Volkswagen, the world’s top-selling automaker, lost a stunning 17.1 percent of its value Monday after admitting that it intentionally rigged nearly half a million cars to defeat U.S. smog tests.
The Obama administration, meanwhile, announced it is expanding its investigation of what it’s calling “defeat devices” in diesel vehicles, to make sure other manufacturers aren’t using similar schemes to thwart federal Clean Air laws.
Volkswagen has now admitted that it intentionally installed software programmed to switch engines to a cleaner mode during official emissions testing. The software then switches off again, enabling cars to drive more powerfully on the road while emitting as much as 40 times the legal pollution limit.
Volkswagen’s chief executive, Martin Winkerton, was under withering pressure Monday as the scandal erased more than 13 billion euros (around $15 billion) from the company’s market value in the first trading session after the EPA announced the violations Friday.
Winkerton apologized, promised an internal investigation and acknowledged that his company had “broken the trust of our customers and the public.”
VW, facing as much as $18 billion in fines, halted U.S. sales of the affected vehicles and pledged to cooperate with regulators after finally acknowledging its scheme on Sept. 3, Purchia said.
For a company to engage in such blatant trickery, top executives must have been informed
The illegal software was made and installed in vehicles with 2.0-liter diesel engines during the model years 2009 through 2015, the EPA said. They include the Audi A3, VW Jetta, Beetle, Golf and Passat models.
Volkswagen marketed these diesel-powered cars, which account for about 25 percent of sales, as being better for the environment.
Volkswagen recently edged out Japan’s Toyota to become the world’s top-selling automaker
Last Friday we learned that Volkswagen got caught cheating on emissions testing via software programming. The punishment? It could get slapped with up to $18 billion in fines. While they company has yet to admit to any wrong doing, the CEO has now issued a formal apology and said the automaker will cooperate fully with any and all investigations. It’s issued a stop-sale on all new and used TDI vehicles until further notice.
The news that Volkswagen had deliberately circumvented U.S. EPA emissions laws on its so-called “clean diesel” models from 2009 to 2015 hit the automotive world like a bombshell on Friday.
Over the weekend, more news emerged, with a statement and apology from VW Group CEO Martin Winterkorn.
The company also took all remaining new 2.0-liter TDI diesel models off sale in the U.S.–and told its dealers to stop selling those models as used cars as well.
When European financial markets opened this morning, Volkswagen shares instantly lost more than a fifth of their value.
(3) What longer-term risks are there to owners?
The almost half a million owners of 2009-2015 Volkswagen and Audi 2.0-liter TDI models face some potentially significant longer-term challenges, however.
First, the value of their vehicles as used cars may well fall.
Second, if VW is able to develop a fix and get it approved, the performance and fuel efficiency of their cars might fall. That’s more likely if the fix is only a software update, which would be far cheaper for Volkswagen.
If VW ends up having to make software changes and retrofit an entire SCR system to the cars (other than the Passat TDI)–something that would likely cost it thousands of dollars per car–performance would likely be unchanged, but interior volume might be reduced to accommodate a liquid-urea tank and associated plumbing.
Third, and most worrisome for owners in California and some other states, they may not be able to re-sell or even re-register their TDI vehicles until they are fixed by Volkswagen.
That’s because the vehicles were apparently “non-compliant,” or illegal to sell in the first place as they now stand.
Auto giant Volkswagen separates the Director-General, due to Martin Winterkornin emission scandal, says a German Tagesspiel reference to the sources of the company’s board of directors.
According to the newspaper the company’s management will Porsche’s head of Matthias Müller. The decision formally told on Friday.
Volkswagen admitted today that it had sold globally by as much as 11 million diesel cars fitted with emission measurements, data-distorting devices.
Volkswagen is getting hammered on world stock exchanges after it was revealed the number of VW cars using software to cheat on pollution tests is far greater than first thought.
On Friday, the US Environmental Protection Agency revealed that the German car firm had been using engine management software that detected when official emissions testing was being conducted. The software would make the engine conveniently run cleaner than usual during these tests, and switch back to normal when an examination is over – cheating, in other words.
Initially, just 500,000 cars were thought to be affected – but the automaker today admitted 11 million worldwide are going to need to be recalled and reprogrammed.
“Discrepancies relate to vehicles with Type EA 189 engines, involving some eleven million vehicles worldwide,” Volkswagen said in a statement on Tuesday.
Dissemination of an Ad hoc announcement according to § 15 WpHG:
Volkswagen AG has issued the following information:
Volkswagen is working at full speed to clarify irregularities concerning a particular software used in diesel engines. New vehicles from the Volkswagen Group with EU 6 diesel engines currently available in the European Union comply with legal requirements and environmental standards. The software in question does not affect handling, consumption or emissions. This gives clarity to customers and dealers.
Further internal investigations conducted to date have established that the relevant engine management software is also installed in other Volkswagen Group vehicles with diesel engines. For the majority of these engines the software does not have any effect.
Quite what those technical measures are remains to be seen. The software detected by the EPA reduced the fuel efficiency and performance in order to bring nitrogen oxide emissions down for testing. Once the testing was complete, the engine shifted to better performance, but at a cost of barfing out up to 40 times the permitted levels of nitrogen oxide.
That’s potentially hundreds of thousands of tonnes of extra air pollution pumped into the atmosphere a year, globally.
If Volkswagen alters the engine management software to make the cars run cleaner, then fuel economy and the cars’ speed will be affected, and owners aren’t going to be happy about that. The company would be open to class action lawsuits all round, and in the statement said they were preparing to take a major financial hit.
The case could also have an interesting knock-on effect in the software field. Technically, Volkswagen’s software was covered under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, meaning tinkerers couldn’t have examined and altered the code.
The EPA has been lobbying with car companies to make sure the DMCA continues to make engine management software off limits to tinkerers. But based on its experience with Volkswagen, the agency may be changing that stance.
Volkswagen is in big trouble. That’s what happens when you knowingly mislead the world’s governments and your customers about a key feature of your primary product. In this case, it’s the two-liter “clean diesel” engines used in more than 10 million VW and sister brand cars over the past decade.
Volkswagen has admitted to illegally using software to manipulate exhaust emissions during government testing. When driving on the road, the emissions of mono-nitrogen oxides, or NOx, were up to forty times the legal limit. VW hasn’t explained how the software worked, but you can be sure that the (literally) dirty details will come out in court.
The company has seen tens of billions of dollars slashed from its market value and is potentially facing an $18 billion fine in the US alone. Then there’s the potential for vehicle recalls and buybacks, class action lawsuits from owners, and criminal charges. This is going to get worse before it gets better.
There are a few things that Volkswagen must do, and some others that it can do. None of it’s going to be fun.
Tarnished Reputation
The Volkswagen brand is one of the oldest and most storied in the world (it traces its routes back to, ahem, Nazi Germany). The company owns some of the world’s best car brands, including Lamborghini, Bugatti and Bentley.
It’s long had a strong reputation for value. The doors shut with a quality thunk. Most of its cars, especially its torque-heavy diesels, are fun to drive as well as affordable.
All that is tainted, because VW has shown it can’t be trusted. The cheating didn’t put anyone in immediate danger—though NOx causes asthma and other respiratory illnesses—but VW’s deceit is hard to take because it was intentional. It was a blatant, deliberate lie, likely done for no other reason than to sell more cars. Many customers bought the “clean diesel” cars because they’d been told they were cleaner for the environment than the alternative. VW betrayed them and the planet.
VW’s confession that it illegally programed the software in 11 million diesel-powered cars to cheat on emissions tests comes with the sting of betrayal for owners. The automaker’s been touting the benefits of “clean diesel” for years, and it dominates the American market for the gasoline alternative.
Last week, the EPA accused the German automaker of using a “defeat device,” an algorithm that detects when the car is being tested by the EPA and changes its performance to meet emissions standards. The rest of the time, the cars produce up to 40 times the legal limit of nitrogen oxides (NOx), the stuff linked to increased rates of asthma and other respiratory problems.
The Jettas, Beetles, Passats, and Audis in question deliver top tier fuel economy, and, eco-conscious owners were told, had no trouble meeting strict emissions standards
Once the sting of the lie fades, the US customers who bought 482,000 of those cars will feel the real pain. Because Volkswagen will be forced to recall those vehicles and somehow make them to meet federal standards. There are two apparent ways to do that, and owners who value performance, fuel economy, and trunk space won’t like either.
One is to “reflash” the engine control module, recalibrating the software so the car always runs the way it does during EPA testing, and always meets emission standards.
The downside here is that to achieve the drastic drop in NOx emissions, the cars in test mode sacrificed some fuel economy, or performance. Just how much is hard to say
There’s precedent for this: Last year, the EPA forced Kia and Hyundai to downgrade fuel economy ratings on more than a million cars (they blamed “procedural errors” at a shared testing facility). The Korean automakers spent $395 million on a settlement with vehicle owners aggrieved over higher than expected fuel costs.
The standard way of making a diesel run cleanly is to use selective catalytic reduction, a chemical process that breaks NOx down into nitrogen and water. Part of that process includes adding urea to the mix. The super effective system can eliminate 70 to 90 percent of NOx emissions, and is used by other diesel manufacturers like Mercedes and BMW. The downside is that it adds complication to the system, and cost—$5,000 to $8,000 per car. And you need to periodically add the urea-based solution to your car to keep it working.
The big “advance” from VW was the “clean diesel” technology that supposedly made the whole urea thing unnecessary on its smaller cars
VW’s unlikely to embrace that option, because adding hardware to half a million cars would be far more expensive than a computer update.
Dodge the Recall
So if the government is making VW recall your car and your fuel economy and performance will take a hit because of it, why not just ignore the recall notice in your mailbox? People ignore recalls all the time, even when they’re to fix critical safety issues.
The man can’t compel you to get it fixed.
Except here, maybe he can. These Volkswagens are a public health threat and exuberantly break federal law.
Whether you dodge the recall or not, your car’s resale value is likely to drop as far and fast as VW’s stock, which has plunged 20 percent since the feds came down on VW Friday.
A multibillion dollar corporation tricks the public into thinking its smog-burping cars are actually good for the environment. A group of Mother Earth-loving researchers exposes the corporation as a fraud. The bad guys are defeated. The good guys win. The credits roll. It sounds like a plot only Disney would dream up. If only real life were so simple. In reality, Volkswagen’s attempt to deceive the Environmental Protection Agency with its emission-masking technology is about to get a lot more complicated.
It all started last week when the EPA accused Volkswagen of violating the Clean Air Act by equipping half-a-million “clean diesel” vehicles with software that would lower the cars’ emissions only when they were undergoing emissions testing. Today, the situation took another downward turn when news broke that the problem is actually much more widespread, involving some 11 million vehicles worldwide.
This is not a manufacturing mistake, but a clear case of trickery.
VW hasn’t done much to appease investors or the public. Already its stock price has dropped to a three-year low, and European stocks fell 3 percent overall.
All of this is a natural immediate reaction. It’s tough for investors to have confidence when Volkswagen’s reputation is taking such a blow. But the important question to be asking now is: Will this reaction last? And if it does, what does that mean for Volkswagen, the German economy, and the European Union itself? It’s distinctly possible Volkswagen won’t implode; other big car companies have weathered serious troubles recently and survived. But if Volkswagen does fall apart, the ripple effect could be felt across a continent.
“The big shock is that they lied, and they did it on purpose.”
That matters, McAlinden says, because we’ve seen other scandals in the past involving companies like General Motors and Toyota that did put people in physical danger. “And yet, people aren’t talking about General Motors all week long,” he says. “You’ll forget about Volkswagen like you’ve already forgotten about Toyota.”
As for the $18 billion in fines with which the EPA has reportedly said it could saddle Volkswagen, McAlinden says it’s important to remember that $18 billion is the maximum fine. In reality, it will likely be much less than that, he says. Already, Volkswagen has set aside $7.3 billion to cover the possible costs to ensue from the scandal.
The Worst-Case Scenario
Then there’s the fact that so much of Volkswagen’s branding in recent years has revolved around its position as an environmental market leader capable of developing vehicles that were clean, powerful, and affordable. Not only has the scandal proved that to be false, but those consumers who do get their cars fixed as a result of this recall won’t likely enjoy them as much
“The problem is, from a customer point of view, I may see my fuel economy drop, and the car won’t be as powerful as it was before,”
There’s also an innovation problem. The entire industry is now working on ways to comply with increasingly stringent global emissions standards while also giving consumers what they want. By trying to solve that problem with deception, all Volkswagen has done is waste time it could have been using to come up with an actual solution. It isn’t just sneaky. It’s lazy. If its stock price continues to drop, and fines and class action suits continue to mount, Volkswagen may struggle to find the resources to make up for that lost time.
After all, a lot more than a few evil executives’ futures are riding on Volkswagen. Volkswagen employs some 600,000 workers. And the German government is a shareholder.
Every so often – and usually not under the best of circumstance – the field of engineering as a whole is presented with a teaching moment. Volkswagen is currently embroiled in a huge scandal involving emissions testing of 11 Million diesel cars sold in recent years. It’s a problem that could cost VW dearly
While diesel automobiles make up one third of the passenger vehicle fleet in Europe, they make up barely a fraction of cars on US roads. This comes down to a difference in environmental regulation. Since the introduction of the US Clean Air Act of 1970, NOx emissions have been under tighter controls than CO₂ emissions. In Europe, CO₂ is more tightly controlled than NOx. It’s a simple consequence of regulation that diesel cars would be more popular in Europe than the US.
Sales of Volkswagen diesels have been on the rise in the US in the last few years, despite this more stringent regulation. ‘Clean diesel’ is a goal for the industry
Despite passing emissions tests required by the US government, CAFEE found these engines were out of compliance. This apparent discontinuity can be brought to light by examining how diesel emissions are measured. An EPA notice of violation explains this was done by a bit of code functioning as a ‘defeat device’ that would sense when the vehicle was under test. Software installed in the electronic control module (ECM) would detect when the car was undergoing emissions testing by reading, “various inputs including the position of the steering wheel, vehicle speed, the duration of the engine’s operation, and barometric pressure.” Under these conditions, the ECM would use a different ‘map’ that would reduce torque and NOx emissions. Under normal conditions – when the vehicle was not being tested for emissions – a separate ‘map’ would be used that would increase acceleration, torque, or fuel economy. CAFEE was able to determine this because of a portable testing rig; instead of testing emissions in a garage on a dynamometer, the researchers performed their tests in real-world conditions, driving around Los Angeles, from LA to Mount Baldy, and from LA to San Diego.
Which Brings Us To Today…
VW has over 400,000 cars on the road in the US that have this ‘defeat device’ installed in their ECM. The EPA can enforce civil penalties of up to $37,500 for each vehicle not in compliance with regulations, meaning Volkswagen could face a penalty of $18 Billion USD. Volkswagen stock has dropped 20% in the last few days, and the entire chain of command, from the CEO of Volkswagen down to the lowliest engineer are sweating bullets.
Ethics in Engineering
Despite these problems, a congress screaming for answers, investigations by the DoJ, and investors losing years off their lives, we may never know one key fact of this matter: why this ‘defeat device’ was ever implemented.
An engineer, either in Volkswagen or less likely at a subcontractor, signed off on code that would defeat the entire purpose of EPA and Clean Air Act regulations. Someone with the authority to say ‘no’ didn’t, and this code was installed in the electronic control unit of millions of cars. This is the teachable moment of this entire ordeal; at some point, someone who should have known better. At least one engineer will lose their job over this, and certainly more than one executive will be hung out to dry.
By now you’ve heard that VW has been accused of doctoring the software in their small diesel models to sidestep emissions standards. The thing that hasn’t been talked about is engineering ethics. An algorithm in the code detects when the vehicle is under test conditions and causes it to perform differently. This couldn’t have been accomplished by just one person.
One day after acknowledging that 11 million Volkswagen-made cars have software that dupes official emissions tests, Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn says he is resigning from his post.
“I am shocked by the events of the past few days,” Winterkorn said in a statement released Wednesday. “Above all, I am stunned that misconduct on such a scale was possible in the Volkswagen Group.”
The news comes as Winterkorn met with Volkswagen’s board Wednesday, less than a week after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said the car company had put software in diesel cars that turns emissions control systems off when the car isn’t undergoing official tests.
Volkswagen is faced with fallout on a number of fronts, from investors punishing its stock to the chance that the U.S. government will levy billions of dollars in fines. There’s also the likelihood — already realized in Canada — that millions of its customers will file class-action lawsuits.
While Winterkorn says he’s shocked by recent events, the report by the EPA and the California Air Resources Board states that Volkswagen has known for more than a year that American inspectors had found something fishy going on with diesel cars made under the Volkswagen and Audi brands.
The initial U.S. report ordered VW to recall more than 480,000 cars; on Tuesday, the company acknowledged that worldwide, it needs to fix 11 million vehicles
The Environmental Protection Agency says Volkswagen intentionally violated the Clean Air Act by using sophisticated software in its diesel-powered cars that detects emissions testing — and “turns full emissions controls on only during the test.”
Installed in four-cylinder cars, the software, which the EPA calls a “defeat device” that’s meant to trick official tests, allowed diesel Jettas, Beetles and other cars to “emit up to 40 times more pollution” than allowed under U.S. emission standards.
Volkswagen must now fix the emissions control systems, the agency says, adding that the automaker could be liable for civil penalties and other punishment. The cars in question are popular Volkswagen and Audi models that were made from 2009 to this year.
“Using a defeat device in cars to evade clean air standards is illegal and a threat to public health,”
The U.S. government also has reason to feel duped: Volkswagen’s “clean diesel” TDI engines earned a $1,300 federal tax credit for people who purchased a Jetta sedan or wagon back in 2009, the first year affected by the recall.
The cars were first found to produce too much nitrogen oxides, or NOx
As for drivers of the cars, the EPA says, “these violations do not present a safety hazard and the cars remain legal to drive and resell.”
VW’s fraud uncovers a snake’s nest of questions — and a whole lot of anger.
Five days into the mess – which was lurking for at least 8 years – has seen more conversations with my peers on this topic than in many a year. I propose to detail here the perils and some possible technical and legal alleviations for what is a global technology catastrophe and fraud. A technical fraud of such scale, that unless we engineers can tend to our own turf, we might witness a tsunami of over technical regulation from eager policy makers and lawyers around the globe.
