Is the software actually designed to "dupe" regulators?
Might there be many legitimate reasons why the emissions vs performance tradeoff might be tailored to driving conditions? Of course when the car is idling it would make sense to minimize emissions as much as possible, just as an idle CPU can utilize a lowered clock speed.
> software actually checks to see if it was in test mode, and altered emissions
I saw this reported, but also saw that it actually just looks for acceleration and steering conditions often found in testing scenarios. There was no mention of whether these conditions are also found in routine use of the vehicle. Not sure which is true.
Agreed. Once the accusations were made public and the stock price dipped, the optimal solution may involve the CEO stepping down... and likely goes a long way to appease regulators and deflect further scrutiny.
Apparently in the VW case, this was their specific intent. Also, limits are limits. You can't have the software allow violations of emissions limits because the driver wants to go faster at a particular point.
That isn't to say that the CEO is at fault, nor would it be expected that the CEO of an enormous company with thousands of engineers would know about or direct specific engineering decisions (and in fact he denies that he knew). More likely than not, he issued unrealistic directives to the engineering team, who met the demands in the only way they could at the time. That doesn't make it right by any stretch, but that appears to be what happened.
> You can't have the software allow violations of emissions limits because the driver wants to go faster at a particular point.
It depends on how the emissions are measured. They could be measured per RPM, per mile, per gallon, per pound transported, or by any of those over time, or some basket of utilization patterns modeled after real-world use.
If you slam the accelerator to the floor, the vehicle produces more emissions than if you'd continued along at a steady pace. Emissions control is a combination of active and passive systems, along with careful moderation of inputs to the engine. So it seems plausible that a complex, computer-controlled vehicle would optimize emissions vs performance by modifying many of the available variables in response to driving conditions.
That is certainly a good point. However in this case, the specifics of what they were doing obviously crossed the line. Normally I roll my eyes when I hear about EPA issues, given that agency's penchant for making mountains out of molehills and ravenous appetite for horrendous fines. But in this case, many rational, scientifically credible people all seem to agree that they were intentionally and egregiously violating the law.
Here is the explanation for what VW is accused of doing.
--- begin quote ---
Specifically, VW manufactured and installed software in the electronic control module (ECM) of these vehicles that sensed when the vehicle was being tested for compliance with EPA emission standards. For ease of reference, the EPA is called this the "switch". 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. During EPA emission testing, the vehicles' ECM ran software which produced compliant emission results under an ECM calibration that VW referred to as the "dyno calibration" (referring to the equipment used in emissions tested, called a dynamometer). At all other times during normal vehicle operation, the "switch" was activated and the vehicle ECM software ran a separate "road calibration" which reduced the effectiveness of the emission control system (specifically the selective catalytic reduction or the lean NOx trap). As a result, emissions of NOx increased by a factor of 10 to 40 times above the EPA complian levels, depending on the type of drive cycles (e.g., city, highway).
--- end quote ---
And here is what happened when this was found out and the EPA and CARB tried to find out what was happening:
--- begin quote ---
VW continued to assert to CARB and the EPA that the increased emissions from these vehicles could be attributed to various technical issues and unexpected in-use conditions. VW issued a voluntary recall in December 2014 to address the issue. CARB, in coordination with the EPA, conducted follow up testing of those vehicles both in the laboratory and during normal road operation to confirm the efficacy of the recall. When the teting showed only a limited benefit to the recall, CARB broadened the testing to pinpoint the exact technical nature of the vehicles' poor performance, and to investigate why the vehicles' onboard diagnostic system was not detecting the increase emissions. None of the potential technical issues suggested by VW explained the higher test results consistently confirmed during CARB's testing. It became clear that CARB and the EPA would not approve certificates of conformity for VW's 2016 model year diesel vehicles until VW could adequately explain the anomalous emissions and ensure the agencies that the 2016 model year vehicles would not have similar issues. Only then did VW admit it had designed and installed a defeat device in these vehicles in the form of a sophisticated software algorithm that detected when a vehicle was undergoing emissions testing.
The engineering team met the demands by cheating, which is not meeting the demands and is criminal. Being afraid to tell your boss it can't be done is not an excuse.
It's not an excuse at all. I'm just saying that appears to be what happened. Whoever actually made the decision to do this should be prosecuted. I was just saying that the CEO may be the public fall guy but it is unlikely that this was his decision.
I haven't seen specific proof of this, other than describing the computer as detecting a lack of steering, etc. Conditions that could also describe the car idling or being driven in real world use cases. It would seem that this point is the crux of the accusation, so I find it odd that more detail hasn't been offered.
