Handelsblatt GmbH reports
A German government task force has now discovered the same devices designed to cheat emissions tests were found in two of luxury carmaker Audi's models -- the Audi A8 Automatic with V8 and V6 engine, built from 2009 to 2013. A total of some 24,000 Audi vehicles are affected by the cheat, with around half of them having been sold in the carmaker's home market Germany and the rest throughout Europe.
Germany's Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt, who announced the findings on Thursday, has demanded a recall of those vehicles and set a June 12 deadline for the carmaker to come up with a comprehensive plan to refit the cars. On Friday, state prosecutors in Munich confirmed to Handelsblatt that they would investigate the new disclosures.
The findings mean that Audi cars sold in Europe will also now be investigated, according to Ken Heidenreich, a spokesperson for the Munich state prosecutors office. Until now, prosecutors had only been looking into some 80,000 cars sold in the United States, where Audi admitted at the start of 2017 that cars had been manipulated to cheat emissions tests. Europe wasn't part of the investigation because Germany's automotive authorities believed there was no manipulation on this side of the Atlantic.
Further, Ars Technica reports A year of digging through code yields "smoking gun" on VW & Fiat diesel cheats
For more than a year, researchers studied 926 firmware images from the VWs and Audis identified by the EPA in 2015, and they found a potential defeat device in 406 of those firmware images. All the cars studied had Engine Control Unit (ECU) systems developed by Bosch.
Interestingly, Volkswagen may not have written any of the code that enabled its scandal, although it may have requested certain functions from Bosch. The researchers note: "We have found no evidence that automobile manufacturers write any of the code running on the ECU [Engine Control Unit]. All code we analyzed in this work was documented in documents copyrighted by Bosch and identified automakers as the intended customers."
[...] The researchers [...] discovered that Volkswagen's defeat devices were far more nuanced than anything found previously. [Team leader, computer scientist Kirill Levchenko of the University of California San Diego said] told Eurekalert that the "Volkswagen defeat device is arguably the most complex in automotive history."
The researchers found that the cars assumed they were being tested in a lab until a sensor reading ruled out a lab test. At that point, "the vehicle can switch to an operating regime favored by the manufacturer for real driving rather than the clean regime necessary to pass the emission test," the research paper noted (PDF).
(Score: 5, Interesting) by frojack on Saturday June 03 2017, @10:42PM (1 child)
I can see why milage measurements might have to be run in specific laboratory environments following a strict protocol, but why emissions tests?
Throw them on the road, with wires and sniffers up the tail pipe, their own GPS tracker, and camera recording of the tail pipe, fed to a computer locked in the trunk and drive them around for a few hours or days and let the third party testing authority remotely trigger measurements at random any time the vehicle was moving. 20 vehicles each, chosen by random VIN bingo.
Why tell the manufacturers the precise test protocol? The cars are supposed to not pollute ALL the time.
Certainly Bosch has to go down as a co-conspirator in these things. Bosch had cornered the EU market for software in diesels.
(When this story broke years ago, I mentioned that almost no car company writes their own engine software - and Bosch was the common thread.)
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday June 04 2017, @04:38PM
The problem is the general public is being fed fake news from the journalists that the engineers "hacked the system" presumably by breaking passwords and such. All thats happening is a weird rule set it getting optimized to, and the weird ruleset seems to have nothing to do anymore with normal driving. Of course back when this stuff was rolled out in the 70s, the idea of super optimization was kinda ridiculous.
In athletic terms we seem to have some weird gentlemens agreement that we're going to send a relatively homogeneous group of 100 healthy and athletic dudes to the competition where some will randomly run marathons, some sprints, some play defensive back american football, some baseball pitching, some swimming, some lifting weights, but just good ole american boys cross section of athletic humanity. And these Germans have the gall to send specialists. Our good ole boys who might be lettering in marathon runs at track are having to compete with kids who have been built to weightlift all their lives in weightlifting competitions and they're crushing us. Why they even have people in the swimming competition who knew how to swim before being assigned to the competition! Unforgivable.
Our 70s designed system worked well in the 70s when 4K of eprom was like $50 but not so good today, and we'll probably end up with something like your idea.
My guess is big brother loves to watch us so Big Bro will track every gallon that goes into every gas tank and thats how reports will be listed, based on a mix of massive tracking and insurance company self reporting (My insurance company occasionally asks how many miles on my odometer... on very long term average they have a pretty good idea what MPG I"m getting)
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday June 03 2017, @11:38PM (2 children)
The last article I read was chock full of suggestions and quotes that indicated that it all started at Audi, then was brought to Volkswagen. Of course the whole scheme was entrenched in the management and the engineering of both lines of cars. Bosch takes a bad hit here though. Bosch is known for making a lot of good things. Here we find them in bed with the corrupt leaders of the auto industry. Bad, Bosch. Bad, bad, bad Bosch! No more chew toys for Bosch!
(Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Saturday June 03 2017, @11:48PM
You have to admit, though, they are good of what they're doing.
Even when they do bad (ethical) things, the things are done with good engineering skills and practice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Sunday June 04 2017, @06:21AM
I believe any of us who has ever worked under corporate rule knows exactly what happened.
If one is not a "team player", one gets replaced...
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 04 2017, @02:28PM (1 child)
The internal operation of their emissions code now seems widely known.
It appears to contain multiple defeat features for the auto manufacturer to choose from when they pick the operating parameters to use in the field.
We are not talking about a single programmer, but rather an industry including both the auto manufacturer and his supply chain.
Perhaps Bosch's defense is 'we just made the tools, we didn't choose to use them'.
With the level of work put into this, I'd bet there was a collaborative effort between the Bosch and their customers.
It seems likely that this level of effort was well known at the management level.
If this is the case, they knew full well how their stuff was used in the field.
The German legal system may have a provable conspiracy that should land some CEO's in jail.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 04 2017, @05:31PM
The German legal system may have a provable conspiracy that should land some CEO's in jail.
That will never happen. They *will* find a scapegoat. You and I both know it.
Basically all municipalities running tests can not trust the stand still tests and just need to run a pipe up the exhaust and drive it around in random areas. You can not trust the computer which is even MORE worrisome. Meaning there could be a bug where these computers go into 'test' mode and do odd things. The mantra of all car engineers should be 'fail safe' not 'fail to more profit'. Extra code laying around also gives more attack vectors for thieves to use.
(Score: 1) by pr on Tuesday June 06 2017, @08:07AM
I do wonder to what extent driving style is important to emissions levels. I'd imagine that no matter how clean running the motor, if you accelerate excessively, you're going to end up with lots of nasty emissions. Anyone know how significant driving style is versus engine design?
Clearly I'm not defending cheating and lying on the part of car manufacturers, but I am genuinely interested in finding the root causes of this problem.
I'd also be curious to what extent the fuel can be improved.
Pr