Volkswagen Is Ordered to Recall Nearly 500k Vehicles Over Emissions Software

>> Once a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

It's quite useful to have a name - a label - for this sort of behaviour. In this case, the means by which VW optimised for this metric was crafty computer software! A metric is only as good as the cost of the unintended consequences that come with imposing it on people, in particular large corporations.

I am not surprised that this is done by many corporations as mentioned elsewhere in the comments (ATI/Nvidia etc). This is because regulations and benchmarks that can be gamed, such as engine efficiency, will be gamed because the incentives of corporations work out that way:

(I hope this isn't perceived as an anti-corporate rant because it's not. Just a way of framing facts).

For regulations imposed on large corporations in general (think EPA admissions standards):

1) Regulations are mandated by a government to effect some purpose (stop destroying Earth)

2) Executives - the people running the corporations - are bound by legal responsibility - their fiduciary duty [1] - to create value for their shareholders (selling lots of cars, and profitably).

3) Regulations can obstruct the activities of a corporation by making them do things they don't want to (making efficient cars is hard and costly and affects the bottom line - its cheaper to manufacture a car with less platinum [2] in it)

4) Companies are incentivized to minimize the time and money spent on adhering to regulations

5) Once a regulation is standardised and codified, it becomes possible to follow the letter of it, while ignoring the spirit of it. All a corporation has to do is meet the metrics in the specification to abide by the regulation - in other words - game the system.

Given these incentives, we have seen that corporations prefer to abide by regulations in the maximally efficient way: gaming them. Thus reducing a well-meaning government initiative to gamesmanship.

Kudos to the EPA for calling VW out on this. This kind of incident reinforces (in me at least) the idea that environmental legislation is an extraordinarily difficult thing to get right.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fiduciary_duty

[2] Catalytic convertors

The emissions guidelines, in your case, likely weren't being "gamed" so much as the manufacturers were just coming up with innovative and cheap ways of reducing emissions. Start/stop features on some newer cars are a way of doing this but this doesn't sound like someone "gaming" the system. If you're not very automotive savvy then you may have misunderstood what the technician was explaining or the logic/purpose behind the system.

What VW did though is completely different with regards to the software although not necessarily illegal until we have all the facts. Based on what the article says, it sounds like they developed a special "emissions mode" which went outside the normal operating parameters with the ultimate goal of reducing the emissions. That in and of itself is not illegal since it passed emissions that way. The illegal part probably comes from when it switch back into normal mode where it never would have passed emissions that way.

We can assume for one reason or another that the "emissions mode" is unsustainable for regular driving (for one reason or another) which is why it was only used when absolutely necessary to pass emissions.