets' ;)
But yeah. Lots of problems: opaque billing, medical cartels (AMA), scale, crony capitalism on the part of drug companies and politicians, ... it's quite a list.
The thing is, many of those problems are a consequence of the existing system of socialised medicine, and would be fixed by the de-nationalisation of the industry.
I happen to strongly agree with you that part of the problem is a shortage of medical staff caused, in part, by a cartel (the AMA). Note their position on the matter of genuinely capitalistic medicine. It's not a coincidence.
They're not taking the cars back and destroying them. They'll send letters to all the owners telling them to come in to a VW dealer for some warranty service. A tech will flash the ECU and they'll be back out on the road in a minutes. It will definitely be costly but not $350B.
How is it possible that the real emission is 40x the allowed limit? Wouldn't you see VW being the only manufacturer under the limit, and everyone else unable to get the car approved? Or alternatively, everyone is cheating? Because you can imagine a world where some firms cheat to get 10-20-30% less than rated, so that they're in line with the industry.
But if VW's normal car is 40x worse than advertised, and most cars were close to the correct standard, wouldn't they just hire a guy who knew how to fix their cars? Did VW's internal testing test competitors' cars?
Is this going to explode across the industry?
Also, this isn't the only kind of test that a car goes through. There's crash tests, MPG tests, and all sorts of things that I wouldn't know about. If you can game an emissions test, you can game the crash test and the MPG test, which are probably both things people care about a fair bit more than emissions.
When I was car shopping the VW diesel numbers, for tdi sportwagen in particular, were impressive. Nothing else came close to VW's combination of power, space, and mileage. Now maybe there are people who know more about cars than I do and can dispute that, but that was my perception a couple of years ago.
If I were the other car companies, I'd want to know exactly how VW was pulling that off. They must have looked into it, and surely they're not as easily misled as I apparently was (how would I know if VW was outright lying about the car?).
This suggests to me that the other car companies must have known that VW was doing something wrong. The fact that they didn't rat VW out suggests to me that they were either doing the same thing (maybe not as aggressively as VW) or they hoped to get away with the same thing. The former seems more likely, and if that's true then I expect this to spread beyond VW soon.
VW has also built a huge reputation on diesel. They go and win Le Mans with diesels. They have a giant budget and research ability. They've pushed diesel forward in a lot of ways.
Maybe the others knew they were cheating, I can't imagine that it wouldn't leak out some how. I also can't imagine how you wouldn't go buy a hundred VWs and meticulously take them apart and understand them after getting brutalized in the diesel market.
With mid-sized and heavy trucks, there is an entire subculture of guys that mod them for "more power" and such. There is a little industry built on it and nearly a religion surrounding the "better mileage" and "more power." Some of the systems and devices are sophisticated enough that they have integrated on/off switches for passing smog tests and such. If we really really cared about it, that would be illegal, there would be much more stringent emissions testing more frequently.
I'm of the belief that the regulators knew or suspected there was some cheating but it's political to make waves.
I also can't imagine how you wouldn't go buy a hundred VWs and meticulously take them apart and understand them after getting brutalized in the diesel market.
This is exactly how the auto industry works, contrary to the uninformed person(s) who modded you down. People should refrain from moderating posts from users who actually know what they're talking about.
For example, the first thing GM did when they began work on the current-generation Corvette was buy a Porsche 911 (from Volkswagen, no less) and study it in detail. This is an objective fact by GM's own admission (http://www.edmunds.com/porsche/911/2013/comparison-test.html). Competitive analysis is a key engineering strategy, no less important than any other.
It's inconceivable that other manufacturers weren't aware of exactly how VW's seemingly-impossible engineering worked. The only question is why they didn't rat them out to the EPA.
That said, there is pretty much no US market for diesel outside the European imports. So they may not be focused on their diesel competitors enough to have done the teardown/research/testing to discover VW cheating. I find that more plausible than everyone cheats and everyone knows everyone else cheats.
> The only question is why [other manufacturers] didn't rat
> them out to the EPA.
Speculation: Ratting out VW carries some degree of risk that the public will become aware that there are better ways to test the emissions of vehicles. The public will then insist that the government legislate newer/better emissions testing, and the manufacturers will have an expensive new problem to solve. Better to keep quiet and let the existing, implemented and paid for (if flawed) process keep running.
> It's inconceivable that other manufacturers weren't aware of exactly how VW's seemingly-impossible engineering worked. The only question is why they didn't rat them out to the EPA.
Everyone cheats, and preserving status quo is in the best interest of everyone.
What worries me is that if this explodes across the industry, the common refrain will become that EPA guidelines are unrealistic and that's why everyone is cheating. Just what we need as the world is coming around to direly needed environmental regulation.
> have integrated on/off switches for passing smog tests and such. If we really really cared about it, that would be illegal, there would be much more stringent emissions testing more frequently.
Actually it is illegal.
And inspections in the US are supposed to check if there are any altered emissions components.
It doesn't help if someone removes and reinstalls it each year, but they do try to check for such things.
I also can't imagine how you wouldn't go buy a hundred VWs and meticulously take them apart and understand them after getting brutalized in the diesel market.
every miniscule detail of the VW car is patented. if you infringe one of those patents accidentally and VW sues you, you'll get slammed with damages proportionate to money you have made or VW has lost (thanks to you). now, you basically cannot infringe a patent incidentally after you've seen it at work. competition buying a bunch of VW cars to take them apart would be an invitation for VW to sue them for willful patent infringement and the accompanying treble damages.
you can read accounts on the internet of programmers working for major corporations (Sun Microsystems among others IIRC) who were prohibited from reading others' patents for exactly this reason.
> competition buying a bunch of VW cars to take them apart would be an invitation for VW to sue them for willful patent infringement and the accompanying treble damages.
As someone noted above, every auto manufacturer is buying the competitor's cars, tearing them down, figuring out they work, rebuilding them, and benchmarking.
The last point is key - you can run your internal tests against their vehicles and see how you compare in your tests.
You can also get a feel for how many molds/stamps/etc that your competitor has in their factory by looking at the mold IDs. You can figure out how tight their weld tolerances are by X-Ray'ing the welds. There is a wealth of information inside a competitor's product that goes beyond the IP.
> You can also get a feel for how many molds/stamps/etc that your competitor has in their factory by looking at the mold IDs.
Also known as the German Tank Problem[0]
Allied intelligence, trying to estimate the extent of Panzer production, used estimates based on serial numbers of various components in tanks that fell into their hands.
From Wikipedia: "Estimating production was not the only use of this serial number analysis. It was also used to understand German production more generally, including number of factories, relative importance of factories, length of supply chain (based on lag between production and use), changes in production, and use of resources such as rubber."
The auto industry is so incestuous as it is. If patents came to play at all, which they didn't, then the big money play would be for GM, Ford, etc.. to buy VW motors and or license the technology. Either build as good a diesel or if you somehow couldn't then buy it or the technology. There is tons and tons of precedence for it. (Heck, the Ford "PowerStroke" diesel wasn't built by Ford for the first half of its life) Auto competitors work together on tons of stuff and with something like a motor that has fuel demands, it's mutually beneficial, if Ford and GM sell small diesel cars, it's more likely there will be diesel at your nearest pump. GM and Ford build heavy diesel too, there is very very real demand if they can improve power, improve mileage and meet emissions and VAG doesn't compete in that market.
