The thing to do is to allow researchers to test cars in realworld situations and then actually listen to them when they report anomalies.
"Testing cars in real-world situations" is only a small part of a vehicle testing procedure. Remember the Toyota uncontrolled acceleration thingy? That was tested in real-world situations multiple times, yet still people died because of it. Toyota had been succesfully dodging liability until they were forced to open up their source code.
"Listen to researchers" is moot if the researchers are forbidden from researching parts independently.
What I want to see is that all current cars are put through the wringer to insure no other manufacturer is gaming the system.
It's also ignoring the larger picture, which I've seen echoed more across this thread: the software governing physical processes should not receive more protection than the physical process itself. Black-box testing is a very poor substitute for dismantling and testing each part in isolation, and if manufacturers are able to subvert regulation by encoding the more useful bits in software and then claim "IP" or "DMCA", expect to see more of these things in the future, not less.
So personally, I would go much further in my suggested response (but I'm not a politician): given the active subversion performed here, I would halt all sales and imports of VW products until they share all source code for their entire (US) range. That should serve as a better deterrent than fines IMHO.
Why not just require that for all cars? It seems a completely sensible policy. Just doing it after a manufacturer has been caught cheating is a reactionary view too.
And of course - you might want to travel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...
That's democracy - the biggest democracy wins.
How so? I think the EFF is going a bit off track here. They seem to imply that source code is required for independent testing. If we assume that's true, who gets to see it? How do they get to use it?
Emissions tests are circumvented by knowing the test conditions and/or sequence and having software behave differently during the test. You can either try to understand the software, or you can just change your testing sequence. Which seems more reasonable?
Now what if China wants to see your code to verify compliance? And Germany, and France, and every country to sell cars in.
I mean, how do you know the source code for this "cheat" wasn't 100% obvious, such that looking at the code would have revealed itself right away? Obviously, no one can know that right now, since it's protected under DMCA, but what if.....
That is most certainly NOT what the EFF is implying. They are asking for an exemption to the DMCA, not access to anyone's original source code. When they say "Automakers argue that it’s unlawful for independent researchers to look at the code that controls vehicles without the manufacturer’s permission," they're not talking about "you should have a legal obligation to give us your human-readable source code," they're talking about "You shouldn't be able to sue us for copyright infringement when we analyze the firmware on our cars." Car manufacturers argue that people don't really own cars, and that any attempt to look at the software that manages them is in violation of the DMCA.You can read more about it here:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/automakers-say-you-don...
The kind of thing the EFF is trying to legally access is already shipped in every vehicle that goes to China (or anywhere), where they don't have the DMCA and probably are already examining it - just not for our benefit.
Everyone? What would be the harm?
> Now what if China wants to see your code to verify compliance? And Germany, and France, and every country to sell cars in.
Show them the code.
Before cars were run with software, it was possible to buy a car, take it apart, measure every single part, and construct a copy. You could learn everything about a car by examining a car. The fact that this was possible did not prevent the U.S. auto industry from succeeding financially. It did not hurt anyone.
I can't think of a reason that would be different today. The DMCA was enacted to protected creative works, in which the IP represents the entirety of the value. Software that runs hardware is not the same thing and should not be accorded the same protections.
As we learned from Toyota, these protections have enabled absolutely terrible software development practices. Third-party inspection would provide pressure to improve that. Imagine if Consumer Reports had electric engineers and software engineers on staff and their car reviews included scores for code quality and proper safety checks. I think that would be good for everyone, including car companies.
In reality, it is very helpful to have a carefully controlled, consistent test so that comparisons between vehicles are apples to apples. Variances in the real world will be argued as inevitable, and very quickly you'll find the industry converges on how likely it is that a give variance is "acceptable/plausible", and then you'll have engineers designing for that variance....
Was isn't this already in place (at least in CA)?
Systems designed to defeat specific test are nothing new. The biggest example I can think of are the Buell (Harley) bikes that use an exhaust bypass designed to keep the bike quite at RPMs used during the CA test.
Such as open doors/hood while the wheels are spinning, no acceleration or a stationary GPS signal.
The fact that cars have GPSs, make it next to impossible to design tests that can't be cheated, you would need a testing rig that could be mounted on a moving car, that didn't cause an increase of pressure on the exhaust system (cars could detect that) And then you would need to do testing on public roads, so the car didn't switch to a different mode when it's GPS showed it was on a known test track.
It would enable your car to suddenly perform better as soon as you enter a state with less strict emission requirements, or vice-versa, your usually high emission car would be legal to operate when visiting stricter places because it can switch to a limited more when needed.
That's how this was discovered.
Maybe an EE could tell us if it's possible for the ECM to detect the presence of the inductive pickup.
"EPA regulators said that Volkswagen adopted a 'sophisticated' algorithm that turned on vehicles' full emissions controls when it detected they were being tested for emissions performance." - http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2015/09/18/epa-accu...
And keep in mind that VW is simply the only company who got caught. I find it hard to believe they were the first one or the only ones doing this.
The epa tests are for beaurocrats, now maybe the world is changing but I suspect that if you could simply plug a usb stick in to your car and get better mileage and more power, at the cost of some nitrogen, a ton of people would do it, maybe most would. If it was really important, they'd require the cars to have real time sensors as standard equipment and put some of the responsibility on the driver too. VAG just played along and made the game more efficient. Not that I agree with it, it sucks, but the system was built to be gamed, it's broken