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from the that's-a-lot-of-rogue-engineers dept.
Four More Companies Caught Cheating Emissions Standards
From The Guardian :
Mercedes-Benz, Honda, Mazda and Mitsubishi have joined the growing list of manufacturers whose diesel cars are known to emit significantly more pollution on the road than in regulatory tests, according to data obtained by the Guardian.
In more realistic on-road tests, some Honda models emitted six times the regulatory limit of NOx pollution while some unnamed 4x4 models had 20 times the NOx limit coming out of their exhaust pipes.
"The issue is a systemic one" across the industry, said Nick Molden, whose company Emissions Analytics tested the cars. The Guardian revealed last week that diesel cars from Renault, Nissan, Hyundai, Citroen, Fiat, Volvo and Jeep all pumped out significantly more NOx in more realistic driving conditions. NOx pollution is at illegal levels in many parts of the UK and is believed to have caused many thousands of premature deaths and billions of pounds in health costs.
The article goes on to state that the toxic emissions levels are anywhere from 1.5 to 6 times higher in road use than in the lab tests. Of the 200 cars tested only five had emissions levels that matched their test results. This is a rather distressing fact. It seems that we the public have been lied to (again) for many years now. The "clean diesel" might just be a myth.
Given that these manufacturers come from all over the world, how is it possible that this is an accident? Is there so much incest in the automobile industry that the code from one manufacturer has permeated the industry and the rest of the manufacturers are just waiting to get caught?
VW Says Rogue Engineers, Not Executives, Responsible for Emissions Scandal
Volkswagen's US CEO testified Thursday that the decision to use emissions cheating software was not made at the corporate level. Instead, it was "software engineers who put this in for whatever reason," Michael Horn told a congressional panel that is investigating the scandal.
What's more, Horn told US lawmakers that the German automaker was withdrawing its application to sell 2016 autos with 2.0-liter diesel engines because they don't comply with US emissions standards. Horn testified that the 2016 vehicles were equipped with the same type of software that allowed millions of VW diesel vehicles to cheat pollution tests. "As a result, we have withdrawn the application for certification of our model year 2016 vehicles. We are working with the agencies to continue the certification process," Horn told the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
The timing is perfect to throw the engineers under the bus.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday October 12 2015, @10:27AM
Thanks for posting that--I missed it in the wash of the news stream. I agree it's not the engineers, but the CEOs and the boards doing the cheating. But then, isn't that the refrain of the age? The people who are getting the richest are, unsurprisingly, the ones breaking all the laws and flouting all the rules. And it makes sense, after all, what incentive does an engineer at VW have to devise a sophisticated cheating scheme and rope all his colleagues into it? Does he really care if the company sells 10,000 more vehicles? Would he do it for bragging rights at the inter-company softball league? No, he wouldn't. Somebody ordered him to do it.
The CEOs and board members must go to jail and forfeit all they have. Alas, they are too big to fail, eh?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday October 12 2015, @11:16AM
what incentive does an engineer at VW have to devise a sophisticated cheating scheme and rope all his colleagues into it?
You only need one line from the theatrical adaptation to summarize the whole story:
Boss at VW speaking to his engineers: "Engineer a way to make it pass the emissions test, or clean out your desks"
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday October 12 2015, @12:23PM
Not so sure that was the carrot they were offering. VW was breaking the law. Threatening to fire their engineers would be a good way to piss someone off who could blow the whistle on them. I'd assume they were given "bonuses" to keep them happy, motivated, and most important: quiet.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday October 12 2015, @12:57PM
Well I put it a little bluntly and concisely, there's probably vast reams of correspondence about tuning their computer under conditions that just happen to match certain test criteria.
So given 64K of data storage allocated for fuel-air ratio maps or whatever, and you've got all kinds of driving conditions to store in there ranging from idling for hours to autobahn racing, and the boss is all like "I'm not asking you to shoot a government regulator here, I'm just telling you to store the air ratio maps for driving condition #29 in double precision math, and BTW part of the eternal marketing tradeoff of performance vs economy says that driving condition #29 needs to be super economic not high performance" and driving condition #29 was designed by another guy in another department to happen to coincidentally "black box style" match an emissions test track...
