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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 "As a result, we have withdrawn the application for certification of our model year 2016 vehicles.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: 5, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 12 2015, @09:33AM
It takes a couple days for a story to work it's way through the queue. Since this story was published, other auto manufacturers have been implicated in a broader scheme to do the same things. No, there are no rogue engineers involved in this deal. Instead we have rogue CEO's and rogue members of the board.
http://qz.com/511064/all-car-companies-cheat-on-emissions-tests-its-just-that-most-do-it-legally/ [qz.com]
It’s not just Volkswagen. For years, emissions from cars built by almost every major manufacturer have been higher out on the road than when tested in labs.
In fact, the average gap between real-world emissions and official test results has been growing. A new report by the International Council on Clean Transportation, the research group that first flagged suspicious emissions patterns at Volkswagen, found that under normal conditions the average carbon-dioxide emissions for passenger cars are some 40% higher than the official amounts certified by European lab tests. In 2001, the gap was less than 10%.
I could c/p dozens of stories, all telling the same story, from different perspectives. The fact of the matter is, consumers have been lied to repeatedly, for years, by all the auto manufacturers, often times with the collusion of government.
ICE is having a Pretti Good season.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 12 2015, @09:37AM
Oh, I should have clicked this aditional link before I posted.
http://blog.caranddriver.com/epa-gathering-up-used-diesels-to-test-if-other-manufacturers-cheated-too/ [caranddriver.com]
If there were any illusions that Volkswagen’s emissions-test cheating wouldn’t spark a broader investigation into diesel-car emissions, please allow us to disallow you of them. As reported by the Financial Times, the EPA is going to begin testing pretty much every diesel car model sold today, from all manufacturers, to determine whether companies not named VW also cheated the system. Should anything be found, the EPA will conduct further testing on more examples of a given model. But the EPA already warned automakers that it would start shaking up its testing procedures—what’s interesting is how the agency plans to go about acquiring cars for its experiments.
In order to compare real-world and lab-generated emissions results, the EPA will rent or borrow cars to test rather than receive them from manufacturers. That eliminates any pre-test fiddling by an automaker. To compensate owners for giving up their diesel ride, the EPA will provide them with a loaner as well as free oil changes or car washes. It’s all very clever, but then, the EPA has a lot of cleverness to make up, at least in the public’s perception.
So who’s caught up in this tougher round of emissions testing? Everyone who sells a diesel-powered passenger car in the U.S., basically, with BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Chrysler, General Motors, and Land Rover all being looked at, 28 different car models in all. Nearly every non-VW, diesel-producing automaker has denied cheating its emissions data. But given how far Volkswagen’s ruse extended, well, obviously the EPA isn’t going to just take manufacturers at their word.
ICE is having a Pretti Good season.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12 2015, @10:02AM
> please allow us to disallow you of them.
That's a new one. And an eggcorn I hope to never see again. The term they were looking for is "disavow".
(Score: 4, Informative) by schad on Monday October 12 2015, @10:46AM
The term is disabuse. You disavow your own alleged knowledge. You disabuse others of illusions they have.
(Score: 1) by TheReaperD on Monday October 12 2015, @02:25PM
Damn english majors... *grumble*
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit
(Score: 3, Funny) by BK on Monday October 12 2015, @04:18PM
Language Engineers...
It's just syntax anyway.
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday October 12 2015, @07:53PM
Language programmers... they have weapons of Vi destruction.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by gidds on Tuesday October 13 2015, @12:57PM
Isn't the test approval needed before the cars could be available to rent or borrow? (Else any test failure would lead to a massive recall.)
It's an interesting idea, though. Perhaps such tests could be used in addition to pre-production testing? If the results were significantly different, that could lead to approval being withdrawn.
However, simply making the existing tests more realistic could go a long way. The closer the test conditions are to the real-world conditions we actually want to optimise for, the harder it is to game the test.
[sig redacted]
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12 2015, @09:46AM
On the other hand one has to wonder why all those SUVs are within limits, while much smaller Diesel cars aren't. Is it really just that the Diesel engines are more dirty, or could it be that the limits were intentionally set to put Diesel cars at a distinct disadvantage?
