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E.P.A. Finds More VW Cheating Software, Including in Porsches

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Re: E.P.A. Finds More VW Cheating Software, Including in Porsches

#101

Post by TeMPOraL »

empath75 wrote: post #20
Scoundreller wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If X person(s) modified their X car(s) in such a way, they'd be forced to take it/them off the road. The value of X should not matter.

'Should' and 'does' aren't always the same thing in real life. You're talking about upending the lives of many thousands of people that depend on their cars to get to work, and lost of people who depend on VW for their pay checks. I'm sure this will all get worked out, but it would be insane to just pull the cars off the road.

> You're talking about upending the lives of many thousands of people that depend on their cars to get to work, and lost of people who depend on VW for their pay checks. I'm sure this will all get worked out, but it would be insane to just pull the cars off the road.

While pulling the existing cars off the road in an instant seems to be an expensive and bad idea, I don't like the idea of suddenly caring about the livelihoods of VW employees. We're talking about a Big Co here, the kind that axes thousands of people because sales said they can't meet their quarterly goals.

How am I, as a citizen, ever to trust the government can hold corporations in check, if not just them, but we ourselves hesitate to take action because of collateral damage. No surprise VW is pulling off the shit they are - they know perfectly well they'll get away with it even if it goes public.

Re: E.P.A. Finds More VW Cheating Software, Including in Porsches

#102

Post by mikestew »

danjayh wrote: post #27
bri3d wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I certainly don't buy the "pesky engineers" argument, it's actually somewhat plausible Porsche didn't know about the cheating (beyond what everyone knew, which was that the stated mileage and emissions were virtually impossible to achieve by any known mechanism). Since they dropped a VW manufactured engine (3.0 TDI) into a shared VW chassis (Touraeg) and built the Cayenne around that, there's a good chance the…

While I'm certainly not making excuses for VW cheating, I think that maybe the EPA needs to revisit its diesel emission standards. The EPA standard is the strictest in the world, and they have successfully ruined many diesel powered devices. Examples: 1) I was recently looking at compact tractors. To meet the standards, new tractors are fitted with Diesel Particulate Filters. Even if they don't flat-out fail (which h…

The EPA standard is the strictest in the world, and they have successfully ruined many diesel powered devices.

One thought, then, is that diesels are not suited to the task. If that particular type of engine can't move things down the road without filling the air with pollution, perhaps it's time we moved on to something else. I mean, what tasks require a diesel? Commercial vehicles, okay. Consumer cars? Not if they spew crap into the air just to save a few MPG. Small farm equipment? See below, totally unnecessary, IMO. Class A motorhomes? Please. The fact that it's designation has "recreational" in the name tells you that kittens won't die if we don't have anymore of them.

An extreme stance? I dunno, maybe. Just like getting rid of lead in our fuel was probably an extreme proposition at one time. But we knew lead was bad, we knew it for decades. But profits uber alles, eh? I just don't know how one would justify to future generations, "sorry 'bout the smog, but Daddy needed to run his garden tractor on diesel, and wanted to save a few bucks on fuel."

I could see an exception for commercial vehicles, but I can't see a good argument for consumer diesels if we can't produce ones that don't choke the air with particulates and NOx.

Personally, the two major things I want to do with a tractor are run a large snowblower and maintain our horse pasture.

Not to pick on you personally, but those tasks don't require a diesel. PTO, plowing a small field, running a bush hog or deck mower, pick your poison, it can all be done just fine with a gas engine. And the gas engine will start when it's -20F and that driveway needs plowed. I grew up in farm country, and the only ones running diesel where the ones with farm equipment the size of your house. I refuse to accept that we'll back off on EPA regulations because some dude feels like he needs a diesel to maintain his five acre play farm. (Again, not directed at you; I have no idea how many acres you have.)

Re: E.P.A. Finds More VW Cheating Software, Including in Porsches

#103

Post by mikeash »

aembleton wrote: post #45
Theodores wrote: post #28

Since Porsche do not use small diesels in their cars this looks to me like the scandal is a lot bigger than first thought. It isn't just the team working on the 1.8 litre diesel engine that fiddled the software, there is something more endemic going on as the 3 litre upwards size engines are implicated. The funny thing is this: Porsche could sue over £25 a day congestion charge (2008) http://www.theguardian.com/busin…

That article is from 2008.

