Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 151 posts

Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats

#61

Post by tehlike »

bambax wrote: post #48

> 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. But one problem regulators confronted was that they couldn’t point to specific code that allowed the cars to do this. They could prove the symptom (high emissions on the road), but they didn’t have concrete evidence of the cause (code that circumvented…

I think part of it is proving the malicious intent. You could have a bug that does that, or a commit that says "we have to do it to bypass regulations". I assume the law says different things about malicious intent and unmalicious-yet-still-harmful code.

Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats

#62

Post by wereHamster »

tyingq wrote: post #23
adrianN wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 ha…

Driving style has a profound effect on emissions. As does ambient temperature, uphill vs downhill, time at stoplight. Short trip vs longer (catalytic converters don't work till they are hot). I'm sure they can find some way to address the cheating, but it's likely not the case that they are just missing some obvious simple solution.

Modern cars have enough sensors that they could store all necessary information about trips, have the service center read it out each time the car is serviced, anonymise, and send back to the manufacturer. That way the manufacturer would have accurate, real-world data about their 'average driver'. Could even make it country-specific.

Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats

#63

Post by semi-extrinsic »

nickodell wrote: post #39
jancsika wrote: post #12

> Firmware images were gleaned from car-tuning forums and from an online portal maintained by Volkswagen for car repair shops. Documentation, in the form of so-called “function sheets,” was harder to come by. The function sheets were necessary to give the binary context, but the sheets are copyrighted by Bosch and generally not shared with the public. The research team ended up turning to the auto-performance tuning…

I would say that this argues for the opposite - making firmware closed source and as hard to reverse engineer as possible. Let's say that the software is open source, and you can buy your own microcontroller and turn it into an ECU. There will be people who make their own modifications to it to improve performance. Some of those modifications make the car fail an emissions test, so they make it so that the car acts l…

What you describe already happens in the extremely-closed-source world of today. For most cars you can buy an ECU remap that can be switched from tuned to standard by the flick of a switch.

An ECU is not actually that complicated. It reads a few tens of inputs (temperatures, air mass flow, lambda sensors, crank position, etc.), and controls a few tens of actuators (throttle body, fuel injectors, spark plugs, maybe variable valve timing), with time resolution measured in tens of microseconds. An Arduino doesn't break a sweat - see the Speeduino project.

Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats

#64

Post by cmdkeen »

mikeash wrote: post #36
ma2rten wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I was an evil VP, I would give my eningeers the incentive to do something without giving them a direct order. So, you might tell them: If you can improve gas millage by X% you get a huge bonus and I don't care how you do it.

This is how modern companies break the rules. Management doesn't break the rules, either overtly or covertly. Management scrupulously follows the rules, while placing requirements on their workers that can only be met by breaking the rules. Want your workers to work more, but you don't want to pay overtime, or you run into trouble with regulations about consecutive hours on the job? Just bump up how much work they ha…

This is why the financial regulators in the UK have changed to consider the corporate culture when dealing with breaches. A company whose senior staff "live a compliance culture" will be penalised less for the same breach than one operating as described above.

Now you can argue efficacy, being able to pull the wool over the eyes of regulators etc but I think it is a good direction to head in.

All that is way beyond the industry described with institutionalised cheating in tests, it wounds more like the graphics card industry than one with regulators.

Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats

#65

Post by edejong »

An interesting twist to this would be to change liability. Make the driver liable (not the manufacturer) for driving a car breaking the emission standards. This will set in motion the following steps:

- Car users will be offered insurance against breaking emission standards

- Insurance companies will hire specialists to lower insurance rates of above insurance

- Consumers are disincentivized to modify their ECU in a non-compliant way

- Consumers are incentivized to buy cars offering more transparency in firmware (and car manufacturers will offer more transparency)

I'm a firm believer in: you buy it, then you're responsible for ascertaining its safety. If you can't do this, hire someone to do it for you.

Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats

#66

Post by thyselius »

throwaway79790 wrote: post #59
mabbo wrote: post #9

While 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. The…

The problem is that nobody wrote a specific defeat device. You have to understand, Bosch has one basic (extremely complex) piece of software that goes in pretty much every single engine controller. There are some specific functions that are developed at the request of specific customers, but the basics are always the same. When this general piece of software is set up to control a new engine from an OEM, a multi-year…

I don't doubt it's this big mess you are describing, but if the engine is actively looking for test/not test and does things like turning off particle filtering after 30 minutes of driving because it knows any test will be over, it seems to me the intention is in fact to lie about the real emissions.

Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats

#67

Post by tyingq »

wereHamster wrote: post #62
tyingq wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Driving style has a profound effect on emissions. As does ambient temperature, uphill vs downhill, time at stoplight. Short trip vs longer (catalytic converters don't work till they are hot). I'm sure they can find some way to address the cheating, but it's likely not the case that they are just missing some obvious simple solution.

Modern cars have enough sensors that they could store all necessary information about trips, have the service center read it out each time the car is serviced, anonymise, and send back to the manufacturer. That way the manufacturer would have accurate, real-world data about their 'average driver'. Could even make it country-specific.

These tests, though, are the ones you have to pass before you can sell that model of car, administered by government agencies. The agencies dictate the tests and measures.

Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats

#68

Post by unityByFreedom »

edejong wrote: post #65

An interesting twist to this would be to change liability. Make the driver liable (not the manufacturer) for driving a car breaking the emission standards. This will set in motion the following steps: - Car users will be offered insurance against breaking emission standards - Insurance companies will hire specialists to lower insurance rates of above insurance - Consumers are disincentivized to modify their ECU in a…

> I'm a firm believer in: you buy it, then you're responsible for ascertaining its safety. If you can't do this, hire someone to do it for you

People elect government to take care of this for them. We can't all be experts in everything.

I firmly believe that when we work together on solving problems, we are better off.

Putting the onus on the individual is exactly what big businesses would like. It gives them even more of a free pass towards short term profits. Get caught doing something wrong? Close up shop and reopen another, earning profit while fooling the public again under another name. No thank you!!!

Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats

#69

Post by crowbahr »

edejong wrote: post #65

An interesting twist to this would be to change liability. Make the driver liable (not the manufacturer) for driving a car breaking the emission standards. This will set in motion the following steps: - Car users will be offered insurance against breaking emission standards - Insurance companies will hire specialists to lower insurance rates of above insurance - Consumers are disincentivized to modify their ECU in a…

Problem is that the US Government guarantees that vehicles sold here have met minimum safety requirements. The public relies on the government to have done that legwork.

Beyond that you would immediately get into jargon and confusing packaging for insurance and vehicle emissions. I was just buying dental insurance and the 4 different plans provided by a single provider had 30+ different fields each of which was subtly different. How am I, as a standard consumer, supposed to make sense of all of that... Much less compare it with the 3 other networks. Then add onto that another factor (the type of car I drive) into the same bag and it becomes just absurd.

I don't have a solution to the cheating but I feel like mandating open source software is a good step.

Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats

#70

Post by jamiepenney »

vinceguidry wrote: post #18
mabbo wrote: post #9

While 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. The…

The problem with this is that it localizes the consequences of defiance on the weakest part of the chain, all but guaranteeing failure. You can't even expect engineers to blow the whistle on their soon-to-be-former employer. Ethics is about protecting the weak from the strong, not offering up the weak to get eaten by the strong. Only heroes put the good of the many over their own needs, and you can't expect everyone…

Whenever I've raised the issue with other developers they've been open to the idea, but to be perfectly honest I have no idea how you'd even go about starting something like that.
Post reply on HN