Volkswagen Emissions Investigation Zeroes in on Two Engineers

Post by bitJericho » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 8:05 AM UTC

HCIdivision17 wrote: post #84

croon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. I read this as an exec saying: "Just get it done. I don't care how it's d…

As an engineer who worked in a couple plants and focused on QC and the like, I damn near have an allergic reaction when any level of management says something like that. I immediately assumed that sort of conversation took place, and it's a strong signal something unethical is afoot - or at least a call for something unethical. ("I'm not saying you should ignore the samples, but sometimes you get different results if…

Post by mironathetin » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 8:41 AM UTC

ecdavis wrote: post #46

akamaka wrote: post #9

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.

Post by colin_jack » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 9:47 AM UTC

Post by semi-extrinsic » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 6:36 PM UTC

mpweiher wrote: post #86

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason people perceive diesels to be better is that they have much flatter torque vs RPM curves, so any schmuck can make them accelerate without shifting to the correct gear. If diesel engines gave better performance at the same amount of horsepowers, and used less fuel, why don't we see diesel engines used in horsepower-limited racing car classes? Why has Ferrari and Lamborghini not ever offered a single diesel…

"The Audi R10 TDI, usually abbreviated to R10, is a racing car from the German car manufacturer Audi. The car is a classic at Le Mans, winning every year since its introduction until it was replaced by the R15. [..] It was the first diesel-powered car to win either of those events. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_R10_TDI

Post by lifeisstillgood » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:28 AM UTC

crpatino wrote: post #83

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #32

I had an interesting conversation with a co-worker today, about why unit-test coverage is always bad unless enforced. I decided that it's because even though my boss and myself will have good intentions, we can both mutually decide (without ever discussing it) that the tests should slide - I will try to meet his deadline, he won't check too hard. Unless there are credible institutions that take that decision away fro…

This is not on the same league. Your unit-test coverage example is closer to the Toyota incident. Surely, it was a catastrophe, and lives were indeed lost, but no one actively inserted a "speed up when driver hits the breaks" feature into the firmware. A closer analogy to the VW case is if the build bot actually did exist, but you wrote some nefarious unit test that just spit out all OK results regardless of what the…