I recall John being surprised that the new generation smart diesels from VW did not need a huge amount of expendable scrubber and catalytic chemicals (usually UREA) when introduced in 2008.
First, this isn’t the first time a global car maker tried to bypass (lax) testing standards. GM did in the 70s and 90s. The trucking diesel industry did 17 years ago and was fined over $1 Billion. And, for all we know, other diesel car makers may not have much cover form what VW has just admitted to. I can see the delete keys in motion as I write this.
What we know so far is very little. 482,000+ VW/Audi US cars affected, 11 million globally. Reports that these cars emitted 40 times the allowed levels of Nitric Oxides is bad. It is the seed for combining with water to form various nitric acids; a foe to plant, animal and humans alike.
There are talks of a potential $18 Billion US fine alone. And that is for 1/25th of the cars they made!
That fine would not cover making the cars legal again IF that is even technical, economically or legally possible.The departing CEO stated he was shocked by this. I’m inclined to believe he and others might have been kept in the dark. No one yet knows how much legal and government horsepower will be needed to determine the full responsibility chain for dieselgate.
Probably, this ruse started with one or more engineers giving assent to the feasibility idea. Yes, there can be threats of livelihood for engineers not to shirk their moral responsibilities. Throughout history. And clearly higher-ups assisted the plan. Was it one VW employee in 10,000 or one in ten? The world wants to know. Fast.
Dieselgate might impact electronic and computing devices, the FCC. ITU and other regulators. WHO is to monitor white space RF devices and misuses of power levels and jamming? We need more field monitors clearly, as some 11 million VWs rolled away from testing facilities and did 40x the air pollution levels regulators allowed for seven to eight years!
What will car owners do? Are they in perpetual violation for polluting? Did ANY dealers know?
Would you engineering readers and managers hire any of the engineers or managers who are identified as contributing to this deception?
Do we need reforms for regulatory agencies…adding more spot checks and fewer bureaucrats?
I personally am so outraged by this misuse of engineering skills that I would like to see punishments for the principals involved. Not just a fine. This is malice aforethought; and regardless of your country, such people are considering crimes on a par with robbery and assault and should be treated as such.
Might public health agencies get involved?
Speed is of the essence for all parties here.
There are so many unanswered questions. I look forward to yours.
Why did Germany not catch this before our overwhelmed EPA?
What do engineering and legal teachers tell their students about this world where such a technical fraud can scale and impact millions?
Volkswagen was reportedly warned about rigging emissions tests on its vehicles years ago, not only by one of its suppliers but also the German car giant’s own engineers.
According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung newspaper, VW’s technicians flagged up concerns about the engine management software the company was using in its motors back in 2011.
It was also reported today that VW had been cautioned eight years ago not to rig the tests by its software supplier Bosch. According to Bild am Sonntag, Bosch had written to VW in 2007.
The cheatware detects when a motor undergoes emissions testing, and then fudges the engine output to pass the examination by cutting performance to meet emissions standards for nitrogen oxide.
Germany’s Federal Motor Transport Authority, KBA, has lost patience with scandal-plagued Volkswagen and has given it a deadline.
By October 7, the regulator says, Volkswagen has to submit its plan for bringing its cars into line with European emissions regulation – and this time, no cheating.
That’s going to be a tough ask for VW: while the software that cheated on emissions tests will be easily patched, it can only be done with a big hit to the performance of cars on the road.
German tabloid Bild am Sonntag says the KBA says it’s obliged “to call for the necessary measures to ensure that the manufactured vehicles are brought into line” with what’s been approved for sale.
If KBA withdraws approval for the affected cars, they can neither be sold nor driven in Germany.
David Kravets / Ars Technica:
Volkswagen scandal shows why tinkering with vehicle software should be exempted from DMCA restrictions, despite objections from automakers and the EPA
“I personally am deeply sorry that we have broken the trust of our customers and the public,” Volkswagen Chief Executive Officer Martin Winterkorn said in a statement Monday, addressing the so-called “defeat device” software the automaker built into its vehicles to deceive US air pollution tests. “We will do everything necessary in order to reverse the damage this has caused.”
What led up to this mea culpa? Researchers from the International Council on Clean Transportation and West Virginia University performed all kinds of tests on VW vehicles, discovering that when the vehicles were on the road they polluted substantially more than when they were being tested for pollution emissions. Nobody could make any sense of how that could be. So the US Environmental Protection Agency threatened not to approve the automaker’s 2016 models for sale. In response, the automaker said its software was designed to hoodwink emissions tests, the EPA said.
“Only then did VW admit it had designed and installed a defeat device in these vehicles in the form of a sophisticated software algorithm that detected when a vehicle was undergoing emissions testing,” the EPA said in an action letter to VW on Friday. The EPA wants VW to recall about 500,000 vehicles dating to 2009.
In the wake of the scandal, VW’s stock has plummeted. It also leaves a black eye on the EPA, the agency that is supposed to regulate air emissions, as VW’s shenanigans played the EPA for a fool.
Strangely, however, the EPA is standing alongside automakers, including VW. They all oppose proposed regulations that would allow the public to circumvent copyright protections measures attached to vehicle software. Also known as “technological protection measures” (TPMs), automakers employ this copyright ruse toward the goal of making it a Digital Millennium Copyright Act violation to examine or tinker with the code in vehicle software. And, for the moment, it’s all legal, and the EPA wants to keep it that way.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation says forbidding tinkering is an abuse of copyright law.
For obvious reasons, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers opposes the EFF’s vehicle software exemption proposal. The alliance, which includes VW, recently told the US Copyright Office that such an exemption would “create or exacerbate” (PDF) “serious threats to safety and security.”
The vehicle software proposal would allow the circumvention of TPMs “in relation to computer programs, databases, and devices for purposes of good-faith testing, identifying, disclosing, and fixing of malfunctions, security flaws, or vulnerabilities.”
Volkswagon’s former CEO, Martin Winterkorn, has come under investigation by the German state attorney.
The German state attorney’s office in Braunschweig, not too distant from Volkswagen’s base in Wolfsburg, acknowledged that it had received complaints from people who had raised the issue anonymously, reported the New York Times.
The investigation is seeking to clarify the criminal nature of the emissions issue, specifically whether it may constitute fraud and to determine who knew about it.
Winterkorn resigned on Wednesday while repeatedly denying any knowledge of the software.
Volkswagen’s supervisory board has corroborated Winterkorn’s statement that he was unaware of the “defeat device” and added that the company had additionally asked the German attorneys, following his resignation, to investigate the possibility of employee criminal behaviour.
It went through the press like a thunderstorm: Volkswagen installed software in its diesel engine controllers that detected when the car was under test. In such situations, it reduced harmful exhaust emissions to the legal limit; otherwise, it blew unacceptably high levels of exhaust fumes into the air. The trick clearly was applied to circumvent environmental legislation in the USA and other countries. Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn was forced to step down – but what effects will this revelation have?
It’s a shame for the German automotive industry that a honourable company like Volkswagen resorts to such means to better its position against the competition. There could be no other solution for Mr. Winterkorn than to step down. There is reason to fear that this dirty little trick has the potential to substantially damage the standing of the Volkswagen group, diesel technology, and the German automotive industry as a whole.
The damage obviously includes Audi as Volkswagen’s nobler sister, simply for the reason that Audi uses the same engines. The same holds true to the other members of the Volkswagen group, SEAT and Skoda. As far as I know, Audi already admitted that they used the same software.
Porsche is in a different position.
Porsche never used these engines
The move also damages the credibility of the diesel technology across all manufacturers. While well established in Europe as a very economic and lasting type of engine, in the US, diesel technology always fought an uphill battle. I don’t believe the reason for the attitude of American customers towards diesel technology was due to the exhaust behaviour of these cars, but the current scandal is grist to the mill of the adversaries. Their impression must be that apparently the technology is difficult to handle in terms of eco-friendliness, and that it takes many engineering efforts to get the exhaust into the legal limits. While I still believe diesel is environmentally friendly, the simple fact that Volkswagen believed they needed such a shabby trick hints that it really takes more efforts to tame a diesel than a gasoline engine.
And there is another open question: How can it be that a rock-solid engineering company like Volkswagen is unable to achieve the correct exhaust gas limits if their competitors can? Are Daimler, BMW, or Opel engineers better? I don’t believe so. In particular not because the German auto industry has, despite all competition, somewhat of a family, every member knows pretty well what the other one does.
But Winterkorn seemed trustable too, until very recently. But potential car buyers across the world will ask themselves the same question. And this is the real damage: The customer’s confidence is annihilated. This is a much bigger damage than any penalty Volkswagen may have to pay.
A lot of questions have been raised by the recent “dieselgate” scandal. Should automakers be held accountable for ethically questionable actions? Are emissions standards in the United States too restrictive? Are we ever going to stop appending “gate” onto every mildly controversial news story? But, for Hackaday readers, the biggest question is most likely “how did they get away with it?” The answer is probably because of a law a lot of hackers are already familiar with: the DMCA.
How could they get away with this simple trick when a brief look at the ECU software would have revealed it? Because, they were able to hide under the umbrella of the DMCA. The ECU software is, of course, not intended to be user-accessible, which means that Volkswagen is allowed to lock it down. That, in turn, means that the EPA isn’t allowed to circumvent that security without violating the DMCA and potentially breaking the law. This kept the EPA’s hands tied, and Volkswagen protected.
It’s clear that what they did is morally wrong, but they designed and sold engines that, when run through the EPA test cycle, met the EPA standards. The ECU wasn’t faking the data and the emissions were indeed within specifications. Their engines don’t perform as expected when subjected to a different set of tests in different conditions — but that isn’t what the EPA said the engines had to do. VW met the tests in an inarguably shady way, but that doesn’t change the fact that they followed the letter of the law.
It’s an interesting argument, but the the EPA makes the rules.
The real question is, did the people who didn’t use the EPA method and used real world tests… did they find other manufacturers doing the same thing?
I heard Audi & Skoda brands have been cheating too but as they are owned by VW and have the same engine. I also wonder if this practice is widespread in other manufacturers also. It just goes to show how morally bankrupt corporations are these days they have too much power. If I defrauded someone I would get prison if a corporation does it gets a fine.
Defeat device means an auxiliary emission control device (AECD) that reduces the effectiveness of the emission control system under conditions which may reasonably be expected to be encountered in normal vehicle operation and use, unless:
(1) Such conditions are substantially included in the applicable Federal emission test procedure for heavy-duty vehicles and heavy-duty engines described in subpart N of this part;
(2) The need for the AECD is justified in terms of protecting the vehicle against damage or accident; or
(3) The AECD does not go beyond the requirements of engine starting.
According to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled) a loophole in the 1970 Clean Air Act could make it impossible for U.S. prosecutors to subject Volkswagen to criminal charges over its use of standards-dodging ‘defeat devices’ in its emissions-testing software.
Faced with a slew of crippling lawsuits and recalls over its software-based evasion of emissions standards, German car manufacturer Volkswagen has a ray of corporate light today – it transpires that a loop in the U.S. 1970 Clean Air Act could stop the company facing criminal charges over use of ‘defeat devices’ in its cars.
According to the Wall Street Journal [paywalled], the clause in the act indemnifies car manufacturers against criminal penalties and leaves the Justice Department in a jurisdictional quandary as far as bringing criminal charges against Volkswagen. Prosecutors are now reported to be considering alternative methods, including charges that Volkswagen lied to regulation authorities – a considerably reduced line of attack.
The New York Times contends that the ‘defeat devices’, the disclosure of which has rocked the car industry, represent part of a long-time culture of systematic deception and standards-rigging in the automotive industry.
Olaf Lies, a Volkswagen board member and economy minister of Lower Saxony has told Newsnight some staff acted criminally over emission cheat tests.
He said the people who allowed the deception to happen or who installed the software that allowed certain models to give false emissions readings must take personal responsibility.
He also said the board only found out about the problems at the last meeting.
About 11 million diesel engine cars are affected by the problem.
Mr Lies told the BBC: “Those people who allowed this to happen, or who made the decision to install this software – they acted criminally. They must take personal responsibility.”
He said: “We only found out about the problems in the last board meeting, shortly before the media did. I want to be quite open. So we need to find out why the board wasn’t informed earlier about the problems when they were known about over a year ago in the United States.”
‘Huge damage’
Mr Lies said the company had no idea of the total bill to sort out the engines and cover any legal costs arising: “Huge damage has been done because millions of people have lost their faith in VW. We are surely going to have a lot of people suing for damages. We have to recall lots of cars and it has to happen really fast.”
He added that the company was strong and that rebuilding trust – and ensuring the majority of the 600,000 workers at the car giant were not blamed – was its priority.
Scandal spilling over
The scandal is continuing to hit VW’s share price. On Tuesday it fell another 1.5% during morning trade in Frankfurt. The company has lost 35% of its market value since last Monday.
Mr Mueller promised a “relentless” investigation to uncover what went wrong.
He said the group was “facing the severest test in its history.”
The Internet of things and a culture of experimentation makes it harder to lie to consumers and regulators.
Volkswagen is still reeling from the revelations that it lied to U.S. regulators and pumped nearly 1 million tons of extra pollutants into the air by installing software onto its cars to fool emissions tests. Now regulators, legislators and others are wondering how to prevent such a scandal from happening again. Open source software has been a suggested salve. So has random testing.
But I think these are part of two bigger trends that will come together to prevent these sort of shenanigans going forward—the Internet of things and the development of a maker culture. The Internet of things and its proliferation of data gathering sensors that are connected to the cloud and to each other combined with an increasing number of people who are comfortable building their own gear to experiment with the world around them will create an environment of constant scrutiny.
“It seems like we’ve gone through this trough where only 100 people in the world have the tools to test something like the Volkswagen emissions, to having a limitless number of people having the tool to detect this,” said Eben Upton, the creator of the Raspberry Pi computer, which is a computer beloved by makers. “But it’s not just that the tools are available, but that the tech culture has changed.”
Upton explained that people are willing to play with technology and experiment with cheap sensors to see if what they are being told is true. The combination of $1 or $2 sensors and a general skepticism has led a class of people to build tools to see if their air quality is really what the EPA is telling them. And, said Upton, as the tools are commercialized through companies, that ability to test will only get easier for the average consumer.
The Internet of things and a culture of experimentation makes it harder to lie to consumers and regulators.
Volkswagen is still reeling from the revelations that it lied to U.S. regulators and pumped nearly 1 million tons of extra pollutants into the air by installing software onto its cars to fool emissions tests. Now regulators, legislators and others are wondering how to prevent such a scandal from happening again. Open source software has been a suggested salve. So has random testing.
But I think these are part of two bigger trends that will come together to prevent these sort of shenanigans going forward—the Internet of things and the development of a maker culture. The Internet of things and its proliferation of data gathering sensors that are connected to the cloud and to each other combined with an increasing number of people who are comfortable building their own gear to experiment with the world around them will create an environment of constant scrutiny.
“It seems like we’ve gone through this trough where only 100 people in the world have the tools to test something like the Volkswagen emissions, to having a limitless number of people having the tool to detect this,” said Eben Upton, the creator of the Raspberry Pi computer, which is a computer beloved by makers. “But it’s not just that the tools are available, but that the tech culture has changed.”
Upton explained that people are willing to play with technology and experiment with cheap sensors to see if what they are being told is true. The combination of $1 or $2 sensors and a general skepticism has led a class of people to build tools to see if their air quality is really what the EPA is telling them. And, said Upton, as the tools are commercialized through companies, that ability to test will only get easier for the average consumer.
He thinks environmental groups will lead the charge.
Already there are projects such as AirCast that are trying to track air quality around cities using air quality sensors worn by volunteers.
Or you can buy an Air Quality Egg for $240 that measures carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide and become part of a worldwide air quality monitoring effort linked over the Internet.
Again, you’d need to make correlations between a cluster of offending Volkswagens and higher-than-expected pollution levels. However, in today’s era of cheap and easy data analysis such a thing isn’t too far fetched.
So, as cheap, connected sensors proliferate, a culture of making and experimenting expands, and civic groups embrace both attributes to start testing the world around them, more consumers will have the tools they need to tell if companies are lying. For those who are damaging the environment, they could find themselves having some sticky conversations.
It’s been a rough year for the Internet of Things. Security researchers uncovered terrifying vulnerabilities in products ranging from cars to garage doors to skateboards. Outages at smart home services Wink and Google’s Nest rendered customers’ gadgets temporarily useless. And the Volkswagen emissions scandal, though not precisely an Internet of Things issue, has exposed yet another issue with “smart” physical goods: the possibility of manufacturers embedding software in their products designed to skirt regulations.
And those are only the most immediate concerns. The Internet of Things brings with it privacy concerns and compatibility headaches. There’s also the potential for the companies that make this stuff to go belly-up at any moment—as Wink’s parent company Quirky just did. In the worst case scenario, customers could be left with a house full of expensive, not-so-smart gadgets.
The Safety of Objects
Today, the vast majority of smart home gadgets, connected cars, wearable devices, and other Internet of Things inhabitants are profoundly closed. Independent researchers can’t inspect the code that makes them run. You can’t wipe the factory-loaded software and load alternative software instead. In many cases you can’t even connect them to other devices unless the manufacturers of each product have worked out a deal with each other.
Ostensibly, this is for your own protection. If you can’t load your own software, you’re less likely to infect your car, burglar alarm, or heart monitor with a virus. But this opacity is also what helped Volkswagen get away with hiding the software it used to subvert emissions tests. It makes it harder to trust that your thermostat isn’t selling your personal info to door-to-door salesmen or handing it out to the National Security Agency.
It seems that also other brands making diesel are not so clear that they claim:
Toyota, Volvo and many others, were placed in the test – it was smoky smell
German motoring organization ADAC found in their tests that very many of the new diesel cars exceeding the permitted emission limits and up to several orders of magnitude. According to official tests, however, these cars meet the emission standards.
EcoTest method simulates actual driving conditions more realistically than the official use in the European Union NEDC test. The official measurements has for many years been accused of the fact that they can be much smaller values than those generated in the real qualifying result.
Euro 5 requirements that tested 41 car just two emissions remained within permitted limits.