Was the software designed only to detect tests? Or is detecting tests (and other cases where limiting performance has no adverse consequences) a side-effect of the system's intended behavior.
For instance, suppose the vehicle was programmed to shut off its engine when stopped at a stoplight. Suppose the test scenario measures emissions while stopped at a stoplight...
All of the reports indicate that the ECUs were programmed to detect tests and enable the changes that reduce NOx emissions. The intended behaviour was to have one performance profile for emissions tests, and one for power/efficiency elsewhere.
The engine shutoff feature is irrelevant, as it happens in the wild when not running emissions tests.
There was an interesting follow up on this which pointed out three things, one GM killed people with their ignition switch cover-up and the CEO didn't resign, the "fix" is a software patch to leave the engine controller in 'minimize emissions' mode all the time, and in spite of this 'cheat' emissions overall have come down 76% in the last 10 years.
So was it more damaging that a small percentage of cars were cheating on their emissions? Yes. But how much more damaging? Not much, especially since diesel cars are a very small fraction of VW's sales in the US.
Overall it is better that this group of cars were cheating as opposed to say Toyota's gasoline powered cars. The overall effect was so small it was not detected by the EPA's and CARB monitoring efforts on air quality which they model against the assumption that people are complying with the regulations.
>> Overall it is better that this group of cars were cheating as opposed to say Toyota's gasoline powered cars
I'm assuming this is due to the fact diesels run cleaner than gas powered cars? This is what I've been told my whole life, so it seems this part of the scandal has been forgotten or overshadowed by the bad deeds of rigging their cars?
No because the impact of cheaters is a function of how much of the population they represent. Since diesels aren't a large percentage of the cars on the road in California the fact that they were cheating was not statistically significant in the overall contribution of pollution. Toyota however has a huge percentage of the California vehicle market and had they been cheating, the measured air quality would not have matched the predicted air quality.
There are a hell of a lot more gasoline-powered Toyotas out there than diesel VWs.
At least in the U.S., diesels are generally dirtier. That might be because our diesel has mostly been high-sulphur, not the cleaner diesel that Europe has. Most diesel engines are built for heavy equipment, tractor-trailers, or pickup trucks in the U.S.
> But how much more damaging? Not much, especially since diesel cars are a very small fraction of VW's sales in the US.
If they are really spewing 40x the limit, then we're talking emissions equivalent to almost 20 million cars that do meet the limit. This is around 1 to 2 years of total new cars sales, or roughly 10% of the active light-duty vehicle fleet in the US. Europe allows more pollution but I doubt it is 40x, and they have a lot of diesels.
This VW scandal has done everyone a big favour. There is a chance that air pollution by all cars - petrol and diesel - will be taken that bit more seriously in the future.
Anyone with the remotest interest in automobiles knows that petrol engine cat-converters do not work when cold, i.e. for the first fifteen minutes or so. Therefore all of those school runs and all of those trips to the local supermarket to pick up a few things are pollution nightmares for people with asthma. Nobody thinks this through to that conclusion, even though it is not rocket science.
The real evil with diesel is the ultra small particles that are too fine for one's lungs to cough up. This has not been addressed, again, it is just the way it is and someone else's problem - maybe that asthma sufferer.
This don't care attitude has history, our parents were quite happy to drive around pumping lead into the faces of children just because everyone did it. Maybe there can be a turning point here with car driving becoming the new smoking, with drivers made pariahs too.
As much as VW are a remarkable company in many ways with many highly desirable products, I do hope that the lawsuits keep on coming - total bankruptcy would be just desserts. I also hope for contagion with pretty much every other car maker also given a severe grilling.
As a product the car really is enemy number one as far as the environment is concerned. There is the noise, the danger, the wars for oil as well as the air pollution. Imagine how much our urban centres would be improved if every road had those rows and rows of tin boxes removed.
On a recent trip to the countryside I opened a local paper. Page after page concerned road accidents. It seemed that was all there was to report. We have got to move on from these horrible little tin boxes and the filth they spew as our lives depend on it.
Perhaps historically, but shift your gaze forward and the opposite is likely to be true. Climate change will likely lead to the end of many millions of lives (billions?). Not to mention, of course, all the death and disease that has been caused as a result of the various pollutants produced by ICEs.
Well, yeah, and over the last two hundred years, amputating injured limbs willy-nilly saved many thousands of lives that would otherwise have been lost to infections. But nowadays we have better options and can do better a lot of the time.