VW emissions cheating is also from 2008, incidentally.

Re: E.P.A. Finds More VW Cheating Software, Including in Porsches

#104

Post by rtpg »

bsimpson wrote: post #99
monkbroc wrote: post #85

Background: I used to be an automotive software engineer. I speak for myself only here. Whenever the topic of automotive software comes up on HN there are comments alongs the lines of "global variables bad", but not much construtive feedback. I want to explain some of the tradeoffs that lead to the architecture used in automotive software to get a better discussion going with HN readers about that architecture. tl;dr…

I'm not an embedded developer, so I don't have much value to add re: architecture; however, this caught my eye: > The microprocessor has to run for 10+ years in a wide range of temperatures and be dirt cheap, so you end up with specs like 180 MHz, 4 MB of flash and 128 KB of RAM. If I'm paying tens of thousands of dollars for a car, how come they're using the cheapest possible components? If tinkerers can ship the Ra…

This is because the parts are orders of magnitude more expensive when being put in harsh environments

These "really slow" parts are actually tested and built for much more extreme conditions. For microchips that go into satelites, you even have hand-checked chips that go through a very long (and costly compared to something like a Pi) testing process. Multiply this by all the eletrical components, and you got yourself a lot of things to check.

Put your Raspberry Pi next to a car motor, and it's pretty likely(1) a part will fail in the heat and grime conditions.

(1) actually, I'm not sure about the likelihood, but there's no assurance that it will be fine

Re: E.P.A. Finds More VW Cheating Software, Including in Porsches

#105

Post by monkbroc »

STRML wrote: post #90
monkbroc wrote: post #85

Background: I used to be an automotive software engineer. I speak for myself only here. Whenever the topic of automotive software comes up on HN there are comments alongs the lines of "global variables bad", but not much construtive feedback. I want to explain some of the tradeoffs that lead to the architecture used in automotive software to get a better discussion going with HN readers about that architecture. tl;dr…

Quality post. Thanks for sharing. If some of these timers are implemented as separate OS tasks that can interrupt each others, what's to stop one from taking a bit too much time and throwing off the timing of another?

You're welcome.

There is only one OS task for each rate (10ms, 100ms, etc). The order of the function calls in each task is determined at compile time while respecting constraints (A_10ms must run before B_10ms because B_10ms uses values computed in A_10ms).

In addition each OS task has an overrun monitor that triggers if a task is scheduled to run but the previous run has not finished yet. This type of error typically sets a "control module performance" diagnostic trouble code.

Re: E.P.A. Finds More VW Cheating Software, Including in Porsches

#106

Post by TeMPOraL »

bsimpson wrote: post #99
monkbroc wrote: post #85

Background: I used to be an automotive software engineer. I speak for myself only here. Whenever the topic of automotive software comes up on HN there are comments alongs the lines of "global variables bad", but not much construtive feedback. I want to explain some of the tradeoffs that lead to the architecture used in automotive software to get a better discussion going with HN readers about that architecture. tl;dr…

I'm not an embedded developer, so I don't have much value to add re: architecture; however, this caught my eye: > The microprocessor has to run for 10+ years in a wide range of temperatures and be dirt cheap, so you end up with specs like 180 MHz, 4 MB of flash and 128 KB of RAM. If I'm paying tens of thousands of dollars for a car, how come they're using the cheapest possible components? If tinkerers can ship the Ra…

$30 Raspberry Pi (2) reboots itself when exposed to strong light. The RPi line is also totally unreliable, it tends to bug up and/or crash after running for too long.

The car components are made to different spec than consumer electronics (for starters, there are several types of component, depending on what "range of temperatures" you need to operate them in; e.g. the stuff that goes into the traffic lights in northern parts of Europe is not something you buy off Farnell for your hobby project), and they also need to be reliable and tested. Add, of course, the usual graft and overhead.