More stringent Euro 6 requirements met several car model, but also in this class standard deviation was very high. ADAC, this reflects the fact that the various anti-pollution methods can keep NOx emissions low in all conditions.
Since the Volkswagen scandal first broke more than a week ago, we know a lot more about how Dieselgate started to unravel. What remains mysterious, though, is why the German carmaker thought it would be OK to hack its own car to rig the system (and put consumer trust in jeopardy); worse, how on earth those involved in the fraud at the company had assumed that they could get away with it.
Leading up to the appointment of Volkswagen’s new CEO, Matthias Mueller, announced last Friday, we’ve learned how one of the biggest frauds in automotive history was uncovered by a group of researchers at West Virginia University working on a $50,000 grant from the International Council on Clean Transportation. And the researchers’ data wasn’t just made available now, but more than a year and a half ago.
Perhaps more important, Volkswagen, confronted with discrepancies in data — between tests results generated in labs and those on the road — insisted to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials, for as long as a year, that Volkswagen wasn’t to blame. The company said testing methodologies or inexperienced testing personnel should be questioned.
It wasn’t until much later — when the EPA denied approval for Volkswagen’s 2016 “clean diesel” cars in the United States — that VW admitted purposely cheating the system.
Volkswagen designed a subroutine — or parallel set of instructions —secretly sent by ECU to the emission controls to activate emission controls during tests.
EE Times has made a list of five issues related to Volkswagen or the auto industry at large that the recent scandal has exposed.
1. Who tests vehicles?
Nobody in any industry – automotive, financial, medical, telecommunications or consumer electronics industries – would volunteer for excessive regulation.
In the United States, carmakers do their own emission tests and submit results to the government. In Europe, automakers can shop around for a private testing outfit in any European Union member state.
Although U.S. carmakers do their own testing, the EPA conducts random checks. This is not so in Europe
In sum, there is a clear conflict of interest in the Europe’s vehicle testing system.
2. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and software code inside cars
As Roger Lanctot, associate director at Strategy Analytics’ global automotive practice, told us, “Technically speaking, the testing and software code analysis performed by the West Virginia University and the California Air Resources Board (CARB)/EPA folks was a violation of VW’s copyright.” He explained that software code in cars is protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Lactot described VW as having “some of the most opaque and carefully protected software code in the industry.”
The real issue, however, resides in the following. “Protecting software code means you or I cannot modify that code or if we do or we want to, we pretty much need to ‘hack’ our way through it.” In his opinion, “Opening up that code to repair shops, vehicle owners, universities and inspectors will be a first positive step forward.”
In a day and age when the open-source community plays an essential role in improving software codes, why should a carmaker hide behind a copyright law to block public access to its automotive code?
3. OBDII ports to be scrutinized further?
The on-board diagnostic port found in most cars manufactured after 1996 was originally created to facilitate emissions testing, according to Lanctot.
Carmakers tend to be fiercely protective of this port as a defense against rogue individuals seeking a way to modify their vehicle performance including the emissions controls.
The question that should be weighed here is which is a more serious offense? Is it an individual modifying a car to add “muscle,” or carmakers who make orchestrated cheating into an organizational practice?
4. Automakers’ engineer-driven culture
Engineers often bewail the hypocrisy of politicians who promote electric cars that plug into a power grid that still burns fossil fuels.
But whether it’s hypocrisy, arrogance, or a sense of technical superiority, it’s clear that engineers contributed to the still-unfolding shame of Dieselgate.
Did engineers agree to develop a clever solution to rig the system, under pressure from management to increase sales of diesel-powered cars in the U.S. market?
5. Carmakers and perils of software code
I’ve found it kind of curious that Volkswagen has been seemingly immune to any high-profile hacking cases.
Strategy Analytics’ Lactot said, “It’s dumb luck so far.”
He explained, “VW was late to the telematics party, and the ADAS (self-parking etc.) party and has generally lagged the market leaders in the United States where the lion’s share of hacking has occurred. So if you are a hacker trying to frighten an OEM into writing a check and listening to your suggestions, VW was not at the top of your list.” Lanctot concluded, “Nothing inherently safe or secure about VW’s.”
The irony here, as the analyst pointed out, is that “VW was caught hacking itself.”
This goes to show how hard it is to prove when something goes wrong in software.
This helps to explain why Dieselgate succeeded for VW for so long.
German auto giant Volkswagen’s emissions-rigging scandal is adding to the jitters in global markets.
As in the aftermath of the collapse of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers, fraud allegations, hefty compensation claims and tighter regulations, could all follow in the Volkswagen fallout. That is raising concerns we will see an auto industry triggered crisis.
Adding to the headache, economies tend to be more sensitive to the auto industry than the financial sector.
Plenty of problems
Ripple effects from an economic stall in China, a pending interest rate hike in the U.S. and the Greek debt crisis, which at one point rattled the equity market, have cast a dark shadow over the global outlook.
Volkswagen adds to this list of concerns. The German automaker is at risk of up to $18 billion in penalties from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which discovered the deception. Amid rising criticism, Americans see the massive fine as par for the course. Volkswagen will also inevitably face class-action lawsuits.
The emissions scandal has ruined the automaker’s strategy of focusing on diesel cars and pushed the company into a corner.
Spillover effects
The EPA recently announced that it will crack down on diesel cars produced by other automakers, such as Germany’s BMW and General Motors of the U.S. Gas-powered vehicles will probably come under more rigorous testing, too.
Automakers will have no control over their fate. The agency will no doubt conduct thorough investigations and could unearth more damaging revelations.
In addition, the U.S. is now moving into presidential election mode.
In Japan, the Volkswagen scandal has dragged down car-related stocks on the Tokyo bourse.
Volkswagen finds itself in a snootful of trouble early this week. Last Friday, the EPA revealed that the company will be instructed to recall nearly 500,000 vehicles and face a potential $18 billion in fines. And VW shares plummeted by more than 20 percent—eviscerating $16.9 billion of market value—at European markets’ close Monday after the company instructed US dealers to stop selling several 2015 diesel models.
All this hot water stems from US regulators’ discovery that VW engine software was engineered to explicitly circumvent US federal and state emissions laws. The clear purpose of the circumvention was to temporarily lower emissions when it detected that the vehicle was being emissions inspected.
Perhaps most dire of all for VW, the US Department of Justice is now investigating Volkswagen’s conduct in a criminal probe, according to Bloomberg. That’s at least four US government agencies now potentially on the carmaker’s tail.
VW saw data in December 2014
How did this all happen? To start, there had been a pattern of non-compliance in emissions observed by a joint research commission in Europe. A list of VW products dominated that list.
“VW acknowledged the numbers found,” says Thiruvengadam. “WVU also presented the findings at multiple conferences at the time, some of which were attended by folks from VW.” Diesel vehicles tested included a VW Jetta, a VW Passat, and a BMW X5. The BMW was found to be within compliance but both VWs were not. Note that the Jetta used a lean NOx (nitrogen oxide) trap, which the Passat and the BMW also used, but the latter two also employed exhaust system after-treatment or urea injection, sometimes known by the marketing name “AdBlue.”
Right after these tests, CARB informed VW in July that its vehicles still showed excessive nitrogen oxide emissions. Volkswagen denied fault, instead laying blame on “various technical issues and unexpected in-use conditions,” according to the EPA. The EPA then threatened not to certify for sale any 2016 VW cars. So in a September 3 meeting, VW admitted that it had used a second calibration in the diesels intended to run only during certification testing. VW stated that these vehicles were manufactured with a “defeat device” to bypass elements of the vehicles’ emission control system. This calibration or “device” was never specified in any certification documents submitted to the EPA and CARB, and it was never covered by any federal Certificate of Conformity (COC) or CARB Executive Order Number (EO). Put simply, it would be in violation of federal and state law.
If Volkswagen were a Japanese company, grown men would figuratively fall on their own swords in the public square when it was discovered that they engineered a way to cheat a country’s laws. If Volkswagen cheated not on emissions compliance but on safety regulations (say, fitting airbags with dummy wiring), things would be quite a bit worse—but not by much.
Willful circumvention of federal and state law is not exactly punishable by death, but it may well mean just that to a brand that relies on the trust of existing customers. This scheme undermines the company’s attempts to build the trust of potential customers and—perhaps most cynically—it blows up a central tenet of VW’s product across two brands: “clean diesel.” VW and Audi have wed themselves to the “clean diesel” mantra for years now, using “clean diesel” technology both in the marketplace and on the racetrack.
So where does this end? Only one thing is certain. The full scope of these probes, fines, and any resulting legal actions are far from over
But will this kill VW as a brand? No, the German federal government, the German State of Lower Saxony, and the EU would never allow that.
It’s looking bad for Volkswagen, German car manufacturers and possibly even car manufacturers as a whole. But the revelations that VW put software in their cars to deliberately cheat on emissions tests could have even greater repercussions. Robocars’ Brad Templeton looks at the effect for manufacturers of autonomous vehicles. From the Robohub article: “There may be more risk from suppliers of technology for robocars.”
Most of you will have heard about the revelations that Volkswagen put software in their cars to deliberately cheat on emissions tests in the USA and possibly other places. It’s very bad for VW, but what are the implications for robocars?
A lot has been written about the Volkswagen emissions violations but here’s a short summary. All modern cars have computer controlled ignition systems, and these can be tuned for different levels of performance, fuel economy and emissions.
Cars have to pass emission tests, so most cars have to tune their systems in ways that reduce other things (like engine performance and fuel economy) in order to reduce their pollution. Most cars attempt to detect the style of driving going on, and tune the engine differently for the best results in that situation.
VW went far beyond that. Apparently their system was designed to detect when it was in an ignitions test. In these tests, the car is on rollers in a garage, and it follows certain patterns.
It has not been revealed just who at VW did this, and whether other car companies have done this as well. (All companies do variable tuning and it’s “normal” to have modestly higher emissions in real driving compared to the test, but this was beyond the pale. The question everybody is asking is “What the hell were they thinking?”
After all, having been caught, the cost is going to be immense, possibly even ruining one of the world’s great brands. Obviously they did not really consider that they might get caught.
Beyond that, they have seriously reduced the trust that customers and governments will place not just in VW, but in car makers in general, and in their software offerings in particular. VW will lose trust, but this will spread to all German carmakers and possibly all carmakers. This could result in reduced trust in the software in robocars.
What the hell were they thinking?
The motive is the key thing we want to understand. In the broad sense, they did it because they felt customers would like it, and that would lead to selling more cars. At a secondary level, it’s possible that those involved felt they would gain prestige (and compensation) if they pulled off the wizard’s trick of making a diesel car which was clean and also high performance, at a level that turns out to be impossible.
Why would customers want this?
But many more customers want performance and would not want to pollute the air. VW gave them a different magic solution — a better performing car and the illusion that they were not polluting.
Who decided to do this?
We all want to know who decided this. It seems really unlikely that a lone rogue engineer would do it — what’s in it for her or him? Ditto for Bosch, the parts supplier. But engineers would have had to collude with any managers who decided to do this
How many levels of management knew?
It needs somebody high enough up that they win big by doing this.
It’s also that possible high management asked the engine systems programmers to do this without informing the middle managers in the chain, but how?
My best guess is a high level manager (high enough to benefit from increased sales in all the vehicles with this engine) but perhaps not the C-levels, who were somehow able to develop incentives for a key programmer. But we’ll find out eventually, I suspect.
For robocars…
It’s not too surprising that companies might cheat to improve the bottom line, especially when they convince themselves they won’t get caught. Where does that leave the robocar maker?
My prediction is that robocar vendors will end up self-insuring their vehicle fleets, at least while the software is driving. Conventional insurance in PAYD mode may apply to miles driven with a human at the wheel. The vendors or fleet operators may purchase reinsurance to cover major liabilities, but will do so with a very specific contract with the underwriter which won’t protect them in the event of actual fraud.
Would suppliers lie?
There may be more risk from suppliers of technology for robocars. Sensor manufacturers, for instance, may be untruthful about their abilities or, more likely, reliability. While the integrators will be inherently distrustful, as they will take the liability, one can see smaller vendors telling lies if they see it as the only way to get a big sale for their business.
Self-certification
This scandal will probably raise more questions about the popular (and still probably correct) approach of having vendors self-certify that they have attained functional safety goals for their systems. These are actually unrelated issues. VW was not self-certifying, it was going through a government certification process, and cheating on it.
Volkswagen Australia has revealed that 77,000 vehicles in Australia carry the emissions-fudging software that has plunged the company into crisis.
The company’s antipodean tentacle today announced that 55,000 Golf and Polo models sold in Australia carried EA 189 diesel engine, while 5,000 Skoda passenger cars also have the problem. A further 17,000 commercial vehicles also have the problem.
What happens next? Even Volkswagen Australia isn’t sure. It’s popped up volkswagendieselinfo.com.au/ to let owners check if their cars are among the dirty dozens.
The emissions scandal that’s plagued Volkswagen over the past month will be tough to recover from. But they’re trying. The company announced a number changes they’re making to their line of vehicles. First, they’ll be revamping their flagship Phaeton vehicles to be all-electric. (If you live in the U.S. and haven’t heard of these, don’t be surprised — they aren’t marketed there.)
Now that the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal is a month old, the new VW Brand Board of Management is beginning to publicly discuss its plans for the future—and how they’ve changed.
Step one: Use emission control systems that actually control emissions. Step two: Go electric.
As soon as possible, VW says, it will start equipping all its diesel cars in Europe and North America with AdBlue technology and selective catalytic reduction, a chemical process that breaks smoggy NOx down into nitrogen and water. It adds complication and expense—$5,000 to $8,000 per car—but it’s effective, eliminating 70 to 90 percent of NOx emissions.
VW’s big “advance” was the “clean diesel” technology that supposedly made this technology unnecessary on its smaller cars, like the Beetle, Jetta, and Audi A3 that are being recalled because they don’t meet emissions standards under real-world driving conditions.
Beyond diesels, VW announced it is “giving our product range and our core technologies a new focus,” lurching away from diesel and toward another way to meet increasingly strict CO2 and NOx emissions regulations in the US and Europe: an increased focus on plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles. One of those, the company announced this week, will be the next-generation Volkswagen Phaeton.
Their press release is difficult to decipher, given the density of buzzwords and vague promises, but they indicate a greater general focus on hybrids and electric vehicles in the future:
Accelerated implementation of the efficiency program creates room for reorientation
Streamlined processes leverage further cost-saving potential, including cuts in fixed costs
Investments to be reduced by 1 billion euros per year compared with planning – combined with prioritization of projects for the future
Product decisions formulated
New Phaeton will be electric
New Modular Electric Toolkit planned
In the wake of the ongoing scandal about manipulated exhaust gas values, Volkswagen sees itself compelled to change some strategic product directions and to drastically cut R&D spending. In addition, the company puts more emphasis on powertrain electrification.
In a special meeting, the newly-formed Volkswagen board of management took a number of strategic decisions, including a reorientation of its diesel strategy and a reduction of R&D spending by € 1 billion compared with previous planning – apparently a measure to cut cost in anticipation of penalties and compensation for damages.
The board also took several decisions regarding the future model strategy. As a direct reaction to the public outcry over the forged exhaust gas tests, the company will install only diesel drives with SCR (Selective Catalytic Reduction) and AdBlue technology in Europe and North America as soon as possible.
Not directly related to the diesel scandal but apparently as a cost-cutting measure, the company will develop a standardised architecture for passenger cars and light commercial vehicles.
Brit vacuum-cleaner maker Dyson is taking legal action against Bosch and Siemens, accusing the pair of cheating in energy efficiency tests.
According to Dyson, the Siemens Q8.0 and Bosch GL80/In’Genius ProPerform vacuum cleaners conveniently operate at a lower power level in lab tests, and dramatically increase their power consumption when used in the real homes. This led to the two rival machines unfairly gaining AAAA energy efficiency stickers from European regulators, it is claimed.
On Tuesday, Dyson said it has filed for an injunction against Siemens in Germany, and started proceedings in Belgium. It also said it has start legal action against Bosch in the Netherlands, and appealed to France’s advertising watchdog to get Bosch’s ads changed.
The allegations from Dyson come after Bosch was embroiled in the controversy over Volkswagen cars circumventing clean air tests. The German automaker has tried to distance itself from the issue by blaming unnamed “rogue software engineers” while Bosch, which developed hardware and software for Volkswagen, said it tried to warn the company about the diesel engine shenanigans years ago to no avail.
Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) made several versions of its “defeat device” software to rig diesel emissions tests, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters, potentially suggesting a complex deception by the German carmaker.
During seven years of self-confessed cheating, Volkswagen altered its illegal software for four engine types, said the sources, who include a VW manager with knowledge of the matter and a U.S. official close to an investigation into the company.
Some industry experts and analysts said several versions of the defeat device raised the possibility that a range of employees were involved.
The number of people involved is a key issue for investors because it could affect the size of potential fines and the extent of management change at the company
“The more higher-ups that are involved, the more the company is considered blameworthy and deserving of more serious punishment,” said Garrett.
When it started using defeat device software in 2008, VW installed it with the EA189 diesel engine. The software was subsequently added to the newer EA288 engine.
Horn added VW was withdrawing its application for regulatory certification of 2016 diesel models
Hackers can quietly disable airbags in cars sold by Volkswagen using a zero day vulnerability in software popular with car mechanics.
The attacks demonstrated on an Audi TT require a mechanic’s computer to be first compromised or for a malicious USB device to be plugged in for the exploit to work.
The attack can allow intruders to conceal the disabling of airbags and other car functions from mechanics by falsifying read outs from the car.
Buttyán told Vulture South the third-party software is widely-used and compatible with cars sold by the Volkswagen Group (which includes Audi), adding that two other platforms also appear affected.
“… it works with other cars in the VW group too without any modification,” Buttyán says.
“Anything that can be switched on or off from the diagnostic application could have been switched on or off.
“After switching off the airbag, we can consistently report to the application that it is still switched on.”
Buttyán stresses that the flaw “has nothing to do with VW itself” and relates solely to third-party software.
“It is not the specific software which makes our work interesting, but the main message that embedded devices are typically managed from PCs and they can be infected [and used] as stepping stones.”