People at work are saying this is the end of VW. The fines are so big, they will never be able to pay them. My answer is "Lawyers". VW's lawyers will argue and deal until fines, civil penalties are slaps on the wrist and written off to reduce next year's taxes.
We really need corporate "death" penalty.
And if by some miracle, regulators grow balls and ability to beat corporate lawyers. All the executives will ride home on golden parachutes. Company will be restructured. Business will continue as normal. Only people paying for this crime will be 11million owners of fucked up cars, thousands of "little people" workers and the Environment.
Well, IDK. Those who order criminal behavior are the ones higher up who have a lot of connections and will find a new job. The average worker will pay the price by being long-term unemployed.
If you want the regulators and their lawyers to grow fangs, they should go after the executives and jail them. And strengthen whistleblower laws.
I looked for the "European Federation for Transport and Environment," which is cited to be the agency that alerted of the differences between laboratory and real world testing. I'd add the link from their website too:
The reason is their expectation that (quote): "The evidence suggests he will not be the last head of a carmaker offering apologies in the next few months as other manufacturers will be found making use of “defeat devices” for tricking laboratory tests."
I do wonder what the "fix" will be for these cars. The test drive is a quintessential part of the purchasing decision in my experience, and potentially the fix will significantly alter the drive feel.
41 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadMight there be many legitimate reasons why the emissions vs performance tradeoff might be tailored to driving conditions? Of course when the car is idling it would make sense to minimize emissions as much as possible, just as an idle CPU can utilize a lowered clock speed.
Varying emissions based on load is perfectly reasonable.
I saw this reported, but also saw that it actually just looks for acceleration and steering conditions often found in testing scenarios. There was no mention of whether these conditions are also found in routine use of the vehicle. Not sure which is true.
That isn't to say that the CEO is at fault, nor would it be expected that the CEO of an enormous company with thousands of engineers would know about or direct specific engineering decisions (and in fact he denies that he knew). More likely than not, he issued unrealistic directives to the engineering team, who met the demands in the only way they could at the time. That doesn't make it right by any stretch, but that appears to be what happened.
It depends on how the emissions are measured. They could be measured per RPM, per mile, per gallon, per pound transported, or by any of those over time, or some basket of utilization patterns modeled after real-world use.
If you slam the accelerator to the floor, the vehicle produces more emissions than if you'd continued along at a steady pace. Emissions control is a combination of active and passive systems, along with careful moderation of inputs to the engine. So it seems plausible that a complex, computer-controlled vehicle would optimize emissions vs performance by modifying many of the available variables in response to driving conditions.
That is certainly a good point. However in this case, the specifics of what they were doing obviously crossed the line. Normally I roll my eyes when I hear about EPA issues, given that agency's penchant for making mountains out of molehills and ravenous appetite for horrendous fines. But in this case, many rational, scientifically credible people all seem to agree that they were intentionally and egregiously violating the law.
That does seem to be the case. I'm curious when the dust settles if the spirit or the letter (or neither, both) of the EPA requirement was violated.
Here is the explanation for what VW is accused of doing.
--- begin quote ---
Specifically, VW manufactured and installed software in the electronic control module (ECM) of these vehicles that sensed when the vehicle was being tested for compliance with EPA emission standards. For ease of reference, the EPA is called this the "switch". 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. During EPA emission testing, the vehicles' ECM ran software which produced compliant emission results under an ECM calibration that VW referred to as the "dyno calibration" (referring to the equipment used in emissions tested, called a dynamometer). At all other times during normal vehicle operation, the "switch" was activated and the vehicle ECM software ran a separate "road calibration" which reduced the effectiveness of the emission control system (specifically the selective catalytic reduction or the lean NOx trap). As a result, emissions of NOx increased by a factor of 10 to 40 times above the EPA complian levels, depending on the type of drive cycles (e.g., city, highway).