After all, so many producers needing to play tricks in order to meet the limits cannot be a coincidence. And I don't believe that Diesel car manufacturers are generally less moral than regular gas car manufacturers.
(Score: 1) by canopic jug on Monday October 12 2015, @10:48AM
I thought the reason was that SUVs are classed as trucks and thereby fall under a different category for emission requirements.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Monday October 12 2015, @02:11PM
Yep, designing a car to be bigger and heavier so it doesn't have to pass the same emissions test. Which, of course, is not cheating at all, it is just playing-the-system and designing-to-spec.
Unlike designing cars to pass the test with no regard for what they emit in real-world driving (because that is not part of the test), which is in fact cheating...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bradley13 on Monday October 12 2015, @09:59AM
"software engineers who put this in for whatever reason"
Whatever reason? How about: because they were told to. The question is: by whom?
Pardon my ignorance, but: why is the EPA only re-testing diesels? If faked emissions results are a problem for diesels, sure it is also likely a problem for gasoline engines?
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by dublet on Monday October 12 2015, @10:18AM
Because it's NOx particles in particular that are the problem. While there is some gap in CO2 emissions for petrol based cars, it's not that big and petrol burns much cleaner in comparison [air-quality.org.uk].
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome. [dublet.org]"
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Monday October 12 2015, @11:42AM
Technically petrol is much filthier but all gasoline.
Much like there is no "the gasoline molecule" there is no "the catalytic converter" and the chemical environment of diesel exhaust vs gasoline exhaust is very interesting and requires different engineering solutions. It turns out that "perfect" cat converters are really easy for gasoline engines due to the rich HC exhaust. Diesel is not so simple.
Even just 30 years ago "everybody knew" that diesel particulate filters were of course impossible, yet here they are being shipped. Ditto "everyone knows" low sulfur, almost sulfur free diesel is impossible, yet here we are. Where we're stuck right now is there exist some really cool catalysts that given raw diesel emissions they devour residual HC and last forever, but no one has a really good chemistry solution for NOx in a lean exhaust stream other than squirting an ammonia source into the exhaust, the ammonia "naturally" eats the NOx, at least at exhaust temps.
Basically the 50000 foot pix is the EPA is intentionally legislating diesel out of existence. "You must get rid of your NOx" "There is no scientific way to do that" "OK then stop making diesels". The previous hurdles have been understood but too much of an engineering PITA... the current hurdle, the NOx output, is just a scientific question mark. Its not a matter of taking an off the shelf DPF design and toughening it up to survive 3000 automatic cleaning cycles so it'll make it to 10 years. Or having the will to convert the entire fuel distribution system from like 1% sulfur to basically zero. Off the top of my head I can't think of a good lean NOx catalyst, there just aint no such thing on this universe for some semi-interesting thermodynamic reasons. This is no problem for petrol engines but it means diesel production will basically have to cease.
In the end, in terms of energy and human effort spent vs motive power generated, its probably a lot more straightforward to refine diesel into syngas than to make a clean diesel engine. Or put the effort into lithium batteries, mass transit, railroads, etc.
Technologies can die out. More than a century ago there were steam automobiles. Think of the vacuum tube.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12 2015, @08:50PM
And conveniently, diesel is one fuel we might have been able to grow enough of to displace fossil fuels (assuming the whole algae based biodiesel wasn't just a boondoggle.)
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday October 13 2015, @12:00AM
A couple of points:
Technologies can die out. More than a century ago there were steam automobiles. Think of the vacuum tube.
Those technologies died out because they were greatly inferior to newer technologies that replaced them, not because of any legislation that prevented them from being used. Steam cars were terribly inefficient, and vacuum tubes were terribly unreliable, power-consuming, and large.