None of that happened, I think the competitors knew and I also think the EPA knew in some capacity and it wasn't until some "small time" researchers got attention that it came out.
> The fact that they didn't rat VW out suggests to me that they were either doing the same thing (maybe not as aggressively as VW) or they hoped to get away with the same thing.
Or (only hypothesizing) they realized they're all in the same industry and are necessarily treading softly wondering what the best course to accuse an 800lb gorilla of cheating.
It will be interesting to see if there are other cheaters, and to what degree, and also if this was an open secret in the industry. Nothing would surprise me.
I'm now searching for a story I'm sure happened, which was Mitsubishi faking crash test data... but damned if I can find it. Best I see is this[0]. Am I imagining a scandal w/ Mitsubishi where they were rigging crash test data ?
It was a researcher from West Virginia who tested it.
Researcher is on the record as "I didn't believe the results" and "I thought I made a mistake".
Also, lol @ efficient market thesis because the results of his research were posted early 2014. EPA took a look at them, and being the slow bureaucracy that it is... took a year and a half to levy charges against Volkswagen.
So this entire "surprise" was over a year in the making. It's been discussed publicly in research groups for a year and no one seemed to care till now.
"Volkswagen hasn't explained exactly why it cheated, but outside analysts have a good guess. The NOx emission controls likely degraded the cars' performance when they were switched on — the engines ran hotter, wore out more quickly, and got poorer mileage. Some experts have suggested that the emission controls may have affected the cars' torque and acceleration, making them less fun to drive. (Indeed, some individual car owners have been known to disable their cars' emission controls to boost performance, though this is against the law.)"
So basically, they wanted the cars to have acceptable performance in real-world conditions, which pushes the emissions up.
I had read something about how diesel engines can use Urea to trap emissions, but it must be refilled frequently, so possibly other manufacturers are using that method. This is tested and proved to work well. However, VW was using another type of method to diminish emissions that has not been well proven. Source: a comment I read on Reddit, so take it with a grain of salt.
AdBlue is also used in the latest Audi ultra TDI engines. It is supposed to be refilled during normal service (every 30000 km), unfortunately it does not last that long and you have to schedule an appointment much earlier. Refilling it yourself is apparently not possible since a software reset is necessary as well.
The 4 cylinder TDI was for the economy range of vehicles. The more expensive models with bigger engines use urea tanks or BlueTec as Mercedes Benz politely calls it. More expensive to make and service, but those who buy more expensive vehicles expect these kind of added service costs. Those on the lower end do not.
I've driven several pickups that require diesel exhaust fluid. It's really not a big deal. If you don't want to pay $3/g for it at Walmart then go to a truck stop where you can get it from a pump for slightly less.
I know someone who recently bought a sportwagen with the urea system. They said it was a $300 service once a year to refill the tank. Though you are probably right that it can be done much cheaper yourself.
It's an ISO-specified solution of CO(NH2)2 and deionized water. If evil automakers want to screw the consumer they could make the fill port difficult to access, but other than that it seems straightforward. The "once a year" thing is also strange, since DEF usage is totally dependent on miles driven and how "hard" those miles were. (High-RPM, high-turbo-pressure driving uses more than low-RPM, low-turbo-pressure driving.)
Mercedes did this on the GLK - the fill port requires a special nozzle. So you buy one of their refill bottles, cut the bottom off, and use it as a funnel with your DEF of choice (since it's a standard ISO solution).
Fun fact: the fill nozzle at the truck stop is also standardized by ISO, so that it will fit all ISO-compliant "commercial vehicles and buses... having a gross vehicle mass of more than 3,5 t". I wonder how how much lobbying it took to convince ISO not to specify anything for smaller vehicles?
Some of the truck stops have DEF nozzles that require a magnet to operate, so the truck drivers don't put it into their diesel tank. There are adapters you can buy that will allow you to fill up your diesel-powered car or RV using the cheaper bulk pump.
That's crazy. I think I probably paid $20 for DEF to cover the ~11,000 miles I drove in my truck last year (and I'd have to imagine it's thirstier than an economy car).
You pop a blue cap under the hood, dump in the DEF, and you're done. RAM and Ford (starting this year I think?) make it even easier by putting the fill behind the fuel door right next to the fuel cap.
5 gallons seems to last me about ~5,000 miles.
DEF only became required in US light-trucks ("1-ton" and below) for the 2015 Model-Year I think.
Anyways, the fluid itself is about the same price as gasoline. A $300 service is just plain gouging.
I'm guessing that the cars with urea injection will be fine. It will be tested by the EPA and CARB if you are in California to make sure. Since the urea injection is there specifically to deal with the pollution this issue is causing, the only cheat I would imagine would be to lengthen the amount of time to change the urea tank and if that is the case, VW will be required to cover the added service costs.
The BMWs also use a urea based system that separates the NOx into Nitrogen and Oxygen and does it very well. However, those systems are expensive and add a lot of costs to the car. VW wouldn't be able to sell their TDI cars as cheaply if they had to incur this cost. That's why they pass and why they have passed alternative tests.
I just bought a new GTI about a month ago...not sure if their gas cars will take a valuation hit or not due to VWs reputation hit. At least it wasn't a TDI Golf or I'd be extremely pissed.
There have also been no claims that the VW Touareg TDI failed. So 6cyl SUVs pass.
There aren't many 4cyl diesels in the US. Chevy Cruze. New BMW 328d. I imagine the new 328d passes just fine, but supposedly the new-for-2016 VW E288 diesels do as well.. they just never got a chance to sell them!
Smaller, cheaper cars are the problem. The bigger cars have a better catalysator system. All those compact diesel cars from Opel, VW, Renault, Peugeot, Nissan will have the same problem.
What is crazy is that the vast amount of people who buy these small diesels don't need them. You need long runs to get the particle filter hot enough to burn off.
People buying these small diesels are buying them based on the fuel consumption benefits but then only doing short trips like 15 minute school runs. All they are doing is damaging the car.
It is why competitors like diesel Cruze had worse performance and others like Mazda did not quite bring to market. VW knew they could own the US diesel small passenger car market but they had to meet customer demands on fuel efficiency, performance, and price.
it's 40x from "faked condition test" to "road condition". And the "test condition" are totally unrealistic behavior on the road (such as 0-50km/h in 26 seconds)
Most car are above the allowed limit in real situation.
Collision tests can be gamed obviously by designing for the fixtures used... But the variety of fixtures in use and testing protocols imposes a decent all around level. It's hard to cheat when 3000 lbs of steel is crashed at 40mph against a concrete obstacle.
Fuel consumption however, now that is rife for cheating by trading off performance for better fuel consumption in the ECU and automatic transmissions.
Emissions and efficiency are usually conflicting goals. Automakers are under a ton of strain right now to achieve BOTH, which is essentially impossible. The VW TDIs are some of the only vehicles to even get close to the efficiency that will be required in just a few years, regardless of emissions.
For what it's worth, Chevy is selling a diesel version of the Cruze in the US, and it has better performance numbers pretty much all around than the VW. I'm skeptical of the claims that this is "the end of clean diesel" as a result.
As I'm observing this scandal unfold, I find it amusing that all the eyes are on the VW company and how it affects it's finances, it's reputation, etc
While the effects on the company are extreme, I think we should also consider the broader and ultimate consequences of this trickery.
