Volkswagen Emissions Investigation Zeroes in on Two Engineers
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Re: Volkswagen Emissions Investigation Zeroes in on Two Engineers
#2I assume they are the scapegoats.
Re: Volkswagen Emissions Investigation Zeroes in on Two Engineers
#3I'm sure these engineers weren't acting on their own here.
Re: Volkswagen Emissions Investigation Zeroes in on Two Engineers
#4I'm sure these engineers weren't acting on their own here.
Well, seeing how one is titled the "Chief Engineer" I wouldn't be too surprised that he represents an entire department (or many) and is the last stop before board of directors.
Re: Volkswagen Emissions Investigation Zeroes in on Two Engineers
#5wasn't the last Great Recession simply due to some poor schmucks making mistakes while calculating risk estimates for bonds ratings?
Re: Volkswagen Emissions Investigation Zeroes in on Two Engineers
#6Scapegoats, in other words. People don't do this on their own.
Re: Volkswagen Emissions Investigation Zeroes in on Two Engineers
#7"regulators are considering steps to tighten emissions standards for diesel engines"? - interesting that the old emissions standards were (one presumes) absolutely fine, until somebody turns out to have been cheating.
Re: Volkswagen Emissions Investigation Zeroes in on Two Engineers
#8surely management at fault here for undue pressure? NASA / Morton Thiokol
Re: Volkswagen Emissions Investigation Zeroes in on Two Engineers
#9The rest of the commenters are quick to dismiss this article as presenting scapegoats, but I'm very keen to see more in-depth investigation about how this was orchestrated.
There are a lot of different ways that this type of cheating can develop over time, and simply saying "lots of people knew must have known about this" isn't very satisfying to me.
There are plenty of ways that upper management can stay in the dark. In the case of Deepwater Horizon, BP didn't make the decisions that lead to the blowout, but created excessive pressure for cost-cutting. In the case of Barings Bank, the managers were genuinely unaware of the rogue trader's fraud, but allowed him to bypass internal controls.
There are important lessons that will come out of the VW case and I'm very interested to learn them. The dismissiveness of the comments here is really disappointing, on the other hand.
Re: Volkswagen Emissions Investigation Zeroes in on Two Engineers
#10It will be interesting to see if the investigators manage to obtain an email chain which will show where the pressure to do this came from - from day 1 I've felt it was unlikely that this was an isolated incident, or one which management weren't tacitly aware of, and I would be very surprised if it doesn't turn out that we find out where it all came from - my bet is that it was pressure from above that led to it, but that's just a hunch - it may be that management didn't know what was going on, and the engineers took it on themselves to cheat. But either way, I don't think we're near the bottom of this yet.