The team’s attack works by replacing the FTDI DLL used to communicate with the diagnostic cable, with a malicious version.
The attack is risky because it is more likely that a mechanic’s PC would contain vulnerabilities than a car would sport remotely-accessible holes.
Still Buttyán says the attack could be made more dangerous if it becomes possible to update a car’s embedded control unit firmware through the OBD2 port. That could allow an attacker to insert a hidden functionality to be triggered by a condition later on – such as cutting a critical system while the car is in motion.
Volkswagen has confirmed that the emission test fooling the software is not installed to diesel motor type EA 288 for EU5 and EU6 emission classes sold in EU area. Thus, these new cars with diesel engines that Volkswagen sells in the European Union, meet regulations and environmental standards of the law.
Corrections are needed for EA 189 engine type. Unregistered new cars using EA 189 motor has so far set a sales ban in EU28 area. Number of cars to recall in Europe is 8.5 million.
Detailed technical solutions related measures are under construction and is making rapid progress. Repair of motor vehicles can be started in Germany in January 2016 – the repair is free of charge to the customer. Technical solutions are currently being developed for each individual model, and model year.
Today, EPA is issuing a second notice of violation (NOV) of the Clean Air Act (CAA) to Volkswagen AG, Audi AG and Volkswagen Group of America, Inc. This NOV is also being issued to Porsche AG and Porsche Cars North America. These five companies are collectively referred to as Volkswagen (VW). The NOV alleges that VW developed and installed a defeat device in certain VW, Audi and Porsche light duty diesel vehicles equipped with 3.0 liter engines for model years (MY) 2014 through 2016 that increases emissions of nitrogen oxide (NOx) up to nine times EPA’s standard. The vehicles covered by today’s NOV are the diesel versions of: the 2014 VW Touareg, the 2015 Porsche Cayenne, and the 2016 Audi A6 Quattro, A7 Quattro, A8, A8L, and Q5.
These alleged violations are in addition to the NOV issued on September 18th and the ongoing investigation by EPA alleging a defeat device on certain 2.0 liter engines for MY 2009-2015 vehicles.
“VW has once again failed its obligation to comply with the law that protects clean air for all Americans,”
Following the September 18th NOV issued for 2.0 liter engines, on September 25th EPA initiated testing of all 2015 and 2016 light duty diesel models available in the U.S using updated testing procedures specifically designed to detect potential defeat devices. That testing led directly to the alleged violations covered under today’s NOV.
Volkswagen’s internal investigation revealed that part of the company’s petrol engine cars in carbon dioxide emissions is unclear. The matter told, among other things German newspapers Bild and Spiegel.
Previous scandal related to the company’s diesel truck emissions, and now the emissions scam is expanding the gasoline engine cars. According to the company any irregularities relating to Volkswagen car models Polo, Golf and Passat. Discrepancies regarding the company’s 1.4-liter gasoline engines with cylinders. It means possibly around 800 000 cars, Volkswagen announced on Tuesday evening
Volkswagen’s new car gas emissions scam related to CO2 emissions, which determine the car taxation in Finland. The previous Volkswagen diesel cars in the scam-related emissions of nitrogen did not affect the taxation of cars in Finland. The new Tuesday night announced carbon dioxide emissions scam instead of taxation could be affected: In Finland, car tax is determined by the vehicle purchase price and CO2 emissions, and the annual vehicle tax is based on CO2 emissions.
Volkswagen says it has found “unexplained inconsistencies” in carbon dioxide emission tests affecting 800,000 of its vehicles.
The automaker fears the CO2 test oddness could cost it about 2bn euros ($2.19bn) to put right.
VW is already in deep trouble after its diesel engines were programmed to lower their nitrogen oxide (NO) output during lab tests to conform to environmental standards. After leaving the labs, the cars would ramp up their performance, pumping out up to nine times the allowed amount of NO, a gas that causes respiratory problems with humans.
That cheatware scandal affects 11 million or more cars – now Volkswagen says an internal probe has uncovered 800,000 vehicles that emit unexpected levels of carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas.
“VW’s top management will immediately start a dialogue with responsible authorities regarding the consequences of these findings,” the biz said in a statement.
Volkswagen AG said it found faulty emissions readings for the first time in gasoline-powered vehicles, widening a scandal that so far had centered on diesel engines. The shares fell the most in almost five weeks.
Volkswagen said an internal probe showed 800,000 cars had “unexplained inconsistencies” concerning their carbon-dioxide output. The automaker had previously estimated it would need to recall 11 million vehicles worldwide
The company said late Tuesday that the new finding could add at least 2 billion euros ($2.2 billion) to the 6.7 billion euros already set aside for repairs. The company’s Porsche unit said it’s halting North American sales of a model criticized by U.S. regulators.
The crisis that emerged after Volkswagen admitted in September to cheating U.S. pollution tests for years with illegal software has shaved more than one-third of the company’s stock price and led to a leadership change.
Volkswagen’s Polo, Golf and Passat models are affected as well as the subcompact A1 and the A3 hatchback at the Audi premium brand
The affected models at other brands include the Skoda Octavia, the Seat Ibiza and the Seat Leon.
The 1.4-liter, 1.6-liter and 2-liter TDI diesel engines account for the vast majority of affected cars. The only gasoline engine is a 1.4-liter version with cylinder head shutdown
Further Irregularities
Wolfsburg, Germany-based Volkswagen said the findings surfaced following a “comprehensive investigation to establish whether there were indications of further irregularities” after the initial findings rocked the company in September.
“This adds to the bad news,”
Including today’s announcement, Volkswagen’s total liabilities might have grown to about 13.2 billion euros, said London-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. analyst Jose Asumendi. “We note that the company continues to leave no stone unturned and still enjoys a 27.8 billion euro net cash position to face the crisis,” Asumendi said in a report.
“This is a painful process, but it is our only alternative,”
According to a report in German newspaper Bild am Sonntag several Volkswagen engineers have come forward and admitted manipulating carbon dioxide emissions data, blaming the overly ambitious goals set by former Chief Executive Martin Winterkorn. Reuters reports: “The paper said VW engineers tampered with tyre pressure and mixed diesel with their motor oil to make them use less fuel, a deception that began in 2013 and carried on until the spring of this year.”
VW engineers have admitted manipulating CO2 emissions data-paper
Read more at Reutershttp://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/08/volkswagen-emissions-idUSL8N1320KD20151108#CMlTsM8DXdALxtob.99
MUNICH—The disclosure of the Volkswagen exhaust gas scandal was initiated by an engineer in the carmaker’s R&D department. According to a report from German tabloid Bild am Sonntag, the engineer reported the problem to his supervisors.
The reason to forge the CO2 exhaust gas values included unrealistic targets from VW’s managing board, connected with high pressure to reach those goals.
In order to achieve the desired fuel consumption values at the test stand, the engineers made use of a variety of tricks. For example, they increased the tire pressure to 3.5 bar to reduce friction and mixed additives into the engine oil before the vehicles were tested.
According to the report, the fraud started in 2013 and continued to spring 2015. The overarching motivation for their activities was that the fuel consumption goals set by former VW CEO Martin Winterkorn could not be reached with legal means. Out of fear of reprisals, the engineers did not dare to communicate the actual values. A “culture of fear” reigned at the carmaker, the report stated.
In 2012, Winterkorn announced VW would reduce the fleet CO2 emission by as much as 30%. Recently the company was forced to admit publicly that its CO2 emission values were disguised. Worldwide, some 800,000 vehicles are affected.
Here are six reasons why VW’s new disclosure – on understated CO2 emissions — is even more devastating to the company, markets, and consumers.
But the end result is even more devastating, for several reasons.
1. Problems with 800,000 more vehicles
In addition to 11 million diesel vehicles worldwide that vastly understated their actual emissions of smog-causing pollutant nitrogen oxide, VW now has 800,000 cars tooling around Europe emitting illegal levels of carbon dioxide.
2. Overstated fuel economy
Consumers might find CO2 emissions more important than NOx
3. A gasoline-powered engine is also involved
4. Limited information available
So far, information is barely trickling out of VW.
5. Defeat devices also used in Porsche diesel SUV
6. Ballooning economic risk
The latest revelation about fuel economy and CO2 emissions is said to represent a roughly 2 billion euro ($2.19 billion) economic risk, according to VW. This piles on top of the 6.5 billion euro write-off that VW announced September for the costs of fixing 11 million vehicles emitting excessive NOx.
After the latest disclosure by VW, red flags unfurled everywhere in the investment community.
The rumors of emissions: the EU issued a VW in the period of 10 days
The European Commission requires that Volkswagen will report within ten days of the carbon dioxide emissions of their cars.
EU Energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete has sent Volkswagen’s Director-General Matthias Müller’s letter in which he asks for precise information on events that are problems for. Volkswagen said last week that 800 000 car carbon dioxide emissions are higher than the test results are given to understand.
Volkswagens gasoline models suspects emission Manipulation is put into order the prohibition in Finland.
Last week, Volkswagen announced that the CO2 emissions of carbon dioxide readings may not be accurate about 800 000 in Volkswagen. Of these, about 100 000 of Petrol and 700 000 were diesels.
Now, Audi, Volkswagen and Seat Finland-importer VV-Auto Group announces on its website that “a precautionary measure, declare that the some of the Web-site CO2 emissions and fuel consumption values are currently under revision”.
Volkswagen has announced that it will resolve European diesels update program and a sort of air resistance control.
Repair operations are the subject of the European market, Volkswagen’s EA189-Type 1.6 TDI and 2.0 TDI engines, with nitrogen oxide emissions test cheating software. These engines are used in addition to the Volkswagen, Audi, Seat and Skoda.
To repair the car in Finland is far 64 000.
“grating, which relieves the turbulent air flow air mass meter”
“In addition, the software update is done to the engine. The implementation of technical measures of these cars will probably take less than an hour. ”
Volkswagen aims to measure to achieve the current emission limits, and even more so that the engine power will not decrease and consumption increase.
Volkswagen’s (VOWG_p.DE) top executives knew a year ago that some of the company’s cars were markedly less fuel efficient than had been officially stated, Sunday paper Bild am Sonntag reported, without specifying its sources.
VW in early November revealed that it had understated the level of carbon dioxide emissions and fuel usage in around 800,000 cars sold mainly in Europe.
The scandal, which will likely cost VW billions, initially centered on software on up to 11 million diesel vehicles worldwide that VW admitted was designed to artificially suppress nitrogen oxide emissions in a test setting.
The Bild am Sonntag report contradicts VW’s assertion, however, that it only uncovered the false CO2 emissions labeling as part of efforts to clear up the diesel emissions scandal, which became public in September.
A VW spokesman declined to comment on whether VW had knowledge already a year ago of overstated fuel efficiency.
Months after becoming aware of excessive fuel consumption, former Chief Executive Martin Winterkorn decided this spring to pull one model off the market where the discrepancy was particularly pronounced, the Polo TDI BlueMotion, the paper cited sources close to Winterkorn as saying.
Volkswagen’s top executives are alleged to have had knowledge that its cars were not as fuel efficient as it claimed a year ago, according to a news report.
German Sunday paper Bild am Sonntag has claimed that VW pulled the Poloi TDI BlueMotion earlier this year after an 18 per cent discrepancy between its stated fuel economy and its actual performance was discovered. VW has responded to the accusation by claiming it is “pure speculation” and that investigations are ongoing. The company explained that the model was pulled as there was less demand.
However, Bild claimed otherwise, and said that top executives at VW had known about similar issues with a range of the company’s automobiles for roughly a year.
they had claimed the firm’s CEO’s public promise of a 30 per cent emissions decline provoked them to cheat on the tests by mixing diesel with the motor oil and inflating the car tyres
The Volkswagen saga continues, as the company deals with the aftermath of its emissions scandal. According to Reuters, the German automaker has secured a loan of roughly 20 billion euros in order to pay for resulting lawsuits and to compensate consumers whose cars are now worth less following the admission. However, there’s a catch. In order to assure that it can pay back the loan, Volkswagen had to confirm that it’s prepared to sell off some of its smaller holdings including Bentley, Lamborghini and Ducati.
As Road and Track notes, these are considered to be the automaker’s smaller investments because the cars and motorbikes are made in limited quantity and only serve a specific market. Another alternative is that Volkswagen can sell its holdings in MAN, a supplier of ship engines, generators and heavy-duty industrial components.
VW agrees on terms of 20 billion euro bridge loan: sources
Read more at Reutershttp://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-emissions-banks-idUSKBN0TL0SW20151202#kx06jqecIR6eZtKU.99
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92 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
VW rocked by emissions scandal as prosecutors come calling
http://www.wowktv.com/story/30075596/vw-rocked-by-emissions-scandal-as-prosecutors-come-calling
Volkswagen, the world’s top-selling automaker, lost a stunning 17.1 percent of its value Monday after admitting that it intentionally rigged nearly half a million cars to defeat U.S. smog tests.
The Obama administration, meanwhile, announced it is expanding its investigation of what it’s calling “defeat devices” in diesel vehicles, to make sure other manufacturers aren’t using similar schemes to thwart federal Clean Air laws.
Volkswagen has now admitted that it intentionally installed software programmed to switch engines to a cleaner mode during official emissions testing. The software then switches off again, enabling cars to drive more powerfully on the road while emitting as much as 40 times the legal pollution limit.
Volkswagen’s chief executive, Martin Winkerton, was under withering pressure Monday as the scandal erased more than 13 billion euros (around $15 billion) from the company’s market value in the first trading session after the EPA announced the violations Friday.
Winkerton apologized, promised an internal investigation and acknowledged that his company had “broken the trust of our customers and the public.”
VW, facing as much as $18 billion in fines, halted U.S. sales of the affected vehicles and pledged to cooperate with regulators after finally acknowledging its scheme on Sept. 3, Purchia said.
For a company to engage in such blatant trickery, top executives must have been informed
The illegal software was made and installed in vehicles with 2.0-liter diesel engines during the model years 2009 through 2015, the EPA said. They include the Audi A3, VW Jetta, Beetle, Golf and Passat models.
Volkswagen marketed these diesel-powered cars, which account for about 25 percent of sales, as being better for the environment.
Volkswagen recently edged out Japan’s Toyota to become the world’s top-selling automaker
Tomi Engdahl says:
Volkswagen CEO Issues Apology Over Emission-Cheating Software
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/09/21/207217/volkswagen-ceo-issues-apology-over-emission-cheating-software?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
Last Friday we learned that Volkswagen got caught cheating on emissions testing via software programming. The punishment? It could get slapped with up to $18 billion in fines. While they company has yet to admit to any wrong doing, the CEO has now issued a formal apology and said the automaker will cooperate fully with any and all investigations. It’s issued a stop-sale on all new and used TDI vehicles until further notice.
VW Diesel Emissions Recall: What You Need To Know In 10 Questions
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1100125_vw-diesel-emissions-recall-what-you-need-to-know-in-10-questions
The news that Volkswagen had deliberately circumvented U.S. EPA emissions laws on its so-called “clean diesel” models from 2009 to 2015 hit the automotive world like a bombshell on Friday.
Over the weekend, more news emerged, with a statement and apology from VW Group CEO Martin Winterkorn.
The company also took all remaining new 2.0-liter TDI diesel models off sale in the U.S.–and told its dealers to stop selling those models as used cars as well.
When European financial markets opened this morning, Volkswagen shares instantly lost more than a fifth of their value.
(3) What longer-term risks are there to owners?
The almost half a million owners of 2009-2015 Volkswagen and Audi 2.0-liter TDI models face some potentially significant longer-term challenges, however.
First, the value of their vehicles as used cars may well fall.
Second, if VW is able to develop a fix and get it approved, the performance and fuel efficiency of their cars might fall. That’s more likely if the fix is only a software update, which would be far cheaper for Volkswagen.
If VW ends up having to make software changes and retrofit an entire SCR system to the cars (other than the Passat TDI)–something that would likely cost it thousands of dollars per car–performance would likely be unchanged, but interior volume might be reduced to accommodate a liquid-urea tank and associated plumbing.
Third, and most worrisome for owners in California and some other states, they may not be able to re-sell or even re-register their TDI vehicles until they are fixed by Volkswagen.
That’s because the vehicles were apparently “non-compliant,” or illegal to sell in the first place as they now stand.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Auto giant Volkswagen separates the Director-General, due to Martin Winterkornin emission scandal, says a German Tagesspiel reference to the sources of the company’s board of directors.
According to the newspaper the company’s management will Porsche’s head of Matthias Müller. The decision formally told on Friday.
Volkswagen admitted today that it had sold globally by as much as 11 million diesel cars fitted with emission measurements, data-distorting devices.
Source: http://www.ts.fi/uutiset/talous/816792/Lehti+Volkswagenin+paajohtajalle+potkut+VW+kiistaa
Tomi Engdahl says:
11 MILLION VW cars used Dieselgate cheatware – what the clutch, Volkswagen?
Sets aside over US$7bn for fines and mass recalls
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/22/volkswagen_admits_11_million_cars_dieselgated/
Volkswagen is getting hammered on world stock exchanges after it was revealed the number of VW cars using software to cheat on pollution tests is far greater than first thought.
On Friday, the US Environmental Protection Agency revealed that the German car firm had been using engine management software that detected when official emissions testing was being conducted. The software would make the engine conveniently run cleaner than usual during these tests, and switch back to normal when an examination is over – cheating, in other words.
Initially, just 500,000 cars were thought to be affected – but the automaker today admitted 11 million worldwide are going to need to be recalled and reprogrammed.
“Discrepancies relate to vehicles with Type EA 189 engines, involving some eleven million vehicles worldwide,” Volkswagen said in a statement on Tuesday.
http://www.volkswagenag.com/content/vwcorp/info_center/en/news/2015/09/Ad_hoc_US.html
Dissemination of an Ad hoc announcement according to § 15 WpHG:
Volkswagen AG has issued the following information:
Volkswagen is working at full speed to clarify irregularities concerning a particular software used in diesel engines. New vehicles from the Volkswagen Group with EU 6 diesel engines currently available in the European Union comply with legal requirements and environmental standards. The software in question does not affect handling, consumption or emissions. This gives clarity to customers and dealers.