The fact that those cars pollute a lot more than officially acknowledged.
I've read figures like 40x as much.
Does that make those 11 million VW cars caught cheating the politically accepted pollution equivalent of 440 million cars ?
Another interesting question - if VW was caught doing it, who else is doing it ?
And if other companies (and factories, etc) are doing it, what is the purpose of the international pollution treaties ? How does it affect the plans to reduce pollution, given that the numbers that we base our calculations on might be off by factors of 40x ?
It's probably a terrible idea for me to do this as I am completely unqualified, I don't have all the required numbers, and I don't have much time to double check or even think this through properly, but it seems that on the back of an envolpe, everything goes!
The average diesel passenger car emitted about 8kg of NOx in 2008 and a third less in 2015 according to [1] and [2], so on average that's 6.6kg per car per year. If VW emitted 20 times that much since 2009, as alleged, that's 6.6 * 20 * 6 years = 792kg. An average diesel engine would have emitted 40kg, so that's 752kg extra for VW.
Multiply by 500,000 cars = 376,000 tons of extra emissions. [2] claims that cutting emissions by 187,000 tons saves 4000 lives. Hence, 376,000 tons should cause about 8000 deaths. That's assuming NOx levels and deaths have a linear relationship, which is highly doubtful.
So it appears that my feeling/belief that 500,000 cars could not have caused 100,000 deaths is correct. But if all 11 million VW cars of that type worldwide have that same "defect", then of course the number of premature deaths rises to 176,000.
All of this is most likely complete bullshit, but you are right, it makes sense to at least try to run some numbers ;-)
[Edit] I already found a mistake in my estimate. The NOx numbers in [1] don't seem to be for diesel or not only for diesel engines. But other sources give similar averages for diesel engines (after the catalytic converter does its job of course)
Nitrous oxide is about 300x more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2[1]. It also depletes the ozone layer. So yes, this could be a major issue for climate change.
These are NOx[1] species not N2O. They do not get into the upper atmosphere, like the ozone layer in the Stratosphere. They are instead constrained to the Troposphere, where we live.
NOx emissions are highly reactive and in the presence of sunlight turn into O3, Tropospheric Ozone [2] the same chemical compound as that in the Stratosphere, but very different in it's effects.
In the Troposphere, Ozone is a highly reactive oxidizing agent and can have serious negative health effects.
You can look at a map of daily ozone generation [3] from pollution. Peak production of ozone occurs at the part of the day where sunlight is most intense following the highest levels of traffic. It then mostly reacts and then levels drop again at night.
Is nitrous oxide a major component of the nitrogen oxides from car exhaust? I thought it was mostly nitrogen dioxide (NO2)and dinitrogen tetroxide (N2O4).
I haven't heard of nitrous oxide (N2O) being much of a concern.
Nitrous oxide (N2O or just "nitrous") is an oxidizer that is consumed in engines, nitrous oxide injection is often used to boost engine performance because it increases the capacity of the engine to burn more fuel per stroke (more oxidizer, more fuel). Nitrogen dioxide, however, is a pollutant produced when atmospheric air is heated to very high temperatures.
Your second sentence is, I think, the whole driver for this: VW have been flogging the line that they don't need hybrids because diesel is as good or better pretty much since the Prius got traction in the marketplace.
Toyota seem to be moving to higher efficiency versions of the four stroke cycle, which haven't previously been popular in petrol engines due to a lack of low-RPM torque, and covering this with the electric element.
Well, you can bet a pretty sum that some legal firm is rushing to test every single car currently on the road. So there will at least be enforcement, albeit private. (And for all the whiners about law firms making money off this, that's inevitable when you neuter public law enforcement and rely on private enforcement of laws. Unless the ultimate goal is no enforcement of environmental law... naw, couldn't be.)
It was phased in on the bigger, heavier cars first. The current US-model Passat has used SCR since it was introduced, as has the Touareg with the and every other VW/Audi with the 3.0L V6 TDI. VW didn't put it in the Golf or Jetta until 2015 because it takes up room, adds cost and complexity. By 2015 emissions standards got tight enough that they had no choice.
Prior to that the Golf and Jetta used a NOx catalyst that requires a periodic burn-off achieved by sending a pulse of unburned fuel down the exhaust. Same deal as the particulate trap--that stuff needs to be burned off every so often, too.
Will the EPA and other automotive regulators test other brands for similar problems? Perhaps this practice is widespread. Testing them seems obvious, but I know little about how regulators work.
EDIT: VW isn't the first. From the other story on HN's front page right now [1]
[Caterpillar Inc and Cummins Engine Co] agreed to pay $83.4 million in civil penalties after federal officials found evidence that they were selling heavy duty diesel engines equipped with “defeat devices” that allowed the engines to meet EPA emission standards during testing but disabled the emission control system during normal highway driving.
The EPA has already stated that all diesel passenger cars will be retested. I think all cars should go through the same complete testing process and by more than one organizations.
The EPA didn't find this issue, a university testing team did
Does anyone know how the test was detected? I'm thinking they noticed either the revving of the engine without the wheels turning or just one set of wheels were turning.
Hopefully the EPA will test in a real situation, by attaching the test equipment to the car and actually driving it. That should foil the cheaters.
From the EPA's description: "The 'switch' senses whether the vehicle is being tested or not based on various inputs including the position of the steering wheel, vehicle speed, the duration of the engine's operation, and barometric pressure. These inputs precisely track the parameters of the federal test procedure used for emission testing for EPA certification purposes."
Somewhere I saw a description of the EPA test procedure. It is not just a simple small set of test points. It is a long sequence of operations, calling for specific speeds and durations and rates of change simulating a variety of operating conditions ranging from a wide open freeway to a New York City traffic jam. I believe I read that the order of the various test segments might change from test to test, but each segment's parameters were very strict.
But keep in mind it has to detect the test pretty early. Because non-test-mode emissions are 40x, it has to detect it well before 1/40th of the test is over or it will dominate the average.
The engineer/engineers who pulled this off were pretty slick. I don't condone the cheat, but I am still trying to figure out how they turned on specific emmissions devises, or fooled with pulse cycles, etc.
I have a weird feeling it wasn't fool proof, and they're a bunch of VW owners who failed smog? They brought the auto back, or to a different shop and the code somehow turned on the right components, leaned out injectors, etc? The problem is the customer had to pay for this slick trick.
These smog tests are not cheap in my neck of the woods. Every two years, I end up paying close to $100. They always try to nail me with the "leaky" fuel cap. I just keep a new one in the back storage area, and bring it out at the right time. I'm an ex-mechanic so my vechicle always pass the emmission test, but boy, I have had problems with the visual test.
While I'm here, some of us drive older cars, for a long time. Smog shops in California are required to have one copy of an Emissions Publication. Most use use Motor Publications. That manual is filled with errors. It's is the cheapest emmission manual on the market.
If you happen to fail a visual smog test, go to a smog shop that has access to Mitchell Emission Smog manuals(OnDemand5).
I have yet to find an error in Mitchell manuals.
(The only reason so many smog shops only buy the Motor publications is because they are cheap. Any Smog technician will tell you they have found multiple errors in Motor Emission Publications. Vechicle owners don't have a clue to this problem, and are just sent home with a failed Smog test, or end up spending a day taking to CARB--just praying they will get an exemption. All of this is due to errors in Motor Emission Publications.)