--- end quote ---
And here is what happened when this was found out and the EPA and CARB tried to find out what was happening:
--- begin quote ---
VW continued to assert to CARB and the EPA that the increased emissions from these vehicles could be attributed to various technical issues and unexpected in-use conditions. VW issued a voluntary recall in December 2014 to address the issue. CARB, in coordination with the EPA, conducted follow up testing of those vehicles both in the laboratory and during normal road operation to confirm the efficacy of the recall. When the teting showed only a limited benefit to the recall, CARB broadened the testing to pinpoint the exact technical nature of the vehicles' poor performance, and to investigate why the vehicles' onboard diagnostic system was not detecting the increase emissions. None of the potential technical issues suggested by VW explained the higher test results consistently confirmed during CARB's testing. It became clear that CARB and the EPA would not approve certificates of conformity for VW's 2016 model year diesel vehicles until VW could adequately explain the anomalous emissions and ensure the agencies that the 2016 model year vehicles would not have similar issues. Only then did VW admit it had designed and installed a defeat device in these vehicles in the form of a sophisticated software algorithm that detected when a vehicle was undergoing emissions testing.
--- end quote ---
Is there any information about how this happened organizationally within VW? Was there widespread awareness?
For instance, suppose the vehicle was programmed to shut off its engine when stopped at a stoplight. Suppose the test scenario measures emissions while stopped at a stoplight...
The engine shutoff feature is irrelevant, as it happens in the wild when not running emissions tests.
http://www.classactionrebates.com/settlements/intel-pentium-...
So was it more damaging that a small percentage of cars were cheating on their emissions? Yes. But how much more damaging? Not much, especially since diesel cars are a very small fraction of VW's sales in the US.
Overall it is better that this group of cars were cheating as opposed to say Toyota's gasoline powered cars. The overall effect was so small it was not detected by the EPA's and CARB monitoring efforts on air quality which they model against the assumption that people are complying with the regulations.
I'm assuming this is due to the fact diesels run cleaner than gas powered cars? This is what I've been told my whole life, so it seems this part of the scandal has been forgotten or overshadowed by the bad deeds of rigging their cars?
At least in the U.S., diesels are generally dirtier. That might be because our diesel has mostly been high-sulphur, not the cleaner diesel that Europe has. Most diesel engines are built for heavy equipment, tractor-trailers, or pickup trucks in the U.S.
If they are really spewing 40x the limit, then we're talking emissions equivalent to almost 20 million cars that do meet the limit. This is around 1 to 2 years of total new cars sales, or roughly 10% of the active light-duty vehicle fleet in the US. Europe allows more pollution but I doubt it is 40x, and they have a lot of diesels.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7384/state-of-cheating-in-andr...
Anyone with the remotest interest in automobiles knows that petrol engine cat-converters do not work when cold, i.e. for the first fifteen minutes or so. Therefore all of those school runs and all of those trips to the local supermarket to pick up a few things are pollution nightmares for people with asthma. Nobody thinks this through to that conclusion, even though it is not rocket science.
The real evil with diesel is the ultra small particles that are too fine for one's lungs to cough up. This has not been addressed, again, it is just the way it is and someone else's problem - maybe that asthma sufferer.
This don't care attitude has history, our parents were quite happy to drive around pumping lead into the faces of children just because everyone did it. Maybe there can be a turning point here with car driving becoming the new smoking, with drivers made pariahs too.
As much as VW are a remarkable company in many ways with many highly desirable products, I do hope that the lawsuits keep on coming - total bankruptcy would be just desserts. I also hope for contagion with pretty much every other car maker also given a severe grilling.
As a product the car really is enemy number one as far as the environment is concerned. There is the noise, the danger, the wars for oil as well as the air pollution. Imagine how much our urban centres would be improved if every road had those rows and rows of tin boxes removed.
On a recent trip to the countryside I opened a local paper. Page after page concerned road accidents. It seemed that was all there was to report. We have got to move on from these horrible little tin boxes and the filth they spew as our lives depend on it.
People at work are saying this is the end of VW. The fines are so big, they will never be able to pay them. My answer is "Lawyers". VW's lawyers will argue and deal until fines, civil penalties are slaps on the wrist and written off to reduce next year's taxes.
We really need corporate "death" penalty. And if by some miracle, regulators grow balls and ability to beat corporate lawyers. All the executives will ride home on golden parachutes. Company will be restructured. Business will continue as normal. Only people paying for this crime will be 11million owners of fucked up cars, thousands of "little people" workers and the Environment.
Well, IDK. Those who order criminal behavior are the ones higher up who have a lot of connections and will find a new job. The average worker will pay the price by being long-term unemployed.
If you want the regulators and their lawyers to grow fangs, they should go after the executives and jail them. And strengthen whistleblower laws.
http://www.transportenvironment.org/publications/vw%E2%80%99...
The reason is their expectation that (quote): "The evidence suggests he will not be the last head of a carmaker offering apologies in the next few months as other manufacturers will be found making use of “defeat devices” for tricking laboratory tests."