For diesel, what's the problem with just using ammonia, as you mentioned? If that solves the problem, why not just do that for all diesel engines? Obviously it's a bit of a PITA because now you have another tank to fill, but from what little I've read about the urea-injection systems, a tank lasts a long time, like thousands of miles I think (I guess it doesn't take much to deal with the NOx in the exhaust), so that doesn't seem like such an onerous burden for diesel drivers.
Eliminating diesel altogether seems completely impractical at this time. For small cars, sure, gasoline works well enough (today's latest cars are getting fantastic fuel economy figures), but for 18-wheelers, trains, construction equipment, etc., that isn't going to work so well. There's a reason big engines which need lots of torque always use diesel, and never gasoline. I guess you could deal with that using gearing, but still that's probably going to result in much worse fuel economy. Not to mention how many such engines are in use now.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Monday October 12 2015, @10:37AM
My thought as well. My brother is an engineer at Ford and tells me they use CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency) standards, which are supposed to drive companies to produce more fuel-efficient vehicles, to punk the system and produce more gas guzzlers. So what they do is, they produce a couple of hybrid models and maybe a full EV model. They say to the EPA, "See how green we are, Mr. Govt. Official? We are make 3 kind of green green carz!" Then they proceed to make exactly 100 of each and sell them at one dealership in, say, Oklahoma, where the dealer parks them in the back corner under the weeping willow where all the birds nest and drop crap on the cars below them, because people in Oklahoma want to buy F150s and the dealer wants to sell them those F150s with their hefty price tag.
Cheating and breaking laws is what companies do, and the government rewards them for it. Us, not so much.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday October 12 2015, @12:23PM
I test-drove a hybrid Taurus the last time I was looking, and I can tell you exactly why I didn't buy it:
1. It was about 4 times the price of a used Prius I was also considering.
2. It got 35 mpg versus the Prius' 48 mpg. 35 mpg is not much better than a regular sedan.
3. I was not entirely convinced it was actually a hybrid, because it sure didn't act like one. The gas engine kicked on when going 3-5 mph around the dealer's lot.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday October 12 2015, @01:42PM
Yes, that sounds about right. I test drove the C-Max hybrid and had a similar experience. Of course, I had my brother the Ford engineer sitting next to me pointing out all the flaws and filling in the back-story for each one. I said, "Dude, it is abundantly obvious you're not in sales."
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by TheReaperD on Monday October 12 2015, @02:33PM
This is probably why the CEO stepped down before the investigation. Now, the person answering the questions was not the CEO at the time of the cheating and can claim ignorance while the person that would have to plead the 5th (in the US) is no longer with the company and can hide behind lawyers more easily.
If I was in congress when the new CEO said it was the engineers, I would have had a hard time not to yell out "BULLSHIT!"
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit
(Score: 2) by BK on Monday October 12 2015, @05:13PM
I honestly doubt that the CEO knew that anything illegal was going on. Maybe in a startup the CEO would know, but for established companies, this is seldom the case. The law [wikipedia.org] says the CEO has to understand and be (criminally, if necessary) responsible for the financial statements. The rest is just PowerPoint slides.
I doubt that anyone in the C-suite knew anything inappropriate was going on either. In my experience, even if they once worked in the field, the best a C-Suitor can hope for is to mentor some up-and-comers and read reports. Hell, even if they really believe [youtube.com] in what their employees do, even if it's the core business, they won't have time to read and map and test every code package. In the case of a car company, code is not the core business. Maybe the PHB that managed the coders reported to someone in the C suite...
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 13 2015, @12:36AM
Like dublet wrote, it's about NOx. Current cat doesn't neutralize it so you need something else like urea injection.
There were lean-burning (like diesel) gas engines that give high mileage, but the same problem of high NOx emission stalled their development.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12 2015, @10:02AM
Fine the fine companies, to the tune of a couple of TRILLION dollars. That should teach them a lesson.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday October 12 2015, @12:16PM
They certainly are fine companies!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12 2015, @02:30PM
Even Dr. Evil only extorted 100 billion dollars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12 2015, @02:49PM
Sure, let's just get the bank to print a bunch of money then devalue the currency so we can pay it. Fuck, make it a few quintillion. That way we can finally get rid of all fractional denominations.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RamiK on Monday October 12 2015, @10:28AM
The real problems are:
1. They held off electrification and cleaner combustion cycles from being developed and deployed:
1.1. Toyota spent a decade+ on hybrids that didn't take off since everyone else just cheated.
1.2. Tesla lost investors and sales keeping it a niche since the impression was car manufacturer can produce zero emissions effortlessly and without impacting fuel efficiency in a moment's notice.