Two things that are surprising to me about this story:
1) The secret was kept for so long. How many programmers were involved with the relevant code? How many project managers signed off on it? Surely VW does its own emissions testing internally so some of them must have known. How high up in management did this go? It seems like it must have been quite a few. Amazing that none of them got mad and told someone outside the company.
2) I would never have guessed that emissions from a car engine could vary so widely. 20%? Sure. 50%? Sure. But news outlets are reporting that these cars are emitting at least 10x and possibly as much as 40x NOx as they should. This is clearly because of my ignorance of the details of the engineering here, but I was shocked that such a difference could happen.
> The secret was kept for so long. How many programmers were involved with the relevant code? How many project managers signed off on it? Surely VW does its own emissions testing internally so some of them must have known. How high up in management did this go? It seems like it must have been quite a few. Amazing that none of them got mad and told someone outside the company.
We should not be surprised; we need to learn to expect it and manage that risk. Institutions of all types have long histories of such conspiracies to cover illicit activity. Think of the many recent financial industry scandals, the Catholic Church (and Penn State University) covering widespread rape of children, various military scandals, US government spying on citizens, IT companies spying on their users, performance enhancing drugs in baseball ... in fact we should be surprised when someone steps forward.
The #1 rule of any institution is loyalty. Rape will be covered for; blowing the whistle is a mortal sin. It shouldn't be that way but we can't deal with these problems until we accept that it's human nature, at least in certain situations.
EDIT: I don't mean to preach. A certain part of me is always surprised too.
I would call it a fear issue more so than loyalty. I would be willing to bet not a lot of people knew to begin with, and the few that were told or stumbled upon it didn't want to make it into a big deal for fear of getting caught up in a problem.
In the past, when I've seen a situation like this, one person in middle to middle-upper management made the call, and seriously only 1, maybe 2 devs were involved. If those devs said anything, it was usually a halfhearted attempt to escalate the risk, and was ignored as "well, that manager must have some reason" or "That's too hot of an issue."
I know, it's a crappy mentality, but most people don't want to get caught up in a big ethics issue at work. It's extremely risky for the person escalating.
As far as how only a couple people might know this even happened, corporate codebases are sometimes a total mess. There usually aren't things like code reviews. Project managers sometimes have absolutely no idea what the project actually is or what the requirements are. Devs often work in a bubble with shoddy requirements worked out by managers in the business and/or IT management. Not every company works this way, but I've seen three like this where the SDLC was miserably flawed.
The used of PEDs in baseball was a well known issue dating back to the 1980s. Players, front office types, writers, and anyone in the public paying attention knew about it. I can't comment on the other items, but it's pretty clear that everyone knew about PEDs but just didn't care enough to ban them.
(That said, my personal opinion is that steroid testing done in baseball is much more about using the issue as a wedge to weaken the MLB Players Association, rather than "fixing" the game.)
I don't agree: Back then I was a very knowledgable baseball fan (I probably could have named almost every player on every team) and I didn't know. I heard occasional rumors but nothing more persuasive than that, and nothing at all which indicated, in any convincing way, how widespread it was. When Jose Conseco talked about it, he was ridiculed as a nutcase and shunned (as expected; see my comment above about loyalty).
I remember when home runs and offense increased dramatically, to record levels, and everyone was saying that the ball was juiced - nobody suspected it was the players who were juiced.
In 1991, the commissioner tried to institute a policy banning steroids. He didn't have the authority, so it was no different than if I tried to write that. But it's a clear indication that MLB was aware of the steroid problem and tried taking a small step to fix it.
Regarding the "players being juiced", it's never been shown that juiced players performed better. There have been a number of studies comparing players who were caught using PEDs, before and after, comparing to clean players, etc. None of them show any indication that taking steroids helped players perform better on the field.
If you look at the power-on-contact or ISO of players across periods (the 90s, 00s, current game), you find that there is just as much power on contact in the game now as before. The different is strikeouts, which is clearly tied to strike zone enforcement and some other tradeoffs hitters are making now that teams understand strikeouts are fine if you have power.
I apologize if my tone has some frustration in it, but my pet peeve is people saying that steroids = strength = McGwire hit ball far. The reality is far more nuanced, and if you are able to come into the analyses without preconceived conclusions, it's pretty clear that the 'steroid slugger' era happened to overlap with the power era, but it does not appear to have driven the higher rate of home runs and offense during the time.
I don't know about studies, but the evidence is strong. Let's look at home runs:
* Since 1920 [1], excluding the PED era, only twice have players hit 60 or more home runs in a season and both barely passed the threshold: Babe Ruth hit 60 in 1927 and Roger Maris hit 61 in 1961.
* In the 4 years from 1998 to 2001, the feat was accomplished 6 times by 3 different players (2 very strongly associated with PEDs, the other widely supsected of it), many blowing away the former threshold, hitting 73, 70, 66, 65, 64, and 63 home runs.
* Since PEDs were banned in baseball, only one player has hit more than 55 home runs in a season.
[1] 1920 is when hitters embraced the modern strategy of trying to hit home runs, led by innovator Babe Ruth. Before that, a period called the 'Dead Ball Era', they generally just tried to get any hit they could and home runs were much more rare. Also, there were technological and rule changes which may have facillitated home run hitting. Before 1919 players regularly led the league with 10-15 home runs; in 1919 Ruth hit 29, a record at the time and more than most entire teams hit; in 1920 he hit 54.
The problem with this type of evidence is that it assumes the single change in the game was the presence or absence of steroids. To learn more from the data, check out the references I included at the bottom. The TL;DR is that there is no compelling statistical evidence that suggests steroids impacted homers, or offense in general.
The facile argument fails to address the fact that the game underwent expansion (weakening the average pitcher). The strike zone was changed a number of times (if you normalize for strikeout rate, the power in today's MLB is the same as in the 90s). Umpires got a lot better once PitchFX was able provide them feedback. (Lots were let go as well). Colorado started using a humidor, reducing home runs at the greatest hitters park of all time.
There's not really any way of knowing who did or did not use. MLB and mainstream sports media "strongly suspected" PED usage is closer to HUAC findings than real evidence. Also, it doesn't acknowledge the fact that a lot of pitchers were found using PEDs.
In short, it's incredibly facile to look at some superficial stats and hints of suspicion in order to reach the "steroids = homers" conclusion. But when you look at the underlying component numbers and adjust for the changing environment in the game, there is no evidence to support that conclusion. (That does not mean steroids had no effect, just that we cannot detect them with our best efforts.)
Here's an incredibly strong counter argument from Joe Sheehan's paywalled newsletter [I added it to pastebin for reference, I doubt Joe will mind]. http://pastebin.com/DXW0HSSt
Dan Szymborski is one of the top baseball data analysts in the country. From [0] (paywall)
"Despite the rhetoric surrounding PEDs, players caught for steroid/testosterone use do not show a pattern of overperforming their projections in the years leading up to the drug suspension or a pattern of underperforming their projections in the years after a drug suspension."
In layman's terms, if all you knew about players the past 10-15 years was their past OPS+ and whether they were busted for steroids -- now or at any time in the past -- it appears the PEDs had no noticeable effect on the projection of their future OPS+.