Further internal investigations conducted to date have established that the relevant engine management software is also installed in other Volkswagen Group vehicles with diesel engines. For the majority of these engines the software does not have any effect.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Engineers at West Virginia University Caught VW Cheating
http://www.epanorama.net/newepa/2015/09/22/how-engineers-at-west-virginia-university-caught-vw-cheating-ieee-spectrum/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Quite what those technical measures are remains to be seen. The software detected by the EPA reduced the fuel efficiency and performance in order to bring nitrogen oxide emissions down for testing. Once the testing was complete, the engine shifted to better performance, but at a cost of barfing out up to 40 times the permitted levels of nitrogen oxide.
That’s potentially hundreds of thousands of tonnes of extra air pollution pumped into the atmosphere a year, globally.
If Volkswagen alters the engine management software to make the cars run cleaner, then fuel economy and the cars’ speed will be affected, and owners aren’t going to be happy about that. The company would be open to class action lawsuits all round, and in the statement said they were preparing to take a major financial hit.
The case could also have an interesting knock-on effect in the software field. Technically, Volkswagen’s software was covered under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, meaning tinkerers couldn’t have examined and altered the code.
The EPA has been lobbying with car companies to make sure the DMCA continues to make engine management software off limits to tinkerers. But based on its experience with Volkswagen, the agency may be changing that stance.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/22/volkswagen_admits_11_million_cars_dieselgated/
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Volkswagen Can Salvage Its Wrecked Reputation
http://www.wired.com/2015/09/volkswagen-can-salvage-wrecked-reputation/
Volkswagen is in big trouble. That’s what happens when you knowingly mislead the world’s governments and your customers about a key feature of your primary product. In this case, it’s the two-liter “clean diesel” engines used in more than 10 million VW and sister brand cars over the past decade.
Volkswagen has admitted to illegally using software to manipulate exhaust emissions during government testing. When driving on the road, the emissions of mono-nitrogen oxides, or NOx, were up to forty times the legal limit. VW hasn’t explained how the software worked, but you can be sure that the (literally) dirty details will come out in court.
The company has seen tens of billions of dollars slashed from its market value and is potentially facing an $18 billion fine in the US alone. Then there’s the potential for vehicle recalls and buybacks, class action lawsuits from owners, and criminal charges. This is going to get worse before it gets better.
There are a few things that Volkswagen must do, and some others that it can do. None of it’s going to be fun.
Tarnished Reputation
The Volkswagen brand is one of the oldest and most storied in the world (it traces its routes back to, ahem, Nazi Germany). The company owns some of the world’s best car brands, including Lamborghini, Bugatti and Bentley.
It’s long had a strong reputation for value. The doors shut with a quality thunk. Most of its cars, especially its torque-heavy diesels, are fun to drive as well as affordable.
All that is tainted, because VW has shown it can’t be trusted. The cheating didn’t put anyone in immediate danger—though NOx causes asthma and other respiratory illnesses—but VW’s deceit is hard to take because it was intentional. It was a blatant, deliberate lie, likely done for no other reason than to sell more cars. Many customers bought the “clean diesel” cars because they’d been told they were cleaner for the environment than the alternative. VW betrayed them and the planet.
Tomi Engdahl says:
VW Owners Aren’t Going to Like the Fixes for Their Diesels
http://www.wired.com/2015/09/vw-owners-arent-going-like-fixes-diesels/
VW’s confession that it illegally programed the software in 11 million diesel-powered cars to cheat on emissions tests comes with the sting of betrayal for owners. The automaker’s been touting the benefits of “clean diesel” for years, and it dominates the American market for the gasoline alternative.
Last week, the EPA accused the German automaker of using a “defeat device,” an algorithm that detects when the car is being tested by the EPA and changes its performance to meet emissions standards. The rest of the time, the cars produce up to 40 times the legal limit of nitrogen oxides (NOx), the stuff linked to increased rates of asthma and other respiratory problems.
The Jettas, Beetles, Passats, and Audis in question deliver top tier fuel economy, and, eco-conscious owners were told, had no trouble meeting strict emissions standards
Once the sting of the lie fades, the US customers who bought 482,000 of those cars will feel the real pain. Because Volkswagen will be forced to recall those vehicles and somehow make them to meet federal standards. There are two apparent ways to do that, and owners who value performance, fuel economy, and trunk space won’t like either.
One is to “reflash” the engine control module, recalibrating the software so the car always runs the way it does during EPA testing, and always meets emission standards.
The downside here is that to achieve the drastic drop in NOx emissions, the cars in test mode sacrificed some fuel economy, or performance. Just how much is hard to say
There’s precedent for this: Last year, the EPA forced Kia and Hyundai to downgrade fuel economy ratings on more than a million cars (they blamed “procedural errors” at a shared testing facility). The Korean automakers spent $395 million on a settlement with vehicle owners aggrieved over higher than expected fuel costs.
The standard way of making a diesel run cleanly is to use selective catalytic reduction, a chemical process that breaks NOx down into nitrogen and water. Part of that process includes adding urea to the mix. The super effective system can eliminate 70 to 90 percent of NOx emissions, and is used by other diesel manufacturers like Mercedes and BMW. The downside is that it adds complication to the system, and cost—$5,000 to $8,000 per car. And you need to periodically add the urea-based solution to your car to keep it working.
The big “advance” from VW was the “clean diesel” technology that supposedly made the whole urea thing unnecessary on its smaller cars
VW’s unlikely to embrace that option, because adding hardware to half a million cars would be far more expensive than a computer update.
Dodge the Recall
So if the government is making VW recall your car and your fuel economy and performance will take a hit because of it, why not just ignore the recall notice in your mailbox? People ignore recalls all the time, even when they’re to fix critical safety issues.
The man can’t compel you to get it fixed.
Except here, maybe he can. These Volkswagens are a public health threat and exuberantly break federal law.
Whether you dodge the recall or not, your car’s resale value is likely to drop as far and fast as VW’s stock, which has plunged 20 percent since the feds came down on VW Friday.
Tomi Engdahl says:
VW Probably Won’t Die—But if It Does, Europe Is in Trouble
http://www.wired.com/2015/09/vw-probably-wont-die-europe-trouble/
A multibillion dollar corporation tricks the public into thinking its smog-burping cars are actually good for the environment. A group of Mother Earth-loving researchers exposes the corporation as a fraud. The bad guys are defeated. The good guys win. The credits roll. It sounds like a plot only Disney would dream up. If only real life were so simple. In reality, Volkswagen’s attempt to deceive the Environmental Protection Agency with its emission-masking technology is about to get a lot more complicated.
It all started last week when the EPA accused Volkswagen of violating the Clean Air Act by equipping half-a-million “clean diesel” vehicles with software that would lower the cars’ emissions only when they were undergoing emissions testing. Today, the situation took another downward turn when news broke that the problem is actually much more widespread, involving some 11 million vehicles worldwide.
This is not a manufacturing mistake, but a clear case of trickery.
VW hasn’t done much to appease investors or the public. Already its stock price has dropped to a three-year low, and European stocks fell 3 percent overall.
All of this is a natural immediate reaction. It’s tough for investors to have confidence when Volkswagen’s reputation is taking such a blow. But the important question to be asking now is: Will this reaction last? And if it does, what does that mean for Volkswagen, the German economy, and the European Union itself? It’s distinctly possible Volkswagen won’t implode; other big car companies have weathered serious troubles recently and survived. But if Volkswagen does fall apart, the ripple effect could be felt across a continent.
“The big shock is that they lied, and they did it on purpose.”
That matters, McAlinden says, because we’ve seen other scandals in the past involving companies like General Motors and Toyota that did put people in physical danger. “And yet, people aren’t talking about General Motors all week long,” he says. “You’ll forget about Volkswagen like you’ve already forgotten about Toyota.”
As for the $18 billion in fines with which the EPA has reportedly said it could saddle Volkswagen, McAlinden says it’s important to remember that $18 billion is the maximum fine. In reality, it will likely be much less than that, he says. Already, Volkswagen has set aside $7.3 billion to cover the possible costs to ensue from the scandal.
The Worst-Case Scenario
Then there’s the fact that so much of Volkswagen’s branding in recent years has revolved around its position as an environmental market leader capable of developing vehicles that were clean, powerful, and affordable. Not only has the scandal proved that to be false, but those consumers who do get their cars fixed as a result of this recall won’t likely enjoy them as much
“The problem is, from a customer point of view, I may see my fuel economy drop, and the car won’t be as powerful as it was before,”
There’s also an innovation problem. The entire industry is now working on ways to comply with increasingly stringent global emissions standards while also giving consumers what they want. By trying to solve that problem with deception, all Volkswagen has done is waste time it could have been using to come up with an actual solution. It isn’t just sneaky. It’s lazy. If its stock price continues to drop, and fines and class action suits continue to mount, Volkswagen may struggle to find the resources to make up for that lost time.
After all, a lot more than a few evil executives’ futures are riding on Volkswagen. Volkswagen employs some 600,000 workers. And the German government is a shareholder.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ethics in Engineering: Volkswagen’s Diesel Fiasco
http://hackaday.com/2015/09/23/ethics-in-engineering-volkswagens-diesel-fiasco/
Every so often – and usually not under the best of circumstance – the field of engineering as a whole is presented with a teaching moment. Volkswagen is currently embroiled in a huge scandal involving emissions testing of 11 Million diesel cars sold in recent years. It’s a problem that could cost VW dearly
While diesel automobiles make up one third of the passenger vehicle fleet in Europe, they make up barely a fraction of cars on US roads. This comes down to a difference in environmental regulation. Since the introduction of the US Clean Air Act of 1970, NOx emissions have been under tighter controls than CO₂ emissions. In Europe, CO₂ is more tightly controlled than NOx. It’s a simple consequence of regulation that diesel cars would be more popular in Europe than the US.
Sales of Volkswagen diesels have been on the rise in the US in the last few years, despite this more stringent regulation. ‘Clean diesel’ is a goal for the industry
Despite passing emissions tests required by the US government, CAFEE found these engines were out of compliance. This apparent discontinuity can be brought to light by examining how diesel emissions are measured. An EPA notice of violation explains this was done by a bit of code functioning as a ‘defeat device’ that would sense when the vehicle was under test. Software installed in the electronic control module (ECM) would detect when the car was undergoing emissions testing by reading, “various inputs including the position of the steering wheel, vehicle speed, the duration of the engine’s operation, and barometric pressure.” Under these conditions, the ECM would use a different ‘map’ that would reduce torque and NOx emissions. Under normal conditions – when the vehicle was not being tested for emissions – a separate ‘map’ would be used that would increase acceleration, torque, or fuel economy. CAFEE was able to determine this because of a portable testing rig; instead of testing emissions in a garage on a dynamometer, the researchers performed their tests in real-world conditions, driving around Los Angeles, from LA to Mount Baldy, and from LA to San Diego.
Which Brings Us To Today…
VW has over 400,000 cars on the road in the US that have this ‘defeat device’ installed in their ECM. The EPA can enforce civil penalties of up to $37,500 for each vehicle not in compliance with regulations, meaning Volkswagen could face a penalty of $18 Billion USD. Volkswagen stock has dropped 20% in the last few days, and the entire chain of command, from the CEO of Volkswagen down to the lowliest engineer are sweating bullets.
Ethics in Engineering
Despite these problems, a congress screaming for answers, investigations by the DoJ, and investors losing years off their lives, we may never know one key fact of this matter: why this ‘defeat device’ was ever implemented.
An engineer, either in Volkswagen or less likely at a subcontractor, signed off on code that would defeat the entire purpose of EPA and Clean Air Act regulations. Someone with the authority to say ‘no’ didn’t, and this code was installed in the electronic control unit of millions of cars. This is the teachable moment of this entire ordeal; at some point, someone who should have known better. At least one engineer will lose their job over this, and certainly more than one executive will be hung out to dry.
Tomi Engdahl says:
VW Fiasco Puts Ethics In Engineering Under the Spotlight, CEO Steps Down
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/09/23/1618214/vw-fiasco-puts-ethics-in-engineering-under-the-spotlight-ceo-steps-down
By now you’ve heard that VW has been accused of doctoring the software in their small diesel models to sidestep emissions standards. The thing that hasn’t been talked about is engineering ethics. An algorithm in the code detects when the vehicle is under test conditions and causes it to perform differently. This couldn’t have been accomplished by just one person.
Ethics in Engineering: Volkswagen’s Diesel Fiasco
http://hackaday.com/2015/09/23/ethics-in-engineering-volkswagens-diesel-fiasco/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Volkswagen CEO Resigns, Saying He’s ‘Shocked’ By Emissions Scandal
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/09/23/442818919/volkswagen-ceo-resigns-saying-he-s-shocked-at-emissions-scandal
One day after acknowledging that 11 million Volkswagen-made cars have software that dupes official emissions tests, Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn says he is resigning from his post.
“I am shocked by the events of the past few days,” Winterkorn said in a statement released Wednesday. “Above all, I am stunned that misconduct on such a scale was possible in the Volkswagen Group.”
The news comes as Winterkorn met with Volkswagen’s board Wednesday, less than a week after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said the car company had put software in diesel cars that turns emissions control systems off when the car isn’t undergoing official tests.
Volkswagen is faced with fallout on a number of fronts, from investors punishing its stock to the chance that the U.S. government will levy billions of dollars in fines. There’s also the likelihood — already realized in Canada — that millions of its customers will file class-action lawsuits.
While Winterkorn says he’s shocked by recent events, the report by the EPA and the California Air Resources Board states that Volkswagen has known for more than a year that American inspectors had found something fishy going on with diesel cars made under the Volkswagen and Audi brands.
The initial U.S. report ordered VW to recall more than 480,000 cars; on Tuesday, the company acknowledged that worldwide, it needs to fix 11 million vehicles
Volkswagen Used ‘Defeat Device’ To Skirt Emissions Rules, EPA Says
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/09/18/441467960/volkswagen-used-defeat-device-to-skirt-emissions-rules-epa-says
The Environmental Protection Agency says Volkswagen intentionally violated the Clean Air Act by using sophisticated software in its diesel-powered cars that detects emissions testing — and “turns full emissions controls on only during the test.”
Installed in four-cylinder cars, the software, which the EPA calls a “defeat device” that’s meant to trick official tests, allowed diesel Jettas, Beetles and other cars to “emit up to 40 times more pollution” than allowed under U.S. emission standards.
Volkswagen must now fix the emissions control systems, the agency says, adding that the automaker could be liable for civil penalties and other punishment. The cars in question are popular Volkswagen and Audi models that were made from 2009 to this year.
“Using a defeat device in cars to evade clean air standards is illegal and a threat to public health,”
The U.S. government also has reason to feel duped: Volkswagen’s “clean diesel” TDI engines earned a $1,300 federal tax credit for people who purchased a Jetta sedan or wagon back in 2009, the first year affected by the recall.
The cars were first found to produce too much nitrogen oxides, or NOx
As for drivers of the cars, the EPA says, “these violations do not present a safety hazard and the cars remain legal to drive and resell.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
VW/Audi “Dieselgate” Has Broad Policy Implications for All Sectors of Engineering
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1327792&
VW’s fraud uncovers a snake’s nest of questions — and a whole lot of anger.
Five days into the mess – which was lurking for at least 8 years – has seen more conversations with my peers on this topic than in many a year. I propose to detail here the perils and some possible technical and legal alleviations for what is a global technology catastrophe and fraud. A technical fraud of such scale, that unless we engineers can tend to our own turf, we might witness a tsunami of over technical regulation from eager policy makers and lawyers around the globe.
I recall John being surprised that the new generation smart diesels from VW did not need a huge amount of expendable scrubber and catalytic chemicals (usually UREA) when introduced in 2008.
First, this isn’t the first time a global car maker tried to bypass (lax) testing standards. GM did in the 70s and 90s. The trucking diesel industry did 17 years ago and was fined over $1 Billion. And, for all we know, other diesel car makers may not have much cover form what VW has just admitted to. I can see the delete keys in motion as I write this.
What we know so far is very little. 482,000+ VW/Audi US cars affected, 11 million globally. Reports that these cars emitted 40 times the allowed levels of Nitric Oxides is bad. It is the seed for combining with water to form various nitric acids; a foe to plant, animal and humans alike.
There are talks of a potential $18 Billion US fine alone. And that is for 1/25th of the cars they made!
That fine would not cover making the cars legal again IF that is even technical, economically or legally possible.The departing CEO stated he was shocked by this. I’m inclined to believe he and others might have been kept in the dark. No one yet knows how much legal and government horsepower will be needed to determine the full responsibility chain for dieselgate.
Probably, this ruse started with one or more engineers giving assent to the feasibility idea. Yes, there can be threats of livelihood for engineers not to shirk their moral responsibilities. Throughout history. And clearly higher-ups assisted the plan. Was it one VW employee in 10,000 or one in ten? The world wants to know. Fast.
Dieselgate might impact electronic and computing devices, the FCC. ITU and other regulators. WHO is to monitor white space RF devices and misuses of power levels and jamming? We need more field monitors clearly, as some 11 million VWs rolled away from testing facilities and did 40x the air pollution levels regulators allowed for seven to eight years!
What will car owners do? Are they in perpetual violation for polluting? Did ANY dealers know?
Would you engineering readers and managers hire any of the engineers or managers who are identified as contributing to this deception?
Do we need reforms for regulatory agencies…adding more spot checks and fewer bureaucrats?
I personally am so outraged by this misuse of engineering skills that I would like to see punishments for the principals involved. Not just a fine. This is malice aforethought; and regardless of your country, such people are considering crimes on a par with robbery and assault and should be treated as such.
Might public health agencies get involved?
Speed is of the essence for all parties here.
There are so many unanswered questions. I look forward to yours.
Why did Germany not catch this before our overwhelmed EPA?
What do engineering and legal teachers tell their students about this world where such a technical fraud can scale and impact millions?
So there are more questions than answers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
NOxious VW emissions scandal: Car maker warned of cheatware YEARS AGO – reports
Engineers, supplier flagged up concerns in 2011 and 2007
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/27/vw_emissions_scandal_car_maker_warned_cheatware_years_ago/
Volkswagen was reportedly warned about rigging emissions tests on its vehicles years ago, not only by one of its suppliers but also the German car giant’s own engineers.
According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung newspaper, VW’s technicians flagged up concerns about the engine management software the company was using in its motors back in 2011.