1.3. Subaru spent half a decade at getting a cleaner cycle at the expense of their fuel economy which hurt their sales when everyone else just cheated and made it look like they have both.
And so on...
2. Manufacturers moved their factories outside the US, Germany and Japan to second and third world countries since they didn't need the high tech quality controls. Fuji took loses staying in Japan despite it's plants getting flooded in one of the tsunamis. Detroit died since there was no need to even assemble in the states now that Mexico's plants could keep up with regulations...
3. There's probably half a decade to a decade worth of lost industrial robotics income and R&D through manufacturers producing ancient tech using manual labor since it's viable now that's you're in a third world country and don't need the precision and quality of modern designs only robots can guarantee.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hyperturtle on Monday October 12 2015, @04:56PM
When I have made comments like this, about various processes at businesses where I have been retained to be an outside expert, I am sometimes looked at with amazement and asked why I don't want to make them money.
One VP at a place I won't name looked at me like he had a brain blue screen and was slowly rebooting his thought processes but had been stymied by chkdsk running before he could abort it, again.
My suggestion to fix various problems in the design process, because of numerous customer complaints about the costs of continued T&M billing for projects that just were not ending due to numerous problems...this idea of mine was simply not valid. No, the business plan required those problems! Those problems were some of the only reasons customers kept paying them to come out and fix things!
In my favorite example, the owner of the company was in sales, and the "senior vice president" was also sales. There were not enough sales, but plenty of trips across the country to various MS conferences. The engineers were not billing enough; sales were down. They were not going to hire new sales people, though. Personality and ego issues, you see. No, their business plan was to get inexperienced IT people involved and charge full price for them; Everyone had senior in their title! No one wanted to pay the full costs for a non-seniorly skilled person, so the executive staff saw to it that there were only people with senior in their title on staff.
They tried to remove titles all together, in order to help reduce the resentment of the truly more skilled people had expressed... they didn't like be measured the same way by clients in the same regard as some of the less skilled people. Having "junior" or dropping the "senior" was not an option because clients would expect to pay less for those people unless the projects were fixed bid, but if no one had a title those problems would go away! (Fixed bid NEVER happens because of that one time a bunch of beginners were put on a project and it took way longer and they lost a lot of money because they should have done it by the hour...when all you have are beginners.. everything is a project)
Except for those customers that start asking for proof about accreditation and certification and demonstration of skill and such... what irritants.
Knowledge is power and training costs money; experts seem to demand more salary than we'd like to pay them so....
Braindumps for everyone! Download some off a pirate site and give everyone a copy and the training is at no cost and everyone can learn how to be experts! This was the official executive management plan to improve client relationships! Now they can all be seniors and be compared against the industry standards as being certified!
When I see things like that happen up close, with the "executive leadership" telling me that I can go run my own damn business if I they don't like the advice I offer, I can easily see how a company's top management can blame their most valuable resources for the problems that are institutional. The vile leadership at such firms probably don't even cast an image in the mirror to reflect on. It is easy, then, to conclude that the only real people to blame for such problems are the ones they can see for themselves.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Monday October 12 2015, @10:51AM
if we switch to electric vehicles then we no longer have to worry about car emissions testing. in doing so we need to ratchet up solar+battery installations so that people can power their homes and charge their cars without causing emissions elsewhere either. nuclear power can make up the power deficit that energy hungry businesses have. doing this stops the growing coal/oil/fracking environmental disaster, bankrupts the oil countries that would rather we be dead and decentralizes our fragile power distribution system by getting rid of most of it.
seems like we should be heavily taxing the industries that are killing us to subsidize the ones that will save us from them.