What this means is that, even with the knowledge of what outliers such as Barry Bonds accomplished while allegedly using performance-enhancing drugs, as a whole, there's extremely limited evidence of a significant effect on statistics of the drug users as whole. And without double-blind research studies of PED use among major leaguers and/or detailed information of what players are using, all we have to go by so far is the bottom-line results.
Now, none of this should be taken as endorsing the idea that MLB should simply open the floodgates and allow players to do whatever they want. Instituting drug testing is a very good thing for the sport -- but that improvement is for reasons other than the record books, such as the long-term health of players and the public trust. As far as the record books being tainted by PED use, well, it appears there isn't much evidence of that."
You are clearly correct and you're probably right that I underestimate the power of loyalty. Just something in my lizard brain remains surprised. Defect in my circuitry I suppose.
For 1), it could be that one set of engineers was tasked with gathering emissions data and finding which parameters got the legal result, another set wrote the software which gathered the data to determine the run profile, and another was tasked with setting the parameters in software for a given run profile. And, the internal emissions testers are probably told to replicate the various government trials. It could be probably done with just one or two directors knowing the whole story.
My understanding is that diesel cars had to be manufactured with either a NOx storage catalyst or injectable urea, both designed to convert the NOx emissions into something less harmful. What VM did seems to be the equivalent of just removing the catalytic converter.
It beggars belief that the ceo and many executives were unaware. Considering that, in order to make emissions standards, competitors have to add hardware to the emissions system or inject urea, which increases costs and hassle to the driver (you have to fill the AdBlue, every piece of hardware is a maintenance cost waiting to happen) and to VW (plumbing, harder to convince drivers to buy diesel.) VW figured out a way to avoid both, a distinct advantage to their diesel products. And nobody in the executive team inquired at all how this engineering miracle they pulled off worked? I don't believe it. If nothing else, someone in the executive team asked how long it would take their competitors to copy VW's innovation. Or suggested patenting it.
It is possible that CEO was unaware. The line was that VW engineers had solved it for small engines with better CDI and engine/transmission management. Theoretically it could be enough and they did patent that stuff.
Of course. My surprise has nothing to do with my opinion of programmers vs other professions. Instead it has to do with the ability of large groups to keep big secrets. That's a pretty hard thing to do.
Instead it has to do with the ability of large groups to keep big secrets. That's a pretty hard thing to do.
Honestly, I wonder if this is a myth started by a large group that was keeping a lot of secrets. It seems like it would be pretty easy to keep secrets under wraps by compartmentalizing knowledge, emphasizing and rewarding loyalty, and intimidating or marginalizing potential whistleblowers.
Part of it is also that announcing this sort of thing online doesn't do much unless it goes viral, and going viral seems to have a lot to do with random luck. There's so many horrible things happening in the world that it's difficult to pay attention to more than a few of them.
I haven't been following the story at all closely, but if VW was able to get (wildly?) better figures than competing companies, I would have thought those other companies would be buying VWs and testing them and/or pulling them apart to figure out how they were doing it... And at some point much earlier than today those other companies would have realized the numbers didn't add up.
Mazda engineers for example thought that there was something in the atomization they could still improve cause that is what they guessed VW did better which now proves to have been a snipe hunt sadly.
To be clear, it's not that VW was able to get wildly better figures than competing companies, it's that, in one engine map, they get NOx emissions levels that are around the same as other companies (i.e. it meets emissions criteria). Then, in another engine map, when it only uses when it suspects it isn't being tested for emissions, it runs a different fuel/air mixture that allows increased economy (which might only be a 10% improvement or whatever), but at the expense of severely increased emissions.
Other companies running the same sort of emission map that optimizes for fuel efficiency at the expense of all emissions would get similar figures of 40X for emitting way too much emission. VW is the main one we're aware of that's cheating in this manner.
Organizations keep those secrets by rationalizing that their behavior is not illegal at all. "This might be against the spirit of the law, but hey, here is this clever loophole that we found." This way, what could have been a perfectly whistle-blowable secret is just a dirty little implementation detail that won't be shared because the people involved are not particularly proud of it. What makes this pattern so powerful is that its persuasiveness does not correlate much with the legal quality of the rationalization: as long as the rationalization is not routinely tested in court, people will happily believe just about anything if it makes their job easier. Doubly so in a corporate environment where optimism is rewarded and pessimism is punished.
Nonetheless it has been very much knowable, for years if not decades, that some level of benchmark-gaming is happening in the car industry. But that's an inconvenient truth to anyone who is living a car centric life, so even people outside of the car industry proper were likely to not make much of it when a car engineer had a spell of loose lips. I am convinced that it is neither a coincidence nor a conspiracy that only a study initiated by a quite car-critical organization could break that wall of motivated disinterest.
Re 40x: a clean combustion combines all the inputs into mostly harmless outputs. Inert gases that have shed all chemically bound energy and won't react much with the molecules that make us alive (unfortunately, we don't know how to perfection that chemical efficiency without sacrificing thermal efficiency). Those mostly harmless gases might still be bad (think CO2), but are not terribly bad as in directly poisonous. In an imperfect combustion, all that stuff can combine into much more reactive and thus dangerous gases. If you set your regulatory threshold sufficiently close to perfection, even a very slight imbalance in the combustion can cause "orders of magnitude beyond threshold". It's the same mathematical principle that makes "many nines" uptime guarantees such a beast: if you fail, you will most probably fail quite hard.
From what I've read so far, this has to do with heat necessary for the catalytic converter to absorb NOx -- without enough heat, NOx isn't absorbed, so in emissions test mode, they're just running the engine in such a way that more heat is generated to make sure the cat works properly.
Fuel economy improves at higher temperatures, but NOx production increases dramatically then. Conventional catalytic systems cannot keep-up so either a selective catalyst (expensive) or improved egr system (performance sapping) must be used.
Interesting! How much heat are we talking about here? When an engine is just running in normal operation it generates a fair amount of heat naturally. I guess that's not enough?
Diesel engines run with a surplus of air so they only burn the fuel they need to. They don't really generate a lot of heat unless they are under load (relative to gas engines). Just cruising down the highway a diesel will not need much fuel and will run fairly cool.
[Dan] Carder [director of West Virginia University’s Center for Alternative
Fuels, Engines and Emissions (CAFEE)] did, however, shed light on diesel
exhaust. The problem, he says, is one of thermal management.
Catalytic converters break down NOX only when they’re hot, and keeping them
hot may sometimes require that you burn more fuel than you need for the
performance you want. You might want to run the engine on a lean fuel-air
mixture, but you have to run it rich.
“There’s also a trap for NOX that acts like a sponge,” Carder points out.
“But if you saturate it with NOX, then you have to go to a rich-burning
condition to use the catalyst to reduce the NOX” and thus wring out the
sponge.
I don't know if it directly answers your question, but NOx emissions are dependent on combustion temperature I believe, so the ECU could potentially adjust fuel and timings to create conditions that don't spew NOx, but don't perform as well either. Then when on the road, it opens back up to increase performance but liberate more of the NOx that otherwise might be bound up in less harmful substances or caught by the particulate filter/catalytic converter.
No, but good question. NOx production varies wildly on factors such as atomization of fuel, ratio vs stochiaometric in mix, temperature of combustion...
