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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 "As a result, we have withdrawn the application for certification of our model year 2016 vehicles.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: 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]