It seems like the majority of people saying these are scapegoats didn't read the article that closely. It clearly says these two engineers were top aides to the former CEO. Regulator's aren't stupid enough to be fooled by a couple of junior engineers being offered up as a sacrifice. They'll definitely go after the highest-level people they can get.
A top aide to the CEO sounds like exactly the kind of person who would be the fall guy in a scandal like this. Important enough for the regulators to be happy, but not someone who has actual power in the company.
The ceo has already fallen on his sword at volkswagon
A top aide to the CEO sounds like exactly the kind of person who would be the fall guy in a scandal like this. Important enough for the regulators to be happy, but not someone who has actual power in the company.
The ceo has already fallen on his sword at volkswagon
Not really. In a case like this people will likely go to jail, so resigning isn't a big deal.
In what other facet of human life would you be held responsible for something you had no knowledge of?
In warfare. A commander can be criminally liable for failing to prevent criminal actions by their subordinates. Most famously, Tomoyuki Yamashita. Or from the prosecution brief during Ernest Medina's trial: >'When troops commit massacres and atrocities against the civilian population of occupied territory or against prisoners of war, the responsibility may rest not only with the actual perpetrators but also with the…
It seems like the majority of people saying these are scapegoats didn't read the article that closely. It clearly says these two engineers were top aides to the former CEO. Regulator's aren't stupid enough to be fooled by a couple of junior engineers being offered up as a sacrifice. They'll definitely go after the highest-level people they can get.
A top aide to the CEO sounds like exactly the kind of person who would be the fall guy in a scandal like this. Important enough for the regulators to be happy, but not someone who has actual power in the company.
Did you read the article? These two were "put in charge of R&D at Volkswagen." They were literally running the R&D department!
It is outrageous to suggest that the blame lies with a handful of people and not a whole division of the company. I don't work in the automotive industry, but I do work as a design engineer in the semiconductor industry and for a mature product in a highly competitive industry, I can guarantee that the external test wasn't the only test that these cars were put though. When we release a chip external reviewers will run it thorough a handful of benchmarks, but we run far more tests internally because when you are building complex systems, not everything that you plan for happens, and you need an extreme level of detail to be able to understand and fix performance problems. Literally hundreds of engineers will participate in performing these measurements, and most of them, along with the whole management tree up to the CEO (especially for an important consumer facing product), will participate in interpreting them. Not doing this means getting left in the dust by your competitors. There is no way that only a small number of people knew about this. Two is laughable, people here with software engineering backgrounds should be highly skeptical that any piece of software in a product with as many users as a car was only examined by two people. The only explanation is that a large number of engineers and managers knew about this and did nothing.
It is outrageous to suggest that the blame lies with a handful of people and not a whole division of the company. I don't work in the automotive industry, but I do work as a design engineer in the semiconductor industry and for a mature product in a highly competitive industry, I can guarantee that the external test wasn't the only test that these cars were put though. When we release a chip external reviewers will r…
One of the people named is Audi’s chief engineer, and they're both described as "being in charge of R&D" at VW. So I would presume they're pretty high up the food chain, not the low-level guys who actually wrote the if: test then: cheat bits.
The 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…
It seems like the majority of people saying these are scapegoats didn't read the article that closely. It clearly says these two engineers were top aides to the former CEO. Regulator's aren't stupid enough to be fooled by a couple of junior engineers being offered up as a sacrifice. They'll definitely go after the highest-level people they can get.
>Regulator's aren't stupid enough to be fooled by a couple of junior engineers being offered up as a sacrifice. They'll definitely go after the highest-level people they can get.
Maybe in a just world. I don't hold out too much hope.