It's been known since at least 2014 that real-world emissions from many diesel cars were much higher than lab-measured emissions. There was speculation about defeat devices as well. EU regulators had recently made moves towards requiring real-world testing though unsurprisingly automakers were fiercely opposed.
For instance here's an article from February 2015 that mentions: "Campaigners say that car makers also use tricks such as programming vehicles to go into a low emissions mode when their front wheels are spinning and their back wheels are stationary, as happens in such lab experiments." (http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/03/car-maker...)
What exactly is a real-world test then? The procedure has to be nailed down to be accurate, and at that point we're back to optimising for a given test procedure again.
It seems to have been common knowledge in the industry for some time. It was mentioned on BBC Newsnight in December last year for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjUr3RQRERM
In Germany there are rumors going around, that not alone VW did cheat at those emission tests and not only at those tests. And the rumors are around for a long time now.
It is a well known fact, that in the EU, the emission tests used in the EU are absolute ridiculous (not only the NOX-tests -- all of them). They are totally artificial, so that they have nothing to do with normal car usage. But they are still used. The reason is, that particularly the German government are blocking all initiatives to change them. This does suggest, that they know about the cheating or at least where influenced from the big car industry. The German car industry is very influential in Germany.
Also it is a well known fact, that the gap between the official fuel usage figures and the fuel usage experienced in real world situation is growing and growing for many (maybe most) car brands. I would say, this is the same thing, because those numbers are determined by tests operated by the manufacturers -- and they are also artificial test situations like the emission tests. Officially, the fuel usage of new cars was reduced very much, but some say, that the real numbers have maybe even growing instead.
All this is known for years, if not decades.
Because of the the German government, the EU still takes a blind eye on this.
Yes you see this already for long time in forced induction cars. If you drive like in the cycle you will get good fuel economy, but it you drive like regular people and for example the turbo spools, fuel economy suffers at the expense of performance. What is particularly egregious here is that NOx levels were gamed to 10-40x, not fuel economy (and directly CO2) to something like just 5-10%. In my personal view it is not German government directly so much as for the tax incentives to keep the unrealistic cycles in place (which then the gov gets involved partly for votes and partly for large industry to be able to still easliy sell more reasonably priced cars).
As much I read, the difference between "standard cycle" and realistic driving is currently at 30-40%. And I guess, there is no realistic way, may you be a good driver as ever possible, to reach these consumption levels.
And I don't agree: The tax incentives are also made by the government and the taxes are of course based on the official (forged) numbers. Also when you argue the fuel tax will make it right: No, I don't agree, because the consumers can not decide -- they are also lied at with the wrong numbers!
I am currently shopping for a car and now need to keep in mind which brands/models are affected by this fiasco as another factor in my shopping.
Here in Ireland motor tax is based on CO2 emissions
I can see some very very unhappy VW drivers in this country in coming months if their tax suddenly jumps by an order of magnitude due to this avoidance scheme putting these cars into the high emission bands
I do wonder how Revenue will handle this, not only some people might find themselves with a more polluting car but a larger and unexpected tax bill will impact peoples pockets directly.
The CO2 amount should remain the same—the issue is with other pollutants that cause smog. The only reason that CO2 might go up is if the fix involves increasing fuel consumption. However, you might not even need the fix in Ireland, as many European countries (as I understand it) have laxer smog requirements to begin with.
Regardless, though, I wouldn't buy a VW product right now, wherever I lived.
Euro standards are backwards; they have stricter CO2 emissions regulations, but are lax on NOx. I'd imagine they don't have a lot of smog events like what happened in California during the 60s and 70s.
I wouldn't call them "backwards". They're opposite of the US, but that's because they're optimizing for reducing a different pollutant. Smog is certainly undesirable (as an asthmatic, I know that from experience), but CO2 may well have more dire long-term costs.
Of course, the optimal situation would be to tightly regulate both pollutants.
The main difference is that Europe has separate regulations for Diesel and Gasoline cars, while the US has regulations independent of engine type. You are right that this leads to lax regulations on NOx. That said, the new Euro 6 regulations for Diesel cars should bring Europe closer to US levels.
This is actually an area where TTIP might improve things a lot by aligning different emission standards.
> Euro standards are backwards; they have stricter CO2 emissions regulations, but are lax on NOx.
In Europe, people don't commute as much, and as long hours, in cars, so I would guess NOx levels in city air don't get as high as in the US cities. So maybe there is no need to have as strict NOx emission limits for cars in Europe.
NOtwithstanding the other comments here, in europe the % or diesel cars is already very high. so europe is optimizing for diesel allowances, and the usa is optimizing also for its own local issues.
> Here in Ireland motor tax is based on CO2 emissions
The amount of CO₂ produced comes directly from the amount of gas that you burn. There is nothing you can do anything about that. Except drive economically and thus spend less gas.
The present scandal is not not about CO₂, but pollutants that make the local air quality worse.
I guess, the tax is based on the "official numbers" not the real numbers. So you are in the clear.
As others already posted, this scandal is about the NOX numbers, what is a different thing, but I am pretty sure that the CO2 numbers (which correlate with the fuel usage, as much I know) are forged too (see my other posting).
The emissions standards are particularly inefficient. They say things like emitting 101ppm is bad and 100 ppm is good. But pollution isn't like that.
A much more practical solution is to annually measure the pollution emitted, multiply by the number of miles driven in the last year, and multiply by the tax rate.
What this does is:
1. cause the consumer to care about the emissions
2. introduce competition to have better numbers, rather than merely meeting the standard
3. enable higher polluting occasional uses rather than banning them outright
Other than border disputes, when has measurement been a political football before? The nerd in me is happy about this, but the rest of me is kinda ... sad.
It's also interesting that there appears to be a tradeoff between NOx and CO2 here.
IMO, VW sort of ... prematurely fell on the grenade in a PR way of thinking about it. Actually proving it as fraud would have taken some doing. Admitting it up front does not have clear advantages that I see. If we use the GM keyswitch debacle as a yardstick, there's evidence than being a cheeseball is rewarded. GM managed to constrain the damage to $99M .
Not saying anyone did the right thing here, but the adversarial approach has consequences.
They appear to have been denying it for a year at this point, before they admitted it. So presumably something happened in that period of time that made them calculate that admitting it now was better than continuing to deny it.
I don't recall where I saw it, but there was mention of 2016 VW TDI models not getting road certification until the issue was dealt with. Maybe this was incentive for VW to come clean.
Problem is they've got the money and the market, CEO can't resign and get away with it, they should pay back all plus a hefty fine. This is much too common nowadays, big corps have no face and are too big to fail, no one is directly accountable and geopolitics are at stake. Hit them hard in the monies, would say, but the risk is fear and a market bubble.
As bad as it is to screw the environment.. I am still shocked by all the out rage coming from countries. Its like everyone forgot GM knowingly left faulty parts that were killing people for 10 years. This entire thing seems so political.
The difference is that from start to finish VW's aim was deception, while GM "only" failed to fix a problem after it was brought to their attention. Plus, pollution does kill, just not as directly as faulty parts.
Yeah that is kinda my point. I am upset that GM wasn't held to this standard of accountability or any other car company for that matter. I agree with you that this one is as bad or worse.
