Multiple sites have been reporting that former Audi CEO, Rupert Stadler, will plead guilty for his role in the 2015 emissions scandal where Audi and VW software was modified to evade emissions testing. The proprietary software embedded in the cars was modified to detect when the cars were being operated in testing conditions and modified the vehicle's operation to reduce emissions enough to pass the inspection. However, during normal operation, they polluted like crazy, up to 40x the NOx shown during testing conditions. The plea deal he has been offered to him in this trial which started 2020 is expected to be a €1.1 million fine and serve a suspended sentence of up to two years. Stadler has spent several months in pre-trial detention to prevent him from interfering with witnesses further.
Remember Dieselgate? It's been nearly a decade since a whistleblower outed Volkswagen and its sister brands in 2015 over tech invented in 1999 that was designed to fool emission testing. Despite the company facing fines worldwide, having involvement in further probes, and being forced to buy back affected cars, the automaker and its problem-era executives are still facing legal backlash.
The scandal has cost those automakers tens of billions so far. There was an initial attempt to blame only low level employees. However, as the trial shows there was more to it than that and that plans came from the highest levels. Further documents show that the emissions software had been in cheat mode for many years.
- Engadget: Former Audi CEO Rupert Stadler will plead guilty to Dieselgate involvement
- New York Times: Former Audi Chief to Plead Guilty in Emissions Scandal
- The Drive: Former Audi Boss Set to Confess for Role in VW Dieselgate Scandal
- VOA: Ex-Audi CEO to Plead Guilty Over 'Dieselgate' Scandal
- The Verge: Germany charges ex-Audi CEO for alleged role in Dieselgate
- Deutsche Welle: Former head of Audi to confess in 'dieselgate' fraud trial
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 06, @11:02AM (5 children)
Too bad was just a suspended sentence... But at least he supposedly did some time in detention.
And still better than the usual company paying a fine and nobody doing any time (or just scapegoats). That would just be the government taking a share of the money and going "bad boy, don't do it again!" with a wink.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Saturday May 06, @11:07AM (3 children)
What would have been really useful, aside from actual jail time for the C-suite, would be a prohibition further closed-source development for their embedded systems. They have not just violated trust but the actual law and the only way to ensure that there are no repeat violations would be to move the work out into the open. I don't care if they choose the 2-clause BSD license or the AGPL 3 or something in between. The important thing is to stop them from further cheating by shining a light on what's going into the car's computers. Otherwise it will just be more of the same again once the court's attention turns elsewhere and a little time has passedd.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 4, Informative) by RS3 on Saturday May 06, @04:39PM (1 child)
Add a court order / rule saying they're not allowed to encrypt or in any way hide or obfuscate the code in the cars or anywhere, nor are they allowed to prohibit reverse-engineering of the code or any of the systems.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by canopic jug on Sunday May 07, @07:52AM
A court order would help but they don't really have to do much of anything to block that. Both the CFAA and the DMCA are written broadly enough that there are many loopholes to consider. That's why requiring them to publish the embedded code under an explicitly Free and Open Source Software license would be the way forward in this specific case. Taking on the CFAA and the DMCA is a low priority what with the RESTRICT Act (s.686 [congress.gov]) or EARNIT in the works aiming to make the situation astronomically worse.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday May 06, @04:44PM
passedd: daemon form of passed. :)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 06, @06:39PM
No sympathy for Audi CEO, Rupert Stadler, but imo the problems at VW/Audi started earlier with Ferdinand Piëch (1937 – 2019).
From https://www.stuttcars.com/ferdinand-piech/ [stuttcars.com]
Fyi, he started with a family connection:
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Saturday May 06, @01:12PM (5 children)
What are young employees to do when they discover that the person who can do more than fire them in an instant is a lying, cheating scumbag trying to suck them in, trap them if they can't get them willingly on board with the cheating? The poor sap will be facing enormous coercive pressure to go along with it all. Any employee that's been fool enough to fall into financial dependence is so screwed. Lose that job, and the employee can say goodbye to their car, home, and even family. You don't want your kids to go hungry, do you?? Further, it's not just their current job that's in peril, it could be an employee's whole career.
But, for those who do play along, there are more traps. First, now they can be blackmailed. Be a real shame if the cheating were to be discovered. You'd better get busy doing more things to cover up. Dig that hole deeper.
Then, they get to be the fall guys. If or more like when the schemes are exposed, the C-suite types will throw those overly loyal employees to the wolves in a heartbeat.