It was also reported today that VW had been cautioned eight years ago not to rig the tests by its software supplier Bosch. According to Bild am Sonntag, Bosch had written to VW in 2007.
The cheatware detects when a motor undergoes emissions testing, and then fudges the engine output to pass the examination by cutting performance to meet emissions standards for nitrogen oxide.
Tomi Engdahl says:
German regulator sets VW deadline
Plan in place by October 7 or get the NOxious cars off the road
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/27/german_regulator_sets_vw_deadline/
Germany’s Federal Motor Transport Authority, KBA, has lost patience with scandal-plagued Volkswagen and has given it a deadline.
By October 7, the regulator says, Volkswagen has to submit its plan for bringing its cars into line with European emissions regulation – and this time, no cheating.
That’s going to be a tough ask for VW: while the software that cheated on emissions tests will be easily patched, it can only be done with a big hit to the performance of cars on the road.
German tabloid Bild am Sonntag says the KBA says it’s obliged “to call for the necessary measures to ensure that the manufactured vehicles are brought into line” with what’s been approved for sale.
If KBA withdraws approval for the affected cars, they can neither be sold nor driven in Germany.
Tomi Engdahl says:
David Kravets / Ars Technica:
Volkswagen scandal shows why tinkering with vehicle software should be exempted from DMCA restrictions, despite objections from automakers and the EPA
VW scandal highlights irony of EPA opposition to vehicle software tinkering
EPA says public can’t be trusted to tinker with vehicle software. So who can we trust?
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/09/vw-scandal-highlights-irony-of-epa-opposition-to-vehicle-software-tinkering/
“I personally am deeply sorry that we have broken the trust of our customers and the public,” Volkswagen Chief Executive Officer Martin Winterkorn said in a statement Monday, addressing the so-called “defeat device” software the automaker built into its vehicles to deceive US air pollution tests. “We will do everything necessary in order to reverse the damage this has caused.”
What led up to this mea culpa? Researchers from the International Council on Clean Transportation and West Virginia University performed all kinds of tests on VW vehicles, discovering that when the vehicles were on the road they polluted substantially more than when they were being tested for pollution emissions. Nobody could make any sense of how that could be. So the US Environmental Protection Agency threatened not to approve the automaker’s 2016 models for sale. In response, the automaker said its software was designed to hoodwink emissions tests, the EPA said.
“Only then did VW admit it had designed and installed a defeat device in these vehicles in the form of a sophisticated software algorithm that detected when a vehicle was undergoing emissions testing,” the EPA said in an action letter to VW on Friday. The EPA wants VW to recall about 500,000 vehicles dating to 2009.
In the wake of the scandal, VW’s stock has plummeted. It also leaves a black eye on the EPA, the agency that is supposed to regulate air emissions, as VW’s shenanigans played the EPA for a fool.
Strangely, however, the EPA is standing alongside automakers, including VW. They all oppose proposed regulations that would allow the public to circumvent copyright protections measures attached to vehicle software. Also known as “technological protection measures” (TPMs), automakers employ this copyright ruse toward the goal of making it a Digital Millennium Copyright Act violation to examine or tinker with the code in vehicle software. And, for the moment, it’s all legal, and the EPA wants to keep it that way.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation says forbidding tinkering is an abuse of copyright law.
For obvious reasons, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers opposes the EFF’s vehicle software exemption proposal. The alliance, which includes VW, recently told the US Copyright Office that such an exemption would “create or exacerbate” (PDF) “serious threats to safety and security.”
The vehicle software proposal would allow the circumvention of TPMs “in relation to computer programs, databases, and devices for purposes of good-faith testing, identifying, disclosing, and fixing of malfunctions, security flaws, or vulnerabilities.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Herbie Goes Under Investigation: German prosecutors probe ex-VW CEO Winterkorn
Claims he was unaware of the ‘defeat device’
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/29/german_prosecutors_open_investigation_into_winterkorn/
Volkswagon’s former CEO, Martin Winterkorn, has come under investigation by the German state attorney.
The German state attorney’s office in Braunschweig, not too distant from Volkswagen’s base in Wolfsburg, acknowledged that it had received complaints from people who had raised the issue anonymously, reported the New York Times.
The investigation is seeking to clarify the criminal nature of the emissions issue, specifically whether it may constitute fraud and to determine who knew about it.
Winterkorn resigned on Wednesday while repeatedly denying any knowledge of the software.
Volkswagen’s supervisory board has corroborated Winterkorn’s statement that he was unaware of the “defeat device” and added that the company had additionally asked the German attorneys, following his resignation, to investigate the possibility of employee criminal behaviour.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Opinion: Volkswagen’s failure
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/engineering-on-wheels/4440414/Opinion–Volkswagen-s-failure?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150928&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150928&elq=c1005f1dfbc94102961e3ab2814e2e6c&elqCampaignId=24949&elqaid=28312&elqat=1&elqTrackId=c323d6a2acc54e6492147bc7d05dd79f
It went through the press like a thunderstorm: Volkswagen installed software in its diesel engine controllers that detected when the car was under test. In such situations, it reduced harmful exhaust emissions to the legal limit; otherwise, it blew unacceptably high levels of exhaust fumes into the air. The trick clearly was applied to circumvent environmental legislation in the USA and other countries. Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn was forced to step down – but what effects will this revelation have?
It’s a shame for the German automotive industry that a honourable company like Volkswagen resorts to such means to better its position against the competition. There could be no other solution for Mr. Winterkorn than to step down. There is reason to fear that this dirty little trick has the potential to substantially damage the standing of the Volkswagen group, diesel technology, and the German automotive industry as a whole.
The damage obviously includes Audi as Volkswagen’s nobler sister, simply for the reason that Audi uses the same engines. The same holds true to the other members of the Volkswagen group, SEAT and Skoda. As far as I know, Audi already admitted that they used the same software.
Porsche is in a different position.
Porsche never used these engines
The move also damages the credibility of the diesel technology across all manufacturers. While well established in Europe as a very economic and lasting type of engine, in the US, diesel technology always fought an uphill battle. I don’t believe the reason for the attitude of American customers towards diesel technology was due to the exhaust behaviour of these cars, but the current scandal is grist to the mill of the adversaries. Their impression must be that apparently the technology is difficult to handle in terms of eco-friendliness, and that it takes many engineering efforts to get the exhaust into the legal limits. While I still believe diesel is environmentally friendly, the simple fact that Volkswagen believed they needed such a shabby trick hints that it really takes more efforts to tame a diesel than a gasoline engine.
And there is another open question: How can it be that a rock-solid engineering company like Volkswagen is unable to achieve the correct exhaust gas limits if their competitors can? Are Daimler, BMW, or Opel engineers better? I don’t believe so. In particular not because the German auto industry has, despite all competition, somewhat of a family, every member knows pretty well what the other one does.
But Winterkorn seemed trustable too, until very recently. But potential car buyers across the world will ask themselves the same question. And this is the real damage: The customer’s confidence is annihilated. This is a much bigger damage than any penalty Volkswagen may have to pay.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The DMCA May Have Allowed Volkswagen to Hide ECU Software From the EPA
http://hackaday.com/2015/09/29/the-dmca-may-have-allowed-volkswagen-to-hide-ecu-software-from-the-epa/
A lot of questions have been raised by the recent “dieselgate” scandal. Should automakers be held accountable for ethically questionable actions? Are emissions standards in the United States too restrictive? Are we ever going to stop appending “gate” onto every mildly controversial news story? But, for Hackaday readers, the biggest question is most likely “how did they get away with it?” The answer is probably because of a law a lot of hackers are already familiar with: the DMCA.
How could they get away with this simple trick when a brief look at the ECU software would have revealed it? Because, they were able to hide under the umbrella of the DMCA. The ECU software is, of course, not intended to be user-accessible, which means that Volkswagen is allowed to lock it down. That, in turn, means that the EPA isn’t allowed to circumvent that security without violating the DMCA and potentially breaking the law. This kept the EPA’s hands tied, and Volkswagen protected.
How the DMCA may have let carmakers cheat clean air standards
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2986682/telematics/how-the-dmca-may-have-let-carmakers-cheat-clean-air-standards.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Comments from http://hackaday.com/2015/09/29/the-dmca-may-have-allowed-volkswagen-to-hide-ecu-software-from-the-epa/
It’s clear that what they did is morally wrong, but they designed and sold engines that, when run through the EPA test cycle, met the EPA standards. The ECU wasn’t faking the data and the emissions were indeed within specifications. Their engines don’t perform as expected when subjected to a different set of tests in different conditions — but that isn’t what the EPA said the engines had to do. VW met the tests in an inarguably shady way, but that doesn’t change the fact that they followed the letter of the law.
It’s an interesting argument, but the the EPA makes the rules.
The real question is, did the people who didn’t use the EPA method and used real world tests… did they find other manufacturers doing the same thing?
I heard Audi & Skoda brands have been cheating too but as they are owned by VW and have the same engine. I also wonder if this practice is widespread in other manufacturers also. It just goes to show how morally bankrupt corporations are these days they have too much power. If I defrauded someone I would get prison if a corporation does it gets a fine.
According to http://www3.epa.gov/otaq/cert/documents/vw-nov-caa-09-18-15.pdf they broke the law. Even if the written law doesn’t back that up, there’s enough sentiment against VW that the charge is going to stick.
Yes, they did. That’s the reason it’s being called a defeat device. (And digging through, an AECD can be a computer system or part of one.)
From: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/40/86.004-2
Defeat device means an auxiliary emission control device (AECD) that reduces the effectiveness of the emission control system under conditions which may reasonably be expected to be encountered in normal vehicle operation and use, unless:
(1) Such conditions are substantially included in the applicable Federal emission test procedure for heavy-duty vehicles and heavy-duty engines described in subpart N of this part;
(2) The need for the AECD is justified in terms of protecting the vehicle against damage or accident; or
(3) The AECD does not go beyond the requirements of engine starting.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Legal Loophole Offers Volkswagen Criminal Immunity
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/09/30/2043255/legal-loophole-offers-volkswagen-criminal-immunity
According to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled) a loophole in the 1970 Clean Air Act could make it impossible for U.S. prosecutors to subject Volkswagen to criminal charges over its use of standards-dodging ‘defeat devices’ in its emissions-testing software.
Volkswagen software scandal may not lead to criminal prosecution due to loophole in Clean Air Act
https://thestack.com/world/2015/09/30/volkswagen-clean-air-act-loophole/
Faced with a slew of crippling lawsuits and recalls over its software-based evasion of emissions standards, German car manufacturer Volkswagen has a ray of corporate light today – it transpires that a loop in the U.S. 1970 Clean Air Act could stop the company facing criminal charges over use of ‘defeat devices’ in its cars.
According to the Wall Street Journal [paywalled], the clause in the act indemnifies car manufacturers against criminal penalties and leaves the Justice Department in a jurisdictional quandary as far as bringing criminal charges against Volkswagen. Prosecutors are now reported to be considering alternative methods, including charges that Volkswagen lied to regulation authorities – a considerably reduced line of attack.
The New York Times contends that the ‘defeat devices’, the disclosure of which has rocked the car industry, represent part of a long-time culture of systematic deception and standards-rigging in the automotive industry.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Volkswagen staff acted criminally, says board member
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34397426
Olaf Lies, a Volkswagen board member and economy minister of Lower Saxony has told Newsnight some staff acted criminally over emission cheat tests.
He said the people who allowed the deception to happen or who installed the software that allowed certain models to give false emissions readings must take personal responsibility.
He also said the board only found out about the problems at the last meeting.
About 11 million diesel engine cars are affected by the problem.
Mr Lies told the BBC: “Those people who allowed this to happen, or who made the decision to install this software – they acted criminally. They must take personal responsibility.”
He said: “We only found out about the problems in the last board meeting, shortly before the media did. I want to be quite open. So we need to find out why the board wasn’t informed earlier about the problems when they were known about over a year ago in the United States.”
‘Huge damage’
Mr Lies said the company had no idea of the total bill to sort out the engines and cover any legal costs arising: “Huge damage has been done because millions of people have lost their faith in VW. We are surely going to have a lot of people suing for damages. We have to recall lots of cars and it has to happen really fast.”
He added that the company was strong and that rebuilding trust – and ensuring the majority of the 600,000 workers at the car giant were not blamed – was its priority.
Scandal spilling over
The scandal is continuing to hit VW’s share price. On Tuesday it fell another 1.5% during morning trade in Frankfurt. The company has lost 35% of its market value since last Monday.
Mr Mueller promised a “relentless” investigation to uncover what went wrong.
He said the group was “facing the severest test in its history.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
How the Internet of things could stop the next Volkswagen scandal in its tracks
http://fortune.com/2015/09/25/volkswagen-internet-of-things/
The Internet of things and a culture of experimentation makes it harder to lie to consumers and regulators.
Volkswagen is still reeling from the revelations that it lied to U.S. regulators and pumped nearly 1 million tons of extra pollutants into the air by installing software onto its cars to fool emissions tests. Now regulators, legislators and others are wondering how to prevent such a scandal from happening again. Open source software has been a suggested salve. So has random testing.
But I think these are part of two bigger trends that will come together to prevent these sort of shenanigans going forward—the Internet of things and the development of a maker culture. The Internet of things and its proliferation of data gathering sensors that are connected to the cloud and to each other combined with an increasing number of people who are comfortable building their own gear to experiment with the world around them will create an environment of constant scrutiny.
“It seems like we’ve gone through this trough where only 100 people in the world have the tools to test something like the Volkswagen emissions, to having a limitless number of people having the tool to detect this,” said Eben Upton, the creator of the Raspberry Pi computer, which is a computer beloved by makers. “But it’s not just that the tools are available, but that the tech culture has changed.”
Upton explained that people are willing to play with technology and experiment with cheap sensors to see if what they are being told is true. The combination of $1 or $2 sensors and a general skepticism has led a class of people to build tools to see if their air quality is really what the EPA is telling them. And, said Upton, as the tools are commercialized through companies, that ability to test will only get easier for the average consumer.
The Internet of things and a culture of experimentation makes it harder to lie to consumers and regulators.
Volkswagen is still reeling from the revelations that it lied to U.S. regulators and pumped nearly 1 million tons of extra pollutants into the air by installing software onto its cars to fool emissions tests. Now regulators, legislators and others are wondering how to prevent such a scandal from happening again. Open source software has been a suggested salve. So has random testing.
But I think these are part of two bigger trends that will come together to prevent these sort of shenanigans going forward—the Internet of things and the development of a maker culture. The Internet of things and its proliferation of data gathering sensors that are connected to the cloud and to each other combined with an increasing number of people who are comfortable building their own gear to experiment with the world around them will create an environment of constant scrutiny.
“It seems like we’ve gone through this trough where only 100 people in the world have the tools to test something like the Volkswagen emissions, to having a limitless number of people having the tool to detect this,” said Eben Upton, the creator of the Raspberry Pi computer, which is a computer beloved by makers. “But it’s not just that the tools are available, but that the tech culture has changed.”
Upton explained that people are willing to play with technology and experiment with cheap sensors to see if what they are being told is true. The combination of $1 or $2 sensors and a general skepticism has led a class of people to build tools to see if their air quality is really what the EPA is telling them. And, said Upton, as the tools are commercialized through companies, that ability to test will only get easier for the average consumer.
He thinks environmental groups will lead the charge.
Already there are projects such as AirCast that are trying to track air quality around cities using air quality sensors worn by volunteers.
Or you can buy an Air Quality Egg for $240 that measures carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide and become part of a worldwide air quality monitoring effort linked over the Internet.
Again, you’d need to make correlations between a cluster of offending Volkswagens and higher-than-expected pollution levels. However, in today’s era of cheap and easy data analysis such a thing isn’t too far fetched.
So, as cheap, connected sensors proliferate, a culture of making and experimenting expands, and civic groups embrace both attributes to start testing the world around them, more consumers will have the tools they need to tell if companies are lying. For those who are damaging the environment, they could find themselves having some sticky conversations.
VW’s Cheating Proves We Must Open Up the Internet of Things
http://www.wired.com/2015/09/volkswagen-open-iot/
It’s been a rough year for the Internet of Things. Security researchers uncovered terrifying vulnerabilities in products ranging from cars to garage doors to skateboards. Outages at smart home services Wink and Google’s Nest rendered customers’ gadgets temporarily useless. And the Volkswagen emissions scandal, though not precisely an Internet of Things issue, has exposed yet another issue with “smart” physical goods: the possibility of manufacturers embedding software in their products designed to skirt regulations.
And those are only the most immediate concerns. The Internet of Things brings with it privacy concerns and compatibility headaches. There’s also the potential for the companies that make this stuff to go belly-up at any moment—as Wink’s parent company Quirky just did. In the worst case scenario, customers could be left with a house full of expensive, not-so-smart gadgets.
The Safety of Objects
Today, the vast majority of smart home gadgets, connected cars, wearable devices, and other Internet of Things inhabitants are profoundly closed. Independent researchers can’t inspect the code that makes them run. You can’t wipe the factory-loaded software and load alternative software instead. In many cases you can’t even connect them to other devices unless the manufacturers of each product have worked out a deal with each other.
Ostensibly, this is for your own protection. If you can’t load your own software, you’re less likely to infect your car, burglar alarm, or heart monitor with a virus. But this opacity is also what helped Volkswagen get away with hiding the software it used to subvert emissions tests. It makes it harder to trust that your thermostat isn’t selling your personal info to door-to-door salesmen or handing it out to the National Security Agency.
Tomi Engdahl says:
It seems that also other brands making diesel are not so clear that they claim:
Toyota, Volvo and many others, were placed in the test – it was smoky smell
German motoring organization ADAC found in their tests that very many of the new diesel cars exceeding the permitted emission limits and up to several orders of magnitude. According to official tests, however, these cars meet the emission standards.
EcoTest method simulates actual driving conditions more realistically than the official use in the European Union NEDC test. The official measurements has for many years been accused of the fact that they can be much smaller values than those generated in the real qualifying result.
Euro 5 requirements that tested 41 car just two emissions remained within permitted limits.
More stringent Euro 6 requirements met several car model, but also in this class standard deviation was very high. ADAC, this reflects the fact that the various anti-pollution methods can keep NOx emissions low in all conditions.