Another thing is that a engine controller doesn't need a near-GHz quad-core chip and shit ton of RAM. It's not meant to stream HD videos or run Python, it has to run a bunch of feedback loops fast enough. Less powerful chips tend to be cheaper and more reliable.

Re: E.P.A. Finds More VW Cheating Software, Including in Porsches

#107

Post by rtpg »

monkbroc wrote: post #85

Background: I used to be an automotive software engineer. I speak for myself only here. Whenever the topic of automotive software comes up on HN there are comments alongs the lines of "global variables bad", but not much construtive feedback. I want to explain some of the tradeoffs that lead to the architecture used in automotive software to get a better discussion going with HN readers about that architecture. tl;dr…

So you can use global variables and the like, but is there any progress in going higher level than C in industry? In which case you use global variables and whatnot, but you have static assertions about things like "this is only written to in one spot"

For example, I know there's an embedded systems company that writes everything in Haskell, and running their Haskell program actually generates "safe" C code that they compile down to their chips.

My impression from the oft-cited Toyota report was not only that there was a lot of global variable stuff, but that these "write-once" principles weren't super respected.

Re: E.P.A. Finds More VW Cheating Software, Including in Porsches

#108

Post by mikestew »

bsimpson wrote: post #99
monkbroc wrote: post #85

Background: I used to be an automotive software engineer. I speak for myself only here. Whenever the topic of automotive software comes up on HN there are comments alongs the lines of "global variables bad", but not much construtive feedback. I want to explain some of the tradeoffs that lead to the architecture used in automotive software to get a better discussion going with HN readers about that architecture. tl;dr…

I'm not an embedded developer, so I don't have much value to add re: architecture; however, this caught my eye: > The microprocessor has to run for 10+ years in a wide range of temperatures and be dirt cheap, so you end up with specs like 180 MHz, 4 MB of flash and 128 KB of RAM. If I'm paying tens of thousands of dollars for a car, how come they're using the cheapest possible components? If tinkerers can ship the Ra…

If I'm paying tens of thousands of dollars for a car, how come they're using the cheapest possible components?

Save a dollar on the part, and you make a million cars, how much does that add up to? Or conversely, why spend more than you have to if the quoted specs do the job? What the hell am I going to do with four cores if I follow the well-written description above?

And I'd give your Raspberry Pi a lifespan of about a month if you were to strap it to the firewall of your car while you drive it. Less if you actually powered it up.

Re: E.P.A. Finds More VW Cheating Software, Including in Porsches

#109

Post by TeMPOraL »

rtpg wrote: post #104
bsimpson wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an embedded developer, so I don't have much value to add re: architecture; however, this caught my eye: > The microprocessor has to run for 10+ years in a wide range of temperatures and be dirt cheap, so you end up with specs like 180 MHz, 4 MB of flash and 128 KB of RAM. If I'm paying tens of thousands of dollars for a car, how come they're using the cheapest possible components? If tinkerers can ship the Ra…

This is because the parts are orders of magnitude more expensive when being put in harsh environments These "really slow" parts are actually tested and built for much more extreme conditions. For microchips that go into satelites, you even have hand-checked chips that go through a very long (and costly compared to something like a Pi) testing process. Multiply this by all the eletrical components, and you got yoursel…

> Put your Raspberry Pi next to a car motor, and it's pretty likely() a part will fail in the heat and grime conditions.

Depending on how hot your motor goes, there's a good chance that unshielded Pi will simply de-solder itself into pieces.

Re: E.P.A. Finds More VW Cheating Software, Including in Porsches

#110

Post by knieveltech »

superuser2 wrote: post #96

I'm conflicted. What do people think about the ethics of buying (non-diesel) Volkswagen cars at this point? Obviously new cars pad VW's profits and reward bad behavior. But what about used ones? Seems like prices will be plummeting. And if you like the cars, seems like a great time to buy.

I have one of the cars that will be impacted by the recall. Performance and fuel economy are both top notch. The cabin fit and finish are on par with vehicles three times the price. I'll certainly be holding on to mine. If the used vehicle price plummets I'd definitely consider getting a 2nd one for my wife.
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