An interesting analogy to the whole problem is black box reverse engineering of BIOSes back in the 80s. Who was "the" criminal who did the reverse engineering, well, nobody, really. Or an entire team of 100 people, kinda.
(Score: 1) by pipedwho on Tuesday October 13 2015, @01:50AM
An interesting analogy to the whole problem is black box reverse engineering of BIOSes back in the 80s. Who was "the" criminal who did the reverse engineering, well, nobody, really. Or an entire team of 100 people, kinda.
Funnily enough, the BIOS assembly source code was printed in full in the appendices of the IBM PC/XT Technical Reference Manual. That manual included full circuit schematics, pinouts, and everything else you'd need to interface with or diagnose/repair the machine.
To the benefit of the clone companies, it also included enough information to guarantee that a cloned work-alike would be fully compatible with software and hardware made for the original IBM machine.
That was back in the day, when repair manuals included everything necessary to diagnose and repair nearly any part of the system. These days, you'd be lucky to find enough information to be able to even re-order a replacement system.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday October 13 2015, @06:34AM
Software is supplied by Bosch to many different product lines from several manufacturers. The fact that more models from different companies are being discovered to be cheating suggests that software suppliers are the source.
This stuff is all contracted out by the manufacturers. Seriously there aren't that many software engineers capable of writing an entire engine and transmission management operating system from scratch.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday October 13 2015, @01:48PM
Though I'm sure Bosch supplies most of the code and the customer tweaks it, a large auto maker certainly has the ability to hire such people. And it's not as difficult as you think: http://www.diyefi.org/ [diyefi.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Monday October 12 2015, @01:13PM
Exactly this. Management never actually ordered engineers to cheat, they ordered them to produce results, or else. The engineers concluded that it wasn't possible to achieve the desired results, certainly not within the budgetary constraints. They probably took these conclusions to management, who weren't impressed, and may well have suggested various solutions that were stupid, impossible, or illegal, all while acting as if the engineers were the idiots who couldn't see all these "obvious" solutions. Somewhere in the back and forth, cheating came in as the only way to beat the problem. No doubt the engineers tried mightily to make it crystal clear that management was pushing for results even if that meant cheating, while management was refusing to acknowledge that they pushed anyone to cheat, they only wanted results.
A big problem with combustion is that a major way to achieve more efficiency is leaner fuel mixtures and higher compression, but that also produces more pollutants. I have not heard of any feasible way around this problem. Only thing they can do about it is enrich the mixture and/or lower the compression. And that's the central difficulty with diesel. Diesel engines are higher compression than gasoline. They have to be, in order to work at all. They don't ignite the fuel with a spark plug, they ignite fuel with the heat of compression, and for that to work the compression has to be quite a bit higher than in a gasoline engine. The chemical reaction is CHx, O2 -> CO2, H2O. But if the mix isn't close to a perfect balance or is made hotter, the unwanted N2 in the mix reacts more to form other nasty chemicals. O2 will preferentially bind to the hydrocarbons, but if there is more O2 than hydrocarbon, as happens in lean mixtures, O2 starts bonding with N2. The optimum ratio for minimum pollution is richer than the optimum ration for maximum efficiency.
Are the standards unrealistic? I haven't seen this question asked yet. Perhaps a trade-off is worthwhile. It could be acceptable, not good, just acceptable, to produce more NOx if that results in significantly less CO2. Sounds like most of the industry was cheating, and when that happens, we should re-examine the rules. Perhaps smaller, more efficient engines should be allowed lower emissions standards. For example, what if engines had to produce less pollution than some fixed amount, no matter what size they were? That would give a small engine a significant advantage over a large one. Not saying such a standard is a good idea. It probably isn't.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday October 12 2015, @04:47PM
It could be acceptable, not good, just acceptable, to produce more NOx if that results in significantly less CO2.