(Score: 2) by SanityCheck on Monday October 12 2015, @02:16PM
In such a case, we will simply move our concern to the next dirtiest aspect of vehicle, but there will always be something.
(Score: 2) by scruffybeard on Monday October 12 2015, @03:31PM
Simple to say, not so easy to execute. Most homes still don't have changing stations available to them. Even if it were inexpensive to install them, many homes and neighborhoods don't have the electrical capacity. Then there is still the range problem. Sure you are probably good for your daily commute, but what about your weekend trip to grandma's? The extra taxes applied, to incentivize the switching, ends up being regressive, since the oldest, most polluting cars, are usually owned by people who cannot readily afford to replace them. Solar doesn't work well in all areas of the country, and nuclear brings out the NIMBYs. I realize that we don't have a lot of time to make a correction for the sake of the environment, but I think "slow and steady" wins this race.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12 2015, @06:24PM
Yes, the solution is simple. All we need to do is dramatically shift three sectors of our economy: energy, transportation, and automotive. Lets assume a tiny 30k per market participant in the western world. 50-100k would be a more realistic number. With rough calculation that means that we only need to spend 25 trillion dollars, or about a third of the global GDP to implement that simple solution. Ignoring any inefficiencies in the process, externalities, toxic waste disposal, lost jobs and productivity, the political fallout, or the repercussions to the 80%+ of the population not even close to being able to afford an additional 30k of unnecessary expenses of course.
Aside from all that, yes it is a simple solution. Simple Jack simple.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Snospar on Monday October 12 2015, @11:02AM
It's made clear in several of these articles that the weak link in the chain is the government mandated test and the testing procedures. None of the other manufacturers were found to have employed "defeat devices" and they have all passed the regulated tests using approved methods. Now it's obvious those tests, and the fact that manufacturers can keep testing until they get a good result, are completely useless when trying to assess a cars real life pollution profile but that is not necessarily the fault of the car manufacturers; they are abiding by the law.
Disclaimer, I drive one of the Mazda's that has been shown to be a high NOx emitter when tested out on the road - luckily the vast majority of my driving is outwith urban areas where high NOx is not an issue and easily disperses. The Mazda is still good in that it has very low CO2 emissions which can be regarded as a much worse pollutant.
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by VLM on Monday October 12 2015, @11:48AM
Now it's obvious those tests, and the fact that manufacturers can keep testing until they get a good result, are completely useless when trying to assess a cars real life pollution profile but that is not necessarily the fault of the car manufacturers; they are abiding by the law.
Design to pass the test is supposedly illegal and bad, yet its the only way to pass the test, since the categorization seems to be manufacturers that have been "caught" and accused of cheating and those that cheat but haven't been caught yet. Its kind of like speeding on the interstate, only 0.1% of the drivers getting a speeding ticket does not imply that 99.9% of the drivers went by at or below the speed limit.
Some other examples of working to the test that no one wants to discuss, are NCLB K-12 teach to the test "education" and drivers license testing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12 2015, @11:27PM
When Consumer Reports tests stuff, they DO NOT allow the company to cherrypick the item that will undergo the test.
They go out and buy the item off the showroom floor.
The concept of random sample appears to missing in a lot of these tests.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12 2015, @01:02PM
Are the makers of Diesel engined heavy trucks also cheating? I wonder if the current scandal will extend to them. Here are a couple of EPA pages on the rules that apply --
http://www3.epa.gov/otaq/highway-diesel/ [epa.gov]
http://www3.epa.gov/otaq/hd-hwy.htm [epa.gov]
I just completed a 2600 mile cross-USA trip and there were plenty of smelly, sooty Diesel trucks on the road, in particular on the long climbs in the Rockies. Btw, my small (?? 2700 pound) 2003 gasoline-fueled car gave 32 mpg, traveling with left lane traffic (usually somewhat over the speed limit).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Dr Spin on Monday October 12 2015, @02:03PM
Smelly sooty diesels are probably old, and mechanically injected.
They won't make any NOx anyway.