Source: http://www.taloussanomat.fi/autot/2015/10/02/toyota-volvo-ja-moni-muu-pantiin-testiin-kary-kavi/201512813/304?rss=4
More information: https://www.adac.de/infotestrat/adac-im-einsatz/motorwelt/abgasskandal_ecotestergebnisse.aspx?ComponentId=246767&SourcePageId=6729
Tomi Engdahl says:
After VW’s Dieselgate: 5 Questions for Carmakers
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327825&
Since the Volkswagen scandal first broke more than a week ago, we know a lot more about how Dieselgate started to unravel. What remains mysterious, though, is why the German carmaker thought it would be OK to hack its own car to rig the system (and put consumer trust in jeopardy); worse, how on earth those involved in the fraud at the company had assumed that they could get away with it.
Leading up to the appointment of Volkswagen’s new CEO, Matthias Mueller, announced last Friday, we’ve learned how one of the biggest frauds in automotive history was uncovered by a group of researchers at West Virginia University working on a $50,000 grant from the International Council on Clean Transportation. And the researchers’ data wasn’t just made available now, but more than a year and a half ago.
Perhaps more important, Volkswagen, confronted with discrepancies in data — between tests results generated in labs and those on the road — insisted to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials, for as long as a year, that Volkswagen wasn’t to blame. The company said testing methodologies or inexperienced testing personnel should be questioned.
It wasn’t until much later — when the EPA denied approval for Volkswagen’s 2016 “clean diesel” cars in the United States — that VW admitted purposely cheating the system.
Volkswagen designed a subroutine — or parallel set of instructions —secretly sent by ECU to the emission controls to activate emission controls during tests.
EE Times has made a list of five issues related to Volkswagen or the auto industry at large that the recent scandal has exposed.
1. Who tests vehicles?
Nobody in any industry – automotive, financial, medical, telecommunications or consumer electronics industries – would volunteer for excessive regulation.
In the United States, carmakers do their own emission tests and submit results to the government. In Europe, automakers can shop around for a private testing outfit in any European Union member state.
Although U.S. carmakers do their own testing, the EPA conducts random checks. This is not so in Europe
In sum, there is a clear conflict of interest in the Europe’s vehicle testing system.
2. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and software code inside cars
As Roger Lanctot, associate director at Strategy Analytics’ global automotive practice, told us, “Technically speaking, the testing and software code analysis performed by the West Virginia University and the California Air Resources Board (CARB)/EPA folks was a violation of VW’s copyright.” He explained that software code in cars is protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Lactot described VW as having “some of the most opaque and carefully protected software code in the industry.”
The real issue, however, resides in the following. “Protecting software code means you or I cannot modify that code or if we do or we want to, we pretty much need to ‘hack’ our way through it.” In his opinion, “Opening up that code to repair shops, vehicle owners, universities and inspectors will be a first positive step forward.”
In a day and age when the open-source community plays an essential role in improving software codes, why should a carmaker hide behind a copyright law to block public access to its automotive code?
3. OBDII ports to be scrutinized further?
The on-board diagnostic port found in most cars manufactured after 1996 was originally created to facilitate emissions testing, according to Lanctot.
Carmakers tend to be fiercely protective of this port as a defense against rogue individuals seeking a way to modify their vehicle performance including the emissions controls.
The question that should be weighed here is which is a more serious offense? Is it an individual modifying a car to add “muscle,” or carmakers who make orchestrated cheating into an organizational practice?
4. Automakers’ engineer-driven culture
Engineers often bewail the hypocrisy of politicians who promote electric cars that plug into a power grid that still burns fossil fuels.
But whether it’s hypocrisy, arrogance, or a sense of technical superiority, it’s clear that engineers contributed to the still-unfolding shame of Dieselgate.
Did engineers agree to develop a clever solution to rig the system, under pressure from management to increase sales of diesel-powered cars in the U.S. market?
5. Carmakers and perils of software code
I’ve found it kind of curious that Volkswagen has been seemingly immune to any high-profile hacking cases.
Strategy Analytics’ Lactot said, “It’s dumb luck so far.”
He explained, “VW was late to the telematics party, and the ADAS (self-parking etc.) party and has generally lagged the market leaders in the United States where the lion’s share of hacking has occurred. So if you are a hacker trying to frighten an OEM into writing a check and listening to your suggestions, VW was not at the top of your list.” Lanctot concluded, “Nothing inherently safe or secure about VW’s.”
The irony here, as the analyst pointed out, is that “VW was caught hacking itself.”
This goes to show how hard it is to prove when something goes wrong in software.
This helps to explain why Dieselgate succeeded for VW for so long.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Automakers may be in their Lehman moment
http://asia.nikkei.com/Features/Emissions-scandal/Automakers-may-be-in-their-Lehman-moment
German auto giant Volkswagen’s emissions-rigging scandal is adding to the jitters in global markets.
As in the aftermath of the collapse of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers, fraud allegations, hefty compensation claims and tighter regulations, could all follow in the Volkswagen fallout. That is raising concerns we will see an auto industry triggered crisis.
Adding to the headache, economies tend to be more sensitive to the auto industry than the financial sector.
Plenty of problems
Ripple effects from an economic stall in China, a pending interest rate hike in the U.S. and the Greek debt crisis, which at one point rattled the equity market, have cast a dark shadow over the global outlook.
Volkswagen adds to this list of concerns. The German automaker is at risk of up to $18 billion in penalties from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which discovered the deception. Amid rising criticism, Americans see the massive fine as par for the course. Volkswagen will also inevitably face class-action lawsuits.
The emissions scandal has ruined the automaker’s strategy of focusing on diesel cars and pushed the company into a corner.
Spillover effects
The EPA recently announced that it will crack down on diesel cars produced by other automakers, such as Germany’s BMW and General Motors of the U.S. Gas-powered vehicles will probably come under more rigorous testing, too.
Automakers will have no control over their fate. The agency will no doubt conduct thorough investigations and could unearth more damaging revelations.
In addition, the U.S. is now moving into presidential election mode.
In Japan, the Volkswagen scandal has dragged down car-related stocks on the Tokyo bourse.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Volkswagen’s dirty mission: Where’s the beginning and where’s the end?
Volkswagen’s circumvention of federal emissions regulations means serious trouble.
http://arstechnica.com/cars/2015/09/vws-dirty-mission-wheres-the-beginning-and-wheres-the-end/
Volkswagen finds itself in a snootful of trouble early this week. Last Friday, the EPA revealed that the company will be instructed to recall nearly 500,000 vehicles and face a potential $18 billion in fines. And VW shares plummeted by more than 20 percent—eviscerating $16.9 billion of market value—at European markets’ close Monday after the company instructed US dealers to stop selling several 2015 diesel models.
All this hot water stems from US regulators’ discovery that VW engine software was engineered to explicitly circumvent US federal and state emissions laws. The clear purpose of the circumvention was to temporarily lower emissions when it detected that the vehicle was being emissions inspected.
Perhaps most dire of all for VW, the US Department of Justice is now investigating Volkswagen’s conduct in a criminal probe, according to Bloomberg. That’s at least four US government agencies now potentially on the carmaker’s tail.
VW saw data in December 2014
How did this all happen? To start, there had been a pattern of non-compliance in emissions observed by a joint research commission in Europe. A list of VW products dominated that list.
“VW acknowledged the numbers found,” says Thiruvengadam. “WVU also presented the findings at multiple conferences at the time, some of which were attended by folks from VW.” Diesel vehicles tested included a VW Jetta, a VW Passat, and a BMW X5. The BMW was found to be within compliance but both VWs were not. Note that the Jetta used a lean NOx (nitrogen oxide) trap, which the Passat and the BMW also used, but the latter two also employed exhaust system after-treatment or urea injection, sometimes known by the marketing name “AdBlue.”
Right after these tests, CARB informed VW in July that its vehicles still showed excessive nitrogen oxide emissions. Volkswagen denied fault, instead laying blame on “various technical issues and unexpected in-use conditions,” according to the EPA. The EPA then threatened not to certify for sale any 2016 VW cars. So in a September 3 meeting, VW admitted that it had used a second calibration in the diesels intended to run only during certification testing. VW stated that these vehicles were manufactured with a “defeat device” to bypass elements of the vehicles’ emission control system. This calibration or “device” was never specified in any certification documents submitted to the EPA and CARB, and it was never covered by any federal Certificate of Conformity (COC) or CARB Executive Order Number (EO). Put simply, it would be in violation of federal and state law.
If Volkswagen were a Japanese company, grown men would figuratively fall on their own swords in the public square when it was discovered that they engineered a way to cheat a country’s laws. If Volkswagen cheated not on emissions compliance but on safety regulations (say, fitting airbags with dummy wiring), things would be quite a bit worse—but not by much.
Willful circumvention of federal and state law is not exactly punishable by death, but it may well mean just that to a brand that relies on the trust of existing customers. This scheme undermines the company’s attempts to build the trust of potential customers and—perhaps most cynically—it blows up a central tenet of VW’s product across two brands: “clean diesel.” VW and Audi have wed themselves to the “clean diesel” mantra for years now, using “clean diesel” technology both in the marketplace and on the racetrack.
So where does this end? Only one thing is certain. The full scope of these probes, fines, and any resulting legal actions are far from over
But will this kill VW as a brand? No, the German federal government, the German State of Lower Saxony, and the EU would never allow that.
Tomi Engdahl says:
What Effect Will VW’s Scandal Have On Robocars?
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/10/05/1935229/what-effect-will-vws-scandal-have-on-robocars
It’s looking bad for Volkswagen, German car manufacturers and possibly even car manufacturers as a whole. But the revelations that VW put software in their cars to deliberately cheat on emissions tests could have even greater repercussions. Robocars’ Brad Templeton looks at the effect for manufacturers of autonomous vehicles. From the Robohub article: “There may be more risk from suppliers of technology for robocars.”
What does the VW scandal mean for robocars?
http://robohub.org/what-does-the-vw-scandal-mean-for-robocars/
Most of you will have heard about the revelations that Volkswagen put software in their cars to deliberately cheat on emissions tests in the USA and possibly other places. It’s very bad for VW, but what are the implications for robocars?
A lot has been written about the Volkswagen emissions violations but here’s a short summary. All modern cars have computer controlled ignition systems, and these can be tuned for different levels of performance, fuel economy and emissions.
Cars have to pass emission tests, so most cars have to tune their systems in ways that reduce other things (like engine performance and fuel economy) in order to reduce their pollution. Most cars attempt to detect the style of driving going on, and tune the engine differently for the best results in that situation.
VW went far beyond that. Apparently their system was designed to detect when it was in an ignitions test. In these tests, the car is on rollers in a garage, and it follows certain patterns.
It has not been revealed just who at VW did this, and whether other car companies have done this as well. (All companies do variable tuning and it’s “normal” to have modestly higher emissions in real driving compared to the test, but this was beyond the pale. The question everybody is asking is “What the hell were they thinking?”
After all, having been caught, the cost is going to be immense, possibly even ruining one of the world’s great brands. Obviously they did not really consider that they might get caught.
Beyond that, they have seriously reduced the trust that customers and governments will place not just in VW, but in car makers in general, and in their software offerings in particular. VW will lose trust, but this will spread to all German carmakers and possibly all carmakers. This could result in reduced trust in the software in robocars.
What the hell were they thinking?
The motive is the key thing we want to understand. In the broad sense, they did it because they felt customers would like it, and that would lead to selling more cars. At a secondary level, it’s possible that those involved felt they would gain prestige (and compensation) if they pulled off the wizard’s trick of making a diesel car which was clean and also high performance, at a level that turns out to be impossible.
Why would customers want this?
But many more customers want performance and would not want to pollute the air. VW gave them a different magic solution — a better performing car and the illusion that they were not polluting.
Who decided to do this?
We all want to know who decided this. It seems really unlikely that a lone rogue engineer would do it — what’s in it for her or him? Ditto for Bosch, the parts supplier. But engineers would have had to collude with any managers who decided to do this
How many levels of management knew?
It needs somebody high enough up that they win big by doing this.
It’s also that possible high management asked the engine systems programmers to do this without informing the middle managers in the chain, but how?
My best guess is a high level manager (high enough to benefit from increased sales in all the vehicles with this engine) but perhaps not the C-levels, who were somehow able to develop incentives for a key programmer. But we’ll find out eventually, I suspect.
For robocars…
It’s not too surprising that companies might cheat to improve the bottom line, especially when they convince themselves they won’t get caught. Where does that leave the robocar maker?
My prediction is that robocar vendors will end up self-insuring their vehicle fleets, at least while the software is driving. Conventional insurance in PAYD mode may apply to miles driven with a human at the wheel. The vendors or fleet operators may purchase reinsurance to cover major liabilities, but will do so with a very specific contract with the underwriter which won’t protect them in the event of actual fraud.
Would suppliers lie?
There may be more risk from suppliers of technology for robocars. Sensor manufacturers, for instance, may be untruthful about their abilities or, more likely, reliability. While the integrators will be inherently distrustful, as they will take the liability, one can see smaller vendors telling lies if they see it as the only way to get a big sale for their business.
Self-certification
This scandal will probably raise more questions about the popular (and still probably correct) approach of having vendors self-certify that they have attained functional safety goals for their systems. These are actually unrelated issues. VW was not self-certifying, it was going through a government certification process, and cheating on it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Volkswagen Australia says 77,000 local diesels need software fix
‘Technical solutions to service the vehicles’ yet to be determined
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/07/volkswagen_australia_says_77000_local_diesels_need_software_fix/
Volkswagen Australia has revealed that 77,000 vehicles in Australia carry the emissions-fudging software that has plunged the company into crisis.
The company’s antipodean tentacle today announced that 55,000 Golf and Polo models sold in Australia carried EA 189 diesel engine, while 5,000 Skoda passenger cars also have the problem. A further 17,000 commercial vehicles also have the problem.
What happens next? Even Volkswagen Australia isn’t sure. It’s popped up volkswagendieselinfo.com.au/ to let owners check if their cars are among the dirty dozens.
Tomi Engdahl says:
VW scandal and cheating software
http://www.epanorama.net/newepa/2015/10/02/vw-scandal-and-cheating-software-cnn-com/
Four more carmakers join diesel emissions row
http://www.epanorama.net/newepa/2015/10/12/four-more-carmakers-join-diesel-emissions-row-environment-the-guardian/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Volkswagen Seeks To Repair Its Image By Focusing On Electric
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/10/14/0343217/volkswagen-seeks-to-repair-its-image-by-focusing-on-electric
The emissions scandal that’s plagued Volkswagen over the past month will be tough to recover from. But they’re trying. The company announced a number changes they’re making to their line of vehicles. First, they’ll be revamping their flagship Phaeton vehicles to be all-electric. (If you live in the U.S. and haven’t heard of these, don’t be surprised — they aren’t marketed there.)
VW Plans to Recover From Its Scandal by Going Electric
http://www.wired.com/2015/10/vw-plans-to-recover-from-its-scandal-by-going-electric/
Now that the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal is a month old, the new VW Brand Board of Management is beginning to publicly discuss its plans for the future—and how they’ve changed.
Step one: Use emission control systems that actually control emissions. Step two: Go electric.
As soon as possible, VW says, it will start equipping all its diesel cars in Europe and North America with AdBlue technology and selective catalytic reduction, a chemical process that breaks smoggy NOx down into nitrogen and water. It adds complication and expense—$5,000 to $8,000 per car—but it’s effective, eliminating 70 to 90 percent of NOx emissions.
VW’s big “advance” was the “clean diesel” technology that supposedly made this technology unnecessary on its smaller cars, like the Beetle, Jetta, and Audi A3 that are being recalled because they don’t meet emissions standards under real-world driving conditions.
Beyond diesels, VW announced it is “giving our product range and our core technologies a new focus,” lurching away from diesel and toward another way to meet increasingly strict CO2 and NOx emissions regulations in the US and Europe: an increased focus on plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles. One of those, the company announced this week, will be the next-generation Volkswagen Phaeton.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Their press release is difficult to decipher, given the density of buzzwords and vague promises, but they indicate a greater general focus on hybrids and electric vehicles in the future:
Volkswagen Brand Board of Management takes strategic decisions
https://www.volkswagen-media-services.com/en/detailpage/-/detail/Volkswagen-Brand-Board-of-Management-takes-strategic-decisions/view/2797663/7a5bbec13158edd433c6630f5ac445da?p_p_auth=zFb01NT0
Accelerated implementation of the efficiency program creates room for reorientation
Streamlined processes leverage further cost-saving potential, including cuts in fixed costs
Investments to be reduced by 1 billion euros per year compared with planning – combined with prioritization of projects for the future
Product decisions formulated
New Phaeton will be electric
New Modular Electric Toolkit planned
Tomi Engdahl says:
Volkswagen Cuts R&D Spending to Face Lawsuits
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1328010&
In the wake of the ongoing scandal about manipulated exhaust gas values, Volkswagen sees itself compelled to change some strategic product directions and to drastically cut R&D spending. In addition, the company puts more emphasis on powertrain electrification.
In a special meeting, the newly-formed Volkswagen board of management took a number of strategic decisions, including a reorientation of its diesel strategy and a reduction of R&D spending by € 1 billion compared with previous planning – apparently a measure to cut cost in anticipation of penalties and compensation for damages.
The board also took several decisions regarding the future model strategy. As a direct reaction to the public outcry over the forged exhaust gas tests, the company will install only diesel drives with SCR (Selective Catalytic Reduction) and AdBlue technology in Europe and North America as soon as possible.
Not directly related to the diesel scandal but apparently as a cost-cutting measure, the company will develop a standardised architecture for passenger cars and light commercial vehicles.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bosch, you suck! Dyson says VW pal cheated in vacuum cleaner tests
Brits bash Bosch
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/20/dyson_says_bosch_fudged_vacuum_tests/
Brit vacuum-cleaner maker Dyson is taking legal action against Bosch and Siemens, accusing the pair of cheating in energy efficiency tests.
According to Dyson, the Siemens Q8.0 and Bosch GL80/In’Genius ProPerform vacuum cleaners conveniently operate at a lower power level in lab tests, and dramatically increase their power consumption when used in the real homes. This led to the two rival machines unfairly gaining AAAA energy efficiency stickers from European regulators, it is claimed.