Thats the micromanagement problem where there are famous smog filled valleys (maybe 5% of the population lives there?) where more CO2 would be better than smog in terms of total devastation, whereas the rest of the world with working ventilation would prefer higher NOx than CO2.
Meanwhile NOx rusts your exhaust system so you'd have a natural motivation to want more CO2 output and the mfgr who wants to sell you a new car ASAP wants as high NOx as possible.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 12 2015, @07:28PM
"Are the standards unrealistic? I haven't seen this question asked yet."
The answer to that question seems to be implied, in the fact that the manufacturers already have in place "agreements" with the regulatory agencies. In effect, if they disclose in advance that under certain conditions, their vehicles won't meed emissions standards, they are generally given waivers for those conditions.
If we use Google to go back to the first "exposures" of this cheating, the problem is less that the cars sometimes exceed emissions standards, but that they didn't disclose these exceptions in advance.
EPA and everyone else involved knows full well that automobiles on the highway are NOT getting advertised fuel efficiency, and they are NOT meeting emissions standards. And, they sure as hell aren't meeting fuel efficience and emissions standards at the same time. They might meet one, but not the other, or vice versa. Most often, they don't meet either standard. It's all trade-offs.
ICE is having a Pretti Good season.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12 2015, @08:39PM
Is management to blame? Yes. Were there rogue engineers? Sort of.
I've seen it before. Not with cars of course, but the dance goes like this.
Management demands results for an impossible, or very difficult problem.
They say make it work, push hard, do whatever you have to.
They usually don't imply cheating.
Many engineers look at it, nobody has come up with a solution.
An engineer offers a solution, under narrow conditions.
Perhaps they are hoping to make their name, and have let their discipline slide.
Or perhaps they have made the narrow conditions clear, and hope to build on these results.
It doesn't matter which, the solution is eagerly accepted, the timelines are drawn.
Perhaps there is intent to follow up with a better solution.
But that isn't a hard condition, management just assumes it will be taken care of.
The time draws near, the pressure mounts.
The robust solution is not found, it is a hard problem after all.
Time is up, time to make a choice, more research or does it go out as is.
The pressure is on, all it requires is silent cooperation.
And dissenters are hushed up by the mob.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 13 2015, @12:01AM
Supplier Warned VW Of Illegal Diesel "Defeat Device"--In 2007 [greencarreports.com]
.
This wasn't a single component that was diddled by a one guy or even a single division.
The components had to work together and had to be specified, purchased, and tested with the cooperation of multiple groups.
This criminal tactic was clearly known to management.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Monday October 12 2015, @12:15PM
CEO: make our cars pass the emission standards test, or you're fired!
Engineer: OK!
Now, the CEO can claim not to have ordered it or known of it, and the Engineer has a good motive to cheat.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Monday October 12 2015, @02:21PM
Unfortunately the engineer also has no defence, even if the CEOs did tell them to cheat - "I was just following orders" is not a defence.
The CEOs sure as hell didn't modify the vehicles on their own.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday October 13 2015, @06:28AM
I agree it's not the engineers, but the CEOs and the boards doing the cheating.
Its nice that you agree. But do you have any ACTUAL information? Or are you merely parroting the corporate hate mantra?
CEOs would have to ORDER software engineers to make some pretty drastic changes to the code to turn on these defeats.
Software engineers would sooner or later spill the beans, maybe after getting fired or something.
You can't keep a secret that lots of people know about for 5 years. It just doesn't happen in the real world.
I still suspect some software engineer dreamed this up, maybe at VW, but far more likely at Bosch.
The fact that its showing up at many companies is further indication that the engine software supplier probably figured this out, and sold it to several companies. The likely hood of CEOs all dreaming up the same scam and forcing their engineers to do it and keep quiet about it seem unlikely. Someone would have blown the whistle long ago.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.