A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats
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Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats
#2> The researchers also say that it’s high-time regulators dispense with the kind of lab tests that US and EU governments have required for years. Instead, some kind of active scan for illegal code needs to be developed.
Alternatively, combine the lab tests with imprecise real-world tests as a sanity check, or keep the exact nature of the lab tests a secret and vary them over time. Really, the first of these seems like a good idea regardless of what else you do.
Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats
#3> The researchers also say that it’s high-time regulators dispense with the kind of lab tests that US and EU governments have required for years. Instead, some kind of active scan for illegal code needs to be developed. Alternatively, combine the lab tests with imprecise real-world tests as a sanity check, or keep the exact nature of the lab tests a secret and vary them over time. Really, the first of these seems lik…
The real world sanity checks for cheating make sense. But the nature of the regular tests can't be secret. Carmakers need to know the bar they are supposed to hit. Building something on the speculation that it might pass, maybe, is a whole different business model.
Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats
#4> The researchers also say that it’s high-time regulators dispense with the kind of lab tests that US and EU governments have required for years. Instead, some kind of active scan for illegal code needs to be developed. Alternatively, combine the lab tests with imprecise real-world tests as a sanity check, or keep the exact nature of the lab tests a secret and vary them over time. Really, the first of these seems lik…
The real world sanity checks for cheating make sense. But the nature of the regular tests can't be secret. Carmakers need to know the bar they are supposed to hit. Building something on the speculation that it might pass, maybe, is a whole different business model.
OK, but there are test details that are known to the manufacturers but seem irrelevant to the thing being tested. Like the bit about the angle of the steering wheel. Surely there are multiple ways one can test for the same standard?
Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats
#5Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real world sanity checks for cheating make sense. But the nature of the regular tests can't be secret. Carmakers need to know the bar they are supposed to hit. Building something on the speculation that it might pass, maybe, is a whole different business model.
OK, but there are test details that are known to the manufacturers but seem irrelevant to the thing being tested. Like the bit about the angle of the steering wheel. Surely there are multiple ways one can test for the same standard?
The cheats are based around detecting when a car is strapped down to a dynamometer, indoors. That why the cheaters are looking at ambient temp, steering wheel angle, etc.
Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats
#6> The researchers also say that it’s high-time regulators dispense with the kind of lab tests that US and EU governments have required for years. Instead, some kind of active scan for illegal code needs to be developed. Alternatively, combine the lab tests with imprecise real-world tests as a sanity check, or keep the exact nature of the lab tests a secret and vary them over time. Really, the first of these seems lik…
The real world sanity checks for cheating make sense. But the nature of the regular tests can't be secret. Carmakers need to know the bar they are supposed to hit. Building something on the speculation that it might pass, maybe, is a whole different business model.
"Build a car that doesn't emit more than X of exhaust Y when a typical driver drives it a) ten kilometers in the city, b) a hundred kilometers on the highway."
That seems like a good enough requirement to me. Define "a typical driver" as "out of a hundred random test drivers, no more than 20 exceed the thresholds, no more than 5 exceed the thresholds by more than a factor two." That forces the car manufacturers to have a sufficient safety margin in their emissions.
I don't know how difficult the actual measurement is, but maybe you could pay a couple thousand people a reasonable amount of money to have some devices attached to their cars for a month or two and collect data. Or make the car makers pay for the procedure.
Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats
#7It smells more like a "smoking tailpipe".
Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats
#8I may be missing something here, but if you take a step back this just seems like a tragedy of misaligned economic incentives.
Both the US & EU would have wanted this information from day one, and this whole fiasco cost VW billions in fines.
There would have been any number of engineers at VW and Bosch that knew exactly how this worked, but there was nothing in it for them to come clear about it. They were never going to get charged for writing that code, and they would have likely been out of a job or destroyed their career at those companies if they volunteered to authorities how this worked.
So why don't investigators just offer a huge cash prices to engineers at those companies who can provide details about exactly how this worked, along with immunity as long as they're forthcoming with information about who instructed them to implement this?
You'd have an army of engineers overnight willing to spill the beans, and you'd save millions in investigative costs, and quickly get to the real root cause of the corruption.
Instead some independent team of investigators is left digging through old firmware images posted on forums to reverse engineer how the defeat device worked.
Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats
#9While I certainly don't support the 'rogue engineer' excuse that VW originally gave everyone, the idea does bring up an interesting point.
An engineer did write this code. Almost certainly, many of them, working together. Now, their managers told them it was okay to do this, maybe that legal had given the go-ahead or that they had to do it to keep their jobs... But it's still pretty clear that this was not right. They still did it, and then didn't tell anyone. And that doesn't sit well with me.
In my opinion (and I welcome disagreement and debate) engineers have an obligation to say 'no' to wiring unethical code.
Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats
#10> In 2015, regulators realized that diesel Volkswagens and Audis were emitting several times the legal limit of nitrogen oxides (NOx) during real-world driving tests.
This means that they can detect emissions levels during real world driving tests. What's wrong with just making those tests the actual regulatory ones? So whatever ingenuity automakers can use will be put to minimizing emissions in the exact same scenarios that will be used in real life.