On Tuesday, Dyson said it has filed for an injunction against Siemens in Germany, and started proceedings in Belgium. It also said it has start legal action against Bosch in the Netherlands, and appealed to France’s advertising watchdog to get Bosch’s ads changed.
The allegations from Dyson come after Bosch was embroiled in the controversy over Volkswagen cars circumventing clean air tests. The German automaker has tried to distance itself from the issue by blaming unnamed “rogue software engineers” while Bosch, which developed hardware and software for Volkswagen, said it tried to warn the company about the diesel engine shenanigans years ago to no avail.
Tomi Engdahl says:
VW made several defeat devices to cheat emissions tests: sources
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/17/us-volkswagen-emissions-software-idUSKCN0SB0PU20151017
Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) made several versions of its “defeat device” software to rig diesel emissions tests, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters, potentially suggesting a complex deception by the German carmaker.
During seven years of self-confessed cheating, Volkswagen altered its illegal software for four engine types, said the sources, who include a VW manager with knowledge of the matter and a U.S. official close to an investigation into the company.
Some industry experts and analysts said several versions of the defeat device raised the possibility that a range of employees were involved.
The number of people involved is a key issue for investors because it could affect the size of potential fines and the extent of management change at the company
“The more higher-ups that are involved, the more the company is considered blameworthy and deserving of more serious punishment,” said Garrett.
When it started using defeat device software in 2008, VW installed it with the EA189 diesel engine. The software was subsequently added to the newer EA288 engine.
Horn added VW was withdrawing its application for regulatory certification of 2016 diesel models
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hackers pop grease monkeys’ laptops to disable Audi airbags
Just when VW thought it was back under control, a nasty 0-day pulls up
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/23/hackers_pop_mechanics_laptops_to_silently_disable_car_airbags/
Hackers can quietly disable airbags in cars sold by Volkswagen using a zero day vulnerability in software popular with car mechanics.
The attacks demonstrated on an Audi TT require a mechanic’s computer to be first compromised or for a malicious USB device to be plugged in for the exploit to work.
The attack can allow intruders to conceal the disabling of airbags and other car functions from mechanics by falsifying read outs from the car.
Buttyán told Vulture South the third-party software is widely-used and compatible with cars sold by the Volkswagen Group (which includes Audi), adding that two other platforms also appear affected.
“… it works with other cars in the VW group too without any modification,” Buttyán says.
“Anything that can be switched on or off from the diagnostic application could have been switched on or off.
“After switching off the airbag, we can consistently report to the application that it is still switched on.”
Buttyán stresses that the flaw “has nothing to do with VW itself” and relates solely to third-party software.
“It is not the specific software which makes our work interesting, but the main message that embedded devices are typically managed from PCs and they can be infected [and used] as stepping stones.”
The team’s attack works by replacing the FTDI DLL used to communicate with the diagnostic cable, with a malicious version.
The attack is risky because it is more likely that a mechanic’s PC would contain vulnerabilities than a car would sport remotely-accessible holes.
Still Buttyán says the attack could be made more dangerous if it becomes possible to update a car’s embedded control unit firmware through the OBD2 port. That could allow an attacker to insert a hidden functionality to be triggered by a condition later on – such as cutting a critical system while the car is in motion.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Volkswagen has confirmed that the emission test fooling the software is not installed to diesel motor type EA 288 for EU5 and EU6 emission classes sold in EU area. Thus, these new cars with diesel engines that Volkswagen sells in the European Union, meet regulations and environmental standards of the law.
Corrections are needed for EA 189 engine type. Unregistered new cars using EA 189 motor has so far set a sales ban in EU28 area. Number of cars to recall in Europe is 8.5 million.
Detailed technical solutions related measures are under construction and is making rapid progress. Repair of motor vehicles can be started in Germany in January 2016 – the repair is free of charge to the customer. Technical solutions are currently being developed for each individual model, and model year.
Sources:
http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/volkswagen-huijausohjelmistoa-ei-asennettu-ea-288-moottoreihin-tarkista-taalta-omasi-6060553
http://www.volkswagen.fi/vv-auto/vw_news.nsf/html/volkswagenvahvistaatyypinea288eu5jaeu6-paastoluokkiendieselmoottoriteivatolevaarinkaytoksenpiirissa?open&db=VW5.nsf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Volkswagen Emissions Cover-Up Will Cause 59 Premature Deaths In America | IFLScience
http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/volkswagen-emissions-cover-will-cause-59-premature-deaths-america
Tomi Engdahl says:
EPA, California Notify Volkswagen of Additional Clean Air Act Violations
http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/bd4379a92ceceeac8525735900400c27/4a45a5661216e66c85257ef10061867b!OpenDocument
Today, EPA is issuing a second notice of violation (NOV) of the Clean Air Act (CAA) to Volkswagen AG, Audi AG and Volkswagen Group of America, Inc. This NOV is also being issued to Porsche AG and Porsche Cars North America. These five companies are collectively referred to as Volkswagen (VW). The NOV alleges that VW developed and installed a defeat device in certain VW, Audi and Porsche light duty diesel vehicles equipped with 3.0 liter engines for model years (MY) 2014 through 2016 that increases emissions of nitrogen oxide (NOx) up to nine times EPA’s standard. The vehicles covered by today’s NOV are the diesel versions of: the 2014 VW Touareg, the 2015 Porsche Cayenne, and the 2016 Audi A6 Quattro, A7 Quattro, A8, A8L, and Q5.
These alleged violations are in addition to the NOV issued on September 18th and the ongoing investigation by EPA alleging a defeat device on certain 2.0 liter engines for MY 2009-2015 vehicles.
“VW has once again failed its obligation to comply with the law that protects clean air for all Americans,”
Following the September 18th NOV issued for 2.0 liter engines, on September 25th EPA initiated testing of all 2015 and 2016 light duty diesel models available in the U.S using updated testing procedures specifically designed to detect potential defeat devices. That testing led directly to the alleged violations covered under today’s NOV.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Volkswagen scandal spread to gasoline engines
Volkswagen’s internal investigation revealed that part of the company’s petrol engine cars in carbon dioxide emissions is unclear. The matter told, among other things German newspapers Bild and Spiegel.
Previous scandal related to the company’s diesel truck emissions, and now the emissions scam is expanding the gasoline engine cars. According to the company any irregularities relating to Volkswagen car models Polo, Golf and Passat. Discrepancies regarding the company’s 1.4-liter gasoline engines with cylinders. It means possibly around 800 000 cars, Volkswagen announced on Tuesday evening
Volkswagen’s new car gas emissions scam related to CO2 emissions, which determine the car taxation in Finland. The previous Volkswagen diesel cars in the scam-related emissions of nitrogen did not affect the taxation of cars in Finland. The new Tuesday night announced carbon dioxide emissions scam instead of taxation could be affected: In Finland, car tax is determined by the vehicle purchase price and CO2 emissions, and the annual vehicle tax is based on CO2 emissions.
Sources:
http://www.iltalehti.fi/ulkomaat/2015110320608297_ul.shtml
http://www.iltalehti.fi/autot/2015110420611177_au.shtml
Tomi Engdahl says:
Volkswagen: 800,000 of our cars may have cheated in CO2 tests
After the NO bombshells, here comes a carbon dioxide scandal
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/03/volkswagen_800000_of_our_cars_may_have_cheated_in_co2_tests/
Volkswagen says it has found “unexplained inconsistencies” in carbon dioxide emission tests affecting 800,000 of its vehicles.
The automaker fears the CO2 test oddness could cost it about 2bn euros ($2.19bn) to put right.
VW is already in deep trouble after its diesel engines were programmed to lower their nitrogen oxide (NO) output during lab tests to conform to environmental standards. After leaving the labs, the cars would ramp up their performance, pumping out up to nine times the allowed amount of NO, a gas that causes respiratory problems with humans.
That cheatware scandal affects 11 million or more cars – now Volkswagen says an internal probe has uncovered 800,000 vehicles that emit unexpected levels of carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas.
“VW’s top management will immediately start a dialogue with responsible authorities regarding the consequences of these findings,” the biz said in a statement.
Tomi Engdahl says:
VW Emissions Issues Spread to Gasoline Cars
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-03/volkswagen-emissions-woes-deepen-as-800-000-more-cars-affected
Volkswagen AG said it found faulty emissions readings for the first time in gasoline-powered vehicles, widening a scandal that so far had centered on diesel engines. The shares fell the most in almost five weeks.
Volkswagen said an internal probe showed 800,000 cars had “unexplained inconsistencies” concerning their carbon-dioxide output. The automaker had previously estimated it would need to recall 11 million vehicles worldwide
The company said late Tuesday that the new finding could add at least 2 billion euros ($2.2 billion) to the 6.7 billion euros already set aside for repairs. The company’s Porsche unit said it’s halting North American sales of a model criticized by U.S. regulators.
The crisis that emerged after Volkswagen admitted in September to cheating U.S. pollution tests for years with illegal software has shaved more than one-third of the company’s stock price and led to a leadership change.
Volkswagen’s Polo, Golf and Passat models are affected as well as the subcompact A1 and the A3 hatchback at the Audi premium brand
The affected models at other brands include the Skoda Octavia, the Seat Ibiza and the Seat Leon.
The 1.4-liter, 1.6-liter and 2-liter TDI diesel engines account for the vast majority of affected cars. The only gasoline engine is a 1.4-liter version with cylinder head shutdown
Further Irregularities
Wolfsburg, Germany-based Volkswagen said the findings surfaced following a “comprehensive investigation to establish whether there were indications of further irregularities” after the initial findings rocked the company in September.
“This adds to the bad news,”
Including today’s announcement, Volkswagen’s total liabilities might have grown to about 13.2 billion euros, said London-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. analyst Jose Asumendi. “We note that the company continues to leave no stone unturned and still enjoys a 27.8 billion euro net cash position to face the crisis,” Asumendi said in a report.
“This is a painful process, but it is our only alternative,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
VW Engineers Have Admitted Manipulating CO2 Emissions Data
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/11/08/1327225/vw-engineers-have-admitted-manipulating-co2-emissions-data
According to a report in German newspaper Bild am Sonntag several Volkswagen engineers have come forward and admitted manipulating carbon dioxide emissions data, blaming the overly ambitious goals set by former Chief Executive Martin Winterkorn. Reuters reports: “The paper said VW engineers tampered with tyre pressure and mixed diesel with their motor oil to make them use less fuel, a deception that began in 2013 and carried on until the spring of this year.”
VW engineers have admitted manipulating CO2 emissions data-paper
Read more at Reutershttp://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/08/volkswagen-emissions-idUSL8N1320KD20151108#CMlTsM8DXdALxtob.99
Tomi Engdahl says:
Engineer Was Whistle-Blower in VW Scandal
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1328220&
MUNICH—The disclosure of the Volkswagen exhaust gas scandal was initiated by an engineer in the carmaker’s R&D department. According to a report from German tabloid Bild am Sonntag, the engineer reported the problem to his supervisors.
The reason to forge the CO2 exhaust gas values included unrealistic targets from VW’s managing board, connected with high pressure to reach those goals.
In order to achieve the desired fuel consumption values at the test stand, the engineers made use of a variety of tricks. For example, they increased the tire pressure to 3.5 bar to reduce friction and mixed additives into the engine oil before the vehicles were tested.
According to the report, the fraud started in 2013 and continued to spring 2015. The overarching motivation for their activities was that the fuel consumption goals set by former VW CEO Martin Winterkorn could not be reached with legal means. Out of fear of reprisals, the engineers did not dare to communicate the actual values. A “culture of fear” reigned at the carmaker, the report stated.
In 2012, Winterkorn announced VW would reduce the fleet CO2 emission by as much as 30%. Recently the company was forced to admit publicly that its CO2 emission values were disguised. Worldwide, some 800,000 vehicles are affected.
Tomi Engdahl says:
VW Feigns ‘Transparency’ With New CO2 Problems
New emissions issues tied to fuel consumption
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1328191&
Here are six reasons why VW’s new disclosure – on understated CO2 emissions — is even more devastating to the company, markets, and consumers.
But the end result is even more devastating, for several reasons.
1. Problems with 800,000 more vehicles
In addition to 11 million diesel vehicles worldwide that vastly understated their actual emissions of smog-causing pollutant nitrogen oxide, VW now has 800,000 cars tooling around Europe emitting illegal levels of carbon dioxide.
2. Overstated fuel economy
Consumers might find CO2 emissions more important than NOx
3. A gasoline-powered engine is also involved
4. Limited information available
So far, information is barely trickling out of VW.
5. Defeat devices also used in Porsche diesel SUV
6. Ballooning economic risk
The latest revelation about fuel economy and CO2 emissions is said to represent a roughly 2 billion euro ($2.19 billion) economic risk, according to VW. This piles on top of the 6.5 billion euro write-off that VW announced September for the costs of fixing 11 million vehicles emitting excessive NOx.
After the latest disclosure by VW, red flags unfurled everywhere in the investment community.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The rumors of emissions: the EU issued a VW in the period of 10 days
The European Commission requires that Volkswagen will report within ten days of the carbon dioxide emissions of their cars.
EU Energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete has sent Volkswagen’s Director-General Matthias Müller’s letter in which he asks for precise information on events that are problems for. Volkswagen said last week that 800 000 car carbon dioxide emissions are higher than the test results are given to understand.
Volkswagens gasoline models suspects emission Manipulation is put into order the prohibition in Finland.
Last week, Volkswagen announced that the CO2 emissions of carbon dioxide readings may not be accurate about 800 000 in Volkswagen. Of these, about 100 000 of Petrol and 700 000 were diesels.
Now, Audi, Volkswagen and Seat Finland-importer VV-Auto Group announces on its website that “a precautionary measure, declare that the some of the Web-site CO2 emissions and fuel consumption values are currently under revision”.
Sources:
http://www.iltalehti.fi/autot/2015111020643639_au.shtml?_ga=1.110828928.483596618.1402989016
http://www.iltalehti.fi/autot/2015111020641577_au.shtml?_ga=1.110828928.483596618.1402989016
Tomi Engdahl says:
Thus Volkswagen repair diesels
Volkswagen has announced that it will resolve European diesels update program and a sort of air resistance control.
Repair operations are the subject of the European market, Volkswagen’s EA189-Type 1.6 TDI and 2.0 TDI engines, with nitrogen oxide emissions test cheating software. These engines are used in addition to the Volkswagen, Audi, Seat and Skoda.
To repair the car in Finland is far 64 000.
“grating, which relieves the turbulent air flow air mass meter”
“In addition, the software update is done to the engine. The implementation of technical measures of these cars will probably take less than an hour. ”
Volkswagen aims to measure to achieve the current emission limits, and even more so that the engine power will not decrease and consumption increase.
Source: http://www.iltalehti.fi/autot/2015112720736789_au.shtml
Tomi Engdahl says:
VW Officials Knew Since Last Year of Misleading Fuel Economy Claims
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/11/30/0317237/vw-officials-knew-since-last-year-of-misleading-fuel-economy-claims
VW knew fuel usage in some cars was too high a year ago: report
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/29/us-volkswagen-emissions-polo-idUSKBN0TI0ML20151129
Volkswagen’s (VOWG_p.DE) top executives knew a year ago that some of the company’s cars were markedly less fuel efficient than had been officially stated, Sunday paper Bild am Sonntag reported, without specifying its sources.
VW in early November revealed that it had understated the level of carbon dioxide emissions and fuel usage in around 800,000 cars sold mainly in Europe.
The scandal, which will likely cost VW billions, initially centered on software on up to 11 million diesel vehicles worldwide that VW admitted was designed to artificially suppress nitrogen oxide emissions in a test setting.
The Bild am Sonntag report contradicts VW’s assertion, however, that it only uncovered the false CO2 emissions labeling as part of efforts to clear up the diesel emissions scandal, which became public in September.
A VW spokesman declined to comment on whether VW had knowledge already a year ago of overstated fuel efficiency.
Months after becoming aware of excessive fuel consumption, former Chief Executive Martin Winterkorn decided this spring to pull one model off the market where the discrepancy was particularly pronounced, the Polo TDI BlueMotion, the paper cited sources close to Winterkorn as saying.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Report: VW execs ‘knew’ about fuel economy issues last year
New allegations from German paper Bild
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/30/vw_emissions_report_bild/
Volkswagen’s top executives are alleged to have had knowledge that its cars were not as fuel efficient as it claimed a year ago, according to a news report.
German Sunday paper Bild am Sonntag has claimed that VW pulled the Poloi TDI BlueMotion earlier this year after an 18 per cent discrepancy between its stated fuel economy and its actual performance was discovered. VW has responded to the accusation by claiming it is “pure speculation” and that investigations are ongoing. The company explained that the model was pulled as there was less demand.
However, Bild claimed otherwise, and said that top executives at VW had known about similar issues with a range of the company’s automobiles for roughly a year.
they had claimed the firm’s CEO’s public promise of a 30 per cent emissions decline provoked them to cheat on the tests by mixing diesel with the motor oil and inflating the car tyres
Tomi Engdahl says:
Volkswagen scandal might force it to sell luxury brands
Bentley, Lamborghini and Ducati could be on the chopping block.
http://wap.engadget.com/2015/12/04/volkswagen-scandal-might-force-it-to-sell-luxury-brands/
The Volkswagen saga continues, as the company deals with the aftermath of its emissions scandal. According to Reuters, the German automaker has secured a loan of roughly 20 billion euros in order to pay for resulting lawsuits and to compensate consumers whose cars are now worth less following the admission. However, there’s a catch. In order to assure that it can pay back the loan, Volkswagen had to confirm that it’s prepared to sell off some of its smaller holdings including Bentley, Lamborghini and Ducati.
As Road and Track notes, these are considered to be the automaker’s smaller investments because the cars and motorbikes are made in limited quantity and only serve a specific market. Another alternative is that Volkswagen can sell its holdings in MAN, a supplier of ship engines, generators and heavy-duty industrial components.
VW agrees on terms of 20 billion euro bridge loan: sources
Read more at Reutershttp://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-emissions-banks-idUSKBN0TL0SW20151202#kx06jqecIR6eZtKU.99