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Saturday May 06, @01:19PM (2 children)
I worked for an implantable med device company that has a 1/700 adverse reaction immediately after implantation and a CEO who actively intimidated employees away from investigating anything related to the phenomenon. I left just about as soon as my two year payback for moving expenses period ended.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 06, @04:53PM (1 child)
Anonymous whistle-blower would have been an appropriate additional action.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Saturday May 06, @08:21PM
They acknowledged the phenomenon, "studied it" as required by the FDA, but basically did the bare minimum required by law/the agency, and any employee initiative into deeper study or understanding of the phenomenon was what was suppressed.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 06, @01:48PM (1 child)
Shocked, shocked I am that senior employees take advantage of juniors. Next you'll be telling me they take credit for work they didn't do. I can't believe this - my world is rocked.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Sunday May 07, @03:08PM
I think every engineering program should have a class on dealing with dysfunctional workplaces. It's not as easy as most engineers suppose. Knowing b.s. and lies when you see them is the easy part, and even that isn't always all that easy. It's avoiding the treachery and traps that's hard. The financial bind in which you can't afford to quit or you'll lose your home and transportation because you can't make the monthly payments any more, is fairly easy to dodge, for those who have some discipline to not spend unnecessarily. But there are other traps. When employers offer to cover your moving expenses, what they deliberately don't bring to your attention is that the contract too likely has a little provision in there that says if you leave the job before you've been there a year, you have to pay back those moving expenses. If you do spot this proviso, and ask why it's there, they'll try to brush it off. Tell you not to worry about it. It's okay. A very common one is saying it's a standard clause and all employers do it. Another is the sob stories about how poor little them were the victims of former employees who quit less than 90 days after they'd spent all this money helping them move. DON'T spend a fortune moving! For those who don't exercise restraint on their spending, well, they'll soon wish they had. One pithy summation of this I read years ago in a magazine: "Kid, always keep some Fuck You Money." What's Fuck You Money? "So you can tell your boss, 'Fuck you.'"
But what do you do when they put words in your mouth? Heck, they might even have access to your communications, and forge messages supposedly from you, and you might not discover this for weeks. I've had that done to my resume. Management decided it needed to be more impressive. But they didn't know what was impressive, and added some garbage that ended up just making me look stupid.
There is also being pressured to approve some plan, design, or product. They want an engineer to give their b.s. a stamp of approval, and even if the engineer correctly refuses to do so, they may just say the engineer approved anyway. They may wait a while, then gaslight the engineers by claiming that, see, they did give the design their approval. Busy engineers may not remember for certain, and may not realize that the records could be falsified, and accept their supposed integrity. And now, the engineers have to make it work somehow. As is all too likely with designs made by manipulative morons, it's too loosely defined for anyone to be sure how it's supposed to work or even exactly what is wanted, which provides more scope for more gaslighting. You're on the carpet for things you never said and things that no one can do, and your denials are not believed. Liars want to believe everyone lies as much as they do, and will be secretly pleased to see you looking like a liar, and stressing over it. Some hate and envy engineers, for being smarter than they are. And some are even crazy enough to destroy their own employment prospects and even tank the company if by doing so they can take a few engineers down with them. Engineers may have trouble believing any supposed professional could be that stupid, to cut their own throats out of spite and malice, and may therefore discount the signs that they are that stupid.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday May 06, @02:53PM (5 children)
Here's a summary of what happened:
Given a public, documented, hyper optimized unit test.
Boss: "Hey engineers, do your TDD thing and pass that unit test."
Engineers: "OK boss."
Whoops a daisy, doing that is a felony.
The usual suspects: "Workers of the world unite, etc etc etc"
Its something to think about... anyone who's ever done test driven development can be considered a felon if their boss doesn't pay off the regulators like everyone else does.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 06, @03:22PM (4 children)
So . . . the bad guys here are . . . the testers and regulators?
What about the other companies who weren't cheating to pass the test? Chumps and suckers 'cause if you ain't cheating you ain't trying? If this test was designed to be done under normal operating conditions and they're 40x above where they're supposed to be, the high optimization is clearly being done on the cheating side and not the testing side.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 06, @04:51PM (3 children)
VLM didn't say any of that. You're that same AC who reads into things, makes up stories, then pins your distorted fiction back on the poster, then refutes your own fabrication. Go back to arguing with yourself in a mirror.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by sonamchauhan on Sunday May 07, @05:57AM (2 children)
VLM made bad points
The Audi CEO knew his cars were fooling the public, and continued to sell them. That's why he was sentences
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 08, @07:02PM (1 child)
Name one.
(Score: 3, Touché) by sonamchauhan on Tuesday May 09, @12:04AM
This analogy is inaccurate. Let's say the CEO did merely tell his workers to tune the engine honestly. Instead they code an emissions cheat mode in software. Then Audi sells the software the VW. VW is exposed. The cheat software came from Audi. At that point, the Audi CEO should investigate because Audi wrote that software.
Instead he hides it, and later interferes with witnesses, according to the charges he pled guilty to.
(Score: 2) by Entropy on Monday May 08, @06:13PM
Yes the injured parties have vehicles with better miles per gallon, and better reliability...That produce more NOx. Poor injured parties.