The NOx problem comes form modern "high performance" diesels, responding to the
legislative requirements to reduce the (relatively harmless, but rather unpleasant) soot.
Engine manufacturers may not have to obey the laws of the land, but they cannot
break the laws of physics.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12 2015, @04:00PM
> (relatively harmless, but rather unpleasant) soot.
Uh, no: http://oehha.ca.gov/public_info/facts/dieselfacts.html [ca.gov]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12 2015, @06:27PM
Diesel exhaust =/= soot
spiritual "-1 no critical thinking skills" to you sir!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12 2015, @11:30PM
A brand new Diesel doesn't produce soot.
A Diesel that is producing soot is out of spec and overdue for a rebuild.
In California you can report them: 1(800)CUT-SMOG
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12 2015, @01:16PM
Kind of sounds like they're full of shit huh?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12 2015, @02:08PM
It is more than that. The c-levels justify their outrageous compensation because they are responsible for so much of the success the company has. Apparently, they can't be as responsible for the failures.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12 2015, @04:17PM
And that's where LLC kicks in. You can sue the shit out of the company but the guilty persons are protected.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12 2015, @04:24PM
Neoliberalism for you baby: profits are privatized, losses are socialized.
Or, tl;dr the casino always wins.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Monday October 12 2015, @03:43PM
I haven't read the regulations. From the name of it, I'd guess it's some (aftermarket) widget with a physical presence. I wouldn't necessarily conclude that works software could qualify as that. From that point alone it strikes me as odd that VW was so forthcoming instead of just saying "we have differing legal opinions on what a defeat device might be".
I've spent decades working for customers selling to strongly regulated markets without having studied the actual regulations. This is always done by the company lawyers via the company people who forward their requirements to me (or actual in-house engineers, who are as enlightened about the legal details as I am).
Now, in the German automotive business there seems to be an opinion "we've always done it that way, and we'll make politics fit to further do so". Hence the NEDC, which has nothing to do with reality. I've said before, that if someone bring the NEDC-fantasy CO2-numbers in alignment with reality, the auto makers would also be in deep shit because they've missed their carbon goals by a third or so. Anyway, they've had the mindset that NEDC compliance consists of mostly cheating (e.g. engines running without alternator). So prepared, they probably didn't find it particularly offensive to cheat with the US tests as well. Especially given the fact that the US limits are most blatant protectionism (e.g. emissions per burned gallon, rather than travelled mile) to keep small import cars out.
The interesting part is if their lawyers at any point in time told them "you can't do that - a 'defeat device' can be part of the works software".
(Score: 2) by BK on Monday October 12 2015, @04:12PM
I'm not sure about your cause and effect here... or about how the standard is about protectionism. At the very least, given real auto sales in the USA, it seems like protectionism has failed...
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Monday October 12 2015, @04:32PM
At the very least, given real auto sales in the USA, it seems like protectionism has failed...
Well, that's because VW cheated. Had they tried to sell at properly-clean-exhaust prices, no one would have bought them :) The manufacturers can't put large truck level detox into a VW Fox or smart sized car at competetive prices ($500 detox vs $10K car or so).
I remember when the smart cars got their particle filters here in Germany. They said they use a so called "open" system (don't ask me about the details) that just slightly pushed down the emissions, so the requirements were barely met - at the expense of 20-25% more consumption.
(Score: 2) by BK on Monday October 12 2015, @05:23PM
Again, not sure how this is protectionism. Maybe the rules are different for locally produced vehicles?
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 2) by eof on Monday October 12 2015, @07:17PM
When the VW defeat tactic was exposed, I wondered how could others not know. Of course, the EPA was fooled; that was the goal of VW. My impression is that manufacturers in the auto industry closely examine the cars of competitors. If they discovered it and didn't reveal their findings, that might suggest it is a common practice or a potential fallback.
There are circumstances where it might not be discovered: tear-downs are not too extensive; they rely on an EPA-like test; VW was using a different diesel technology than the everyone else (I don't know if that would make it more of less likely for a close examination).