[1] Winterkorn studied metallurgy and metal physics at the University of Stuttgart from 1966 to 1973. From 1973 to 1977 he was a PhD student at the Max-Planck-Institute for Metal Research and Metal Physics, where he received his doctorate in 1977.
Winterkorn embarked on his career in 1977, as a specialist assistant in the research division "Process Engineering" at Robert Bosch GmbH.[4] From 1978 to 1981, he headed the refrigerant compressor development group "Substances and Processes" at Robert Bosch and Bosch-Siemens-Hausgeräte GmbH.
I wish this scandal would somehow add pressure to clean up ship and truck pollution. VW is having severe consequences, but their contribution to the problem might not be that significant:
They'll probably start installing NOx emitters in their cars - with defeat devices that will make them active only during tests) - in order to bring Teslas in line with the rest of the industry.
He was only in his job for about 5 months, but I'm not familiar with his previous work history at VW. Was he in some significant sense responsible for the scandal by way of his prior responsibilities? Or is his resignation, for lack of a better way I can think of to put it, an honor move?
Edit: Thanks for the clarifications, all. Although he assumed Ferdinand Piëch's former position as chairman in April 2015, he was VW's CEO since 2007.
He has been CEO since 2007, before any of the VW models with defeat devices were introduced.
Some of the German analysts and experts who are knowledgeable about the industry itself have said that there is not even the slightest chance that he didn't know this.
buying VW stock makes perfect sense. you look at what the value of the company is and when you see a large disconnect between the value and the stock price you buy.
He has said publicly that he is not aware of any wrong-doing on his part. I imagine that just about any board would require just about any CEO to resign after something like this, though.
When it comes to a relatively new CEO, I'm not so sure about that. GM didn't require Mary Barra's resignation over the ignition switch scandal, for example. (Though admittedly that one was smaller than VW's.)
Edit: Winterkorn took over as chairman of the supervisory board of VW in April, but as petewailes pointed out, he's been CEO since 2007, so his resignation makes more sense.
I would imagine at the level of management complexity, liability, and brand awareness of VW, which details get reported to whom becomes very important. He may have been technically unaware of cheating, for instance, but may have been aware of a "test optimizer".
This is about taking a fall. It's up to the courts (I assume, American, not German) to establish how much he is actually at fault. But the idea that they sold 11M vehicles with hardware cheating the emissions test makes his claim fairly absurd. That kind of decision has got to be made at a high level, even if it's just choosing different budgets without looking closely.
> But the idea that they sold 11M vehicles with hardware cheating the emissions test makes his claim fairly absurd.
So a CEO must know every detail about every component of every subsystem of every system in every trim level of every car of every brand that the company sells?
If that's really true, we're headed back to the early industrial revolution. Nothing can have more than a few dozen or perhaps hundred parts, and integration of say electronics and mechanical things will be rare, as it'll be the rare CEO who knows enough about both to meet your standard.
No. But broadly, a CEO is responsible for everything that happens on their watch. And they are specifically responsible for designing their organizations in such a way that the organization behaves responsibly.
Ignorance cannot be an excuse for bad management. If we allow that, then executives can set things up so that they always appear ignorant. E.g., imagine a CEO says, "I don't care how you dispose of that toxic waste, just make sure that it's cheap. And of course it has to be safe [wink, wink]. Just don't bother me with details [wink, wink]." Any employee will know the real message.
The principle that CEOs are responsible for what happens on their watch is major reason cited for their levels of compensation. You don't get it both ways.
Holy moly. I had missed reports of the "GM nod" and their cultural pathologies. What an enormous mess. 95% of people's smarts taken up with performing rituals that shield them from blame. All real communication is sub-rosa, with actual words said unrelated to meaning.
The detail that really kills me is that many employees thought that taking notes in meetings related to safety issues was forbidden. There was no official word of that, of course, but lots of people believed that following unofficial, gossip-routed information was the way to succeed in their careers. What lunacy. They should have been allowed to go bankrupt.
I completely agree! It doesn't matter if this particular CEO knew about this particular detail, because ultimately they're responsible for the culture, the work environment, etc. If they made a bad work environment at the top, and that trickled down to someone deciding to go the cheat route rather than the honest route, that's a problem.
If the CEO did things right and made a good work environment but hired a bad exec, and they applied pressure to people to cheat, and this all got done, again, can be traced back to the CEO.
If the CEO did the right thing and hired a seemingly great exec and that exec hired a bad manager, well, perhaps the CEO didn't do such an exceptional job.
Ultimately all organizational failures like this are failures of management, and the CEO is the top manager so it's all on him (or her) when things go sideways.
But just because it's all on them doesn't mean that we can all safely conclude that they definitely had firsthand personal knowledge of the problem and gave their approval, explicit, implicit or otherwise.
> So a CEO must know every detail about every component of every subsystem of every system in every trim level of every car of every brand that the company sells?
Of course, not. Stop trying to change the argument.
He would know that VW cars are getting better scores than other cars. These are numbers that CEOs and other managerial positions live for. He would know why. Though he may not understand the technical details of why.
> Of course, not. Stop trying to change the argument.
I'm not trying to change the argument. I'm taking your statement literally, and showing that it's entirely unworkable in practice. I'm not saying he shouldn't be fired or have to step down, but to presume that he personally, definitely knew is quite the leap. I can think of several scenarios where he didn't know and is entirely innocent which are quite plausible.
I also think that regardless of whether he personally had knowledge of exactly what was being done or not, he still created a work environment which rewarded the shortcut and the cheat over the right thing and needs to go. But that's an entirely different line of reasoning than "he must have known!" as a justification.
> He would know that VW cars are getting better scores than other cars. These are numbers that CEOs and other managerial positions live for. He would know why. Though he may not understand the technical details of why.
No, not necessarily. You're making an awful lot of assumptions and none of them are even superficially argued, much less backed up by verification. This isn't CO2 where you can draw a pretty clear line correlation between fuel efficiency and CO2 emissions. This is NO2 emissions which are highly variable and depend on a great many factors. So it's entirely possible that for the same CO2 emissions one car might output far more NO2 than another.
I'm very sympathetic to the notion of "if you get to claim credit for the good, then you're also going to be held responsible for the bad" argument, generally I agree with it. This is not an exceptional case. But to argue that because this is a reasonable course of action, that the person in charge of a 500k employee company must have known a particular detail of a particular subsystem? Not reasonable. Not defending the person, the company, the actions, or anything like that but I am attacking your reasoning.
"He would know that VW cars are getting better scores than other cars. These are numbers that CEOs and other managerial positions live for."
Yes. He would know this. I'm not saying he would know or understand the actual technical details (NO2 parts per billion vs other carmakers results).
In fact, I said this, "
He would know why. Though he may not understand the technical details of why."
He would know why they are getting better results. "Oh, we tweaked the firmware and now we're in compliance."
There are no superficial assumptions here. CEOs are NOT that detached. And people are going to tell them things. And they are going to ask questions. They aren't fools.
> He would know why. Though he may not understand the technical details of why."
He would know why they are getting better results. "Oh, we tweaked the firmware and now we're in compliance."
Yes, precisely my point. If he knew that they "tweaked the firmware" well there's a million ways to do that legally and to be in compliance. And there seem to be a few ways you can do it illegally too, and no be in compliance.
