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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

#21

Post by DonHopkins »

parennoob wrote: post #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 scenar…

Are the tests that the hidden code is supposed to defeat performed only a few times on specific cars by regulators, or are they the regular smog checks that everyone has to pass each time they renew their registration [1]? If the latter, then all those smog check shops will have to get new mobile equipment (how much more does that cost?) and drive each car around town for a long time. [2]

This article [3] has a mention and photo of "A portable emissions measurement system at the Engine and Emissions Research Laboratory at West Virginia University."

"Mr. Carder and his team drew on their experience testing trucks when they got the contract to test cars in 2013. One challenge was to fit what amounts to a mobile laboratory in the car. At the time, the equipment available for such emissions testing had enough battery power only for short trips.

To make long hauls possible, the West Virginia University researchers bought portable gasoline generators at regular hardware stores and bolted them to the rear ends of the test cars. The generators made a terrible racket and frequently broke down because they were not designed to be bumped around."

[1] http://www.dmv.org/ca-california/smog-check.php

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZmCp7NocMA

[2] Researchers Who Exposed VW Gain Little Reward From Success: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/25/business/vw-wvu-diesel-vo...

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

#22

Post by crazygringo »

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…

There's a great New Yorker article [1] which addresses this -- particularly that "pretty clear that this was not right" might not be that clear after all. Excerpt:

"...sociologist Diane Vaughan described a phenomenon inside engineering organizations that she called the “normalization of deviance.” In such cultures, she argued, there can be a tendency to slowly and progressively create rationales that justify ever-riskier behaviors... If the same pattern proves to have played out at Volkswagen, then the scandal may well have begun with a few lines of engine-tuning software. Perhaps it started with tweaks that optimized some aspect of diesel performance and then evolved over time: detect this, change that, optimize something else. At every step, the software changes might have seemed to be a slight “improvement” on what came before, but at no one step would it necessarily have felt like a vast, emissions-fixing conspiracy by Volkswagen engineers, or been identified by Volkswagen executives. Instead, it would have slowly and insidiously led to the development of the defeat device and its inclusion in cars that were sold to consumers."

"But assuming all of this is true, how could it have persisted for so long, and without more people stepping forward and speaking out?... Volkswagen was heavily invested, both financially and culturally, in producing a clean-diesel engine. That the company was failing to meet the standard required by American emissions tests would have been embarrassing and frustrating to its German engineers. Some may have seen those tests as arbitrary, and felt justified in “tuning” the engine software to perform differently during them—even as it now looks, to the outside world, like an obvious scandal."

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/an-engineering-th...

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

#23

Post by tyingq »

adrianN wrote: post #6
tyingq wrote: post #3

Earlier 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.

"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.

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

#24

Post by pedrocr »

Sniffnoy wrote: post #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 lik…

Doing a sanity check helps but the best thing that can be done to avoid a repeat of this is to make sure there are sufficiently heavy fines and hopefully also jail time from this case. If the penalty is heavy enough the detection probability doesn't need to be as high.

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

#25

Post by obstinate »

What puzzles me about all this is why the investigators did not compel the companies to produce the exact mechanisms by which they cheated emissions as part of the settlements. I guess it doesn't really matter, since what you're chiefly interested in is the manufacturer ceasing the behavior and not repeating the offense, so that might be why they didn't.

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

#26

Post by notyourwork »

rrhyne wrote: post #19
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…

If I were an evil VP tasked with creating this loop hole, I'd tell my project manager we needed a configurable system that let us control emissions for our intneral testing environments or some other plausible and legal requirement. I'd keep the knowledge of the system obscure and communication between dev, testing and deployment sparse. I'd then have only one person change the configuration before deployment. I'm su…

Great point, it all depends on how the problem is framed.

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

#27

Post by Tempest1981 »

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…

More common is submitting their code to a regulatory agency, as in the medical and gaming (slot machine) industries. They can also confirm that the code submitted is what is actually running on the device.

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

#28

Post by ma2rten »

rrhyne wrote: post #19
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…

If I were an evil VP tasked with creating this loop hole, I'd tell my project manager we needed a configurable system that let us control emissions for our intneral testing environments or some other plausible and legal requirement. I'd keep the knowledge of the system obscure and communication between dev, testing and deployment sparse. I'd then have only one person change the configuration before deployment. I'm su…

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.

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

#29

Post by dkarapetyan »

Weird conclusion. This kind of activity should just be deemed illegal instead of treating it as an arms race between the manufacturers and regulators. Have 3rd party code auditors look through the code and flag any shenanigans. Instead of treating the code as an unregulated black box.

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

#30

Post by nisa »

parennoob wrote: post #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 scenar…

> What's wrong with just making those tests the actual regulatory ones?

Nothing. But Germany has a strong position in the EU and to a large degree does what VW/BMW/Mercedes want and they wanted to avoid stronger or better tests. This topic is quite often in the news here and it's clear that there is no political will to establish real word tests.

There are also a lot of other cheats in this firmware:

- Below 14°C? Just blast the emissions out. It's not like these cars are driven in the winter.

- Autobahn? Go blast out the emissions!

- and so on...

This should be a far bigger scandal than it is now.

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