The claim he made was "He has said publicly that he is not aware of any wrong-doing on his part." And that's technically true! Hiring someone who punches another employee reflects poorly on you, but that doesn't make the punch your fault. So hiring someone who hired someone who hired someone who told a programmer to come up with a "cheat mode" hardly makes the CEO directly responsible. He is responsible through the chain of command, but not because of direct knowledge.
Finally, please remember that emissions are incredibly complex and it's entirely possible that someday someone will discover a way to get great mileage with low NOx emissions. Maybe it's pulsed injection, maybe it's having more fuel injectors, maybe it's even higher pressures, maybe it's who knows what. So just because you're getting numbers that are better than your competitors doesn't automatically mean that the people in your company must be cheating and that they need to be found out. It's entirely likely that they just did something clever!
The background in broad brush strokes is that a number of wealthy families are fighting (two of them immensely powerful in particular) as well as a union and state. This is what you see publicly of this private battle now.
There is usually more than one cockroach in the kitchen if you spot one. I wonder how many other aspects of their software they messed with in ways they probably shouldn't have...
What surprises me is that VW thought they wouldn't be caught doing this, it took a while but it seems like sooner or later someone would figure it out.
It doesn't disable anything, it just uses a different engine management map that runs the engine hotter or leaner (probably both) to get more power and better fuel economy while producing more NOx.
It's market demand for efficient yet sporty cars. They saw a market and made their cars dominate that market. To that end they were wildly successful, so if you set aside any ideological barriers that would speak against creating more pollution than is allowed, it's a fairly logical decision.
Yes, but what's not logical is cheating by means that seem so blatant as to be sure to be discovered and potentially vaporizing all the gains you made by cheating in the first place.
Weirdly enough, it wasn't the EPA that caught them, so they were doing a good job hiding it from the people that are in charge of finding these things out.
So you could say, they would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling kids!
I think someone at the EPA should be held liable for their lousy testing practices. They test cars on a dyno, which is far from real-world testing. They would have easily caught this if they tested cars in the way and same environment that they are driven.
I fully expect corporations to try and skirt the law whenever possible, that's why we have institutions like the EPA. Their practices need to be sound and tamper-proof. It's not impossible. It's engineering 101.
The head of the EPA should resign in disgrace for letting this situation get this far.
Well, they didn't catch it, but when it was brought to their attention, they verified it and went after VW. This exposed a gap in their their testing practices, but the overall process certainly worked as it should.
Their budget keeps getting slashed. Calling the EPA the disgrace, when you have an actually good target for your anger right in front of you, is nonsense.
I initially wrote a stupid rant based on this [0] about how VW's ex-CEO doesn't speak English, but a quick Youtube search proved that was wrong [1]. Oops!
I'll just leave some quick facts that I dug up in the process:
* VW just had another scandal that made it to HN recently, regarding hiding security vulnerabilities [2]
* VW Group numbers for 2014: €204B of which €12.7B revenue, 583k employees [3]
* the board made some weird-ass declarations about the ex-CEO [4]
My confidence in VW is shaken to the point that I'll never buy another car from them again (I didn't like how they artificially segment the market by owning Audi/VW/Skoda/etc anyway), but how do other German manufacturers compare? [5]
"Geo models were manufactured by GM in joint ventures with three Japanese automakers. The Prizm was produced at the GM/Toyota joint-venture NUMMI assembly plant in Fremont, California, and the Metro and Tracker were produced at the GM/Suzuki joint-venture CAMI assembly plant in Ingersoll, Ontario. The exceptions, the Spectrum and Storm, were entirely manufactured by Isuzu in Japan. Geo Metro convertibles and early Geo Trackers were built by Suzuki in Japan."
Postscript: The NUMMI plant is now owned by Tesla.
Definitely not something unique to them, I just don't like that practice - also, you usually have the regular car brand and the upper-market version, e.g. Lexus/Toyota, not N degrees of "luxury" e.g. Audi/VW/Seat&Skoda. I like what BMW are doing, they have 3 branches based on different applications/philosophies.
On point #2, this was not only VW. That list even included Ferrari.
On point #4, this is pretty normal for any large company playing damage control. GM did the exact same song and dance in 2014.
I don't think I've lost any confidence in VW, but we may be looking at different types of cars. I like driving machines that may not be practical, but a hell of an experience to drive. The GTI's have done a great job of this, and I'll probably buy a new one soon. Currently a 2005 MKIV GTI 1.8t.
Given that VW tried to cheat emissions to improve performance and mileage, it's exactly something that a person like me actually wants (not the cheating the system, but the driver benefits).
> Given that VW tried to cheat emissions to improve performance and mileage, it's exactly something that a person like me actually wants (not the cheating the system, but the driver benefits).
No. They cheated to pass the exam on the cheap, instead of investing in the required R&D to create a motor that gives out the same amount of power while reducing emissions.
Given that they already had their engine for the EU, they didn't want to research a new one that conforms to the more drastic emissions of USA for Diesel. That's just a shitty workaround that was there for too long. That it has been in there since 2008 just shows how careless they were.
I'm wondering what the investigation in the chain of decision will unveil. You can't hide this for so long without some pretty intense omerta everywhere.
> No. They cheated to pass the exam on the cheap, instead of investing in the required R&D to create a motor that gives out the same amount of power while reducing emissions.
I'm not going to apologize for them but I can concoct how it happened... I think it all stems from the termination of the licensing deal on Daimler's BlueTec system/standard. Until 2007 VW used the BlueTec system but probably didn't want to continue paying license fees, track a moving target under a competitor's control, and support a competitor's branding alongside their own TDI branding. Continuing my guesswork, they expected their engineers could work out a replacement system but it proved harder than thought when tested in actual driving conditions. Speculating even more, someone noticed that under certain conditions the TDI engines performed up to the standard so they programmed the ECU to do that. But other performance metrics and reliability sucked. It was going to take time to work it out but the model year doesn't wait. Wild-assed guessing and getting into intent, someone down low in the hierarchy realized you could detect an emissions test (OBD2 port in use, wheel sensors differ, speed and rpm and timing, etc.) and trigger the clean mode. Unless someone stuck a sensor up the tailpipe while the vehicle was actually moving, no one would know and there would be enough time to work out the actual emissions problems. Except the vehicles were selling and maybe someone a little higher up decided not to fix it at all.
I wonder if we're going to see other car companies try to quietly issue software updates to existing vehicles to cover up their own emissions-test-defeating code.
European cities have much worse air pollution than American ones because they went with diesels instead of hybrids in an attempt to be more green and partly because of German auto lobbying.
There are 7+ billion people sharing that air. It's interesting that you'd consider 100 lives worth more than a resource we all require to exist, but not really a stance I can consider agreeable.
There are many differences in this situation, not the least of which that there's a difference between an engineering flaw, and engineering the flaw intentionally.
At 1h19s [1], Pierre Macaudière, head of emission control systems at PSA, admits that the model tested emits 1700 ppm of NO2, after measuring 200 ppm (the legal limit) with their own machines.
At 1h17m11s [2], the researchers commissioned by the EU shows the journalist that not one manufacturer respects the legal limits of 200 ppm. He's frightened to tell the journalist that it's all just a widespread fraud.
* [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JFprj6v37Q
* [1] https://youtu.be/5JFprj6v37Q?t=1h19s
* [2] https://youtu.be/5JFprj6v37Q?t=1h17m11s