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Comment by frozenport | Hacker News Reader

Okay you make the software open source, then the cheating will take place in hardware. At the heart of the emission testing problem lies a poorly designed emissions test. We need better test coverage.

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That would at least be more expensive. Moving the cheating to harder and harder chunks of the entire system is a fine start.

You can't have perfect security. You can have security that makes bad actors pay more for the privilege of being bad actors.

How about testing them on the road? Worst that could happen is requiring the car maker to revert to those sub-optimal settings.

This is how the arms race begins. Soon the manufacturers will know how much the equipment weighs, and if the car's total weight is within tolerance for that plus a test driver, the mechanisms activate.

Or whatever - the point isn't the methods, it's the pattern of one-upsmanship.

True, but there shouldn't be an arms race to begin with - one of the parties has men with guns, the other has not. VW should be sued to the ground for fucking with society like that. They should be turned into an example of what happens when you try to pull off highly damaging criminal stunts like that.

Problem is that you don't get the people responsible if you do this. Punishing corporations only work if you do it in real time as the crimes are committed so that it has consequences for the individuals responsible.

Taking VW to court now, while the cars with the software mods in question are currently in the wild, is as Real Time as it gets.

Indeed. Also, it may sound brutal but even if all the responsible evaded the hard punishment that came upon the company, the next time someone would think about pulling such a stunt off, he'd be opposed by the rest. You just need to make the consequences hard enough to bubble up the ladder and ruin the day for someone at the top.

The buck stops with the shareholders.

And also it would require more people in on the conspiracy.

But this is just a band-aid fix. Personally, I would just put the user in control. Let the user decide whether they want to run their car in high mileage low emissions mode or high performance mode. Now automakers can "cheat" all they want and it makes everyone better off.

Better off in every way except for the whole choking in smog because you've essentially abolished emission regulations.

You're right it some respects, but wrong in others. The person who really cares about their car's performance is just going to buy a high emission car and constantly pollute. If you allow drivers to have different driving modes then those gas guzzlers might be enticed to buy a more environmentally friendly car and leave it in low emissions mode for their day-to-day driving and put it in performance mode when they want it.

Hell you could put a green odometer in it and give a tax break proportional to the percent of miles driven in green mode to encourage it's use.

Trying to force car enthusiasts to give up performance will just drive them to older cars which don't have crippling software or dangerous hacks to bypass the restrictions.

Tht sounds like a very bad idea. When buying a car, you already have to make a tradeoff between performance, practicality and environmental impact, but at the very least you have discrete choices and you know the car will be usable. If remapping the ECU at will becomes standard, what is to stop manufacturers from basing MPG figures on a map that does 0-60 in 40 seconds? Where would you draw the line for the definition of misleading consumers? Or what's to stop rednecks from constantly running sky-high NOx and CO2 emissions?

Your implicit argument that it's really not up to consumers to decide whether to bypass emission requirements is fine. That it's "rednecks" who would do this is not.

My sincere apologies if this offended anyone. What would be an appropriate term in this context? Edit: I'm not a native speaker and have heard this term in use in the media to the point where I did not believe it to be a "racial slur" as wikipedia says it is.

So, say I want, for instance, to represent the stereotype person who rolls coal on their diesel pickup and believes global warming is a left-wing conspiracy. Look it up on youtube if you don't know what rolling coal is. (We can get into a whole debate on whether stereotypes are inherently good or bad, but that's not the point. They're a very effective commumication tool, which is why humans are so quick to label and group other humans, but obviously they're only to be used when not offensive.)

Perhaps it's just better not to stereotype here--however effective doing so might be on MSNBC or Fox News or on some politician's stump speech.

And I suspect that a luxury performance car owner would be just as likely to turn off emission controls if it would help performance as a rural pickup truck owner of whatever political persuasion (in both cases).

I think the problem with the emissions test is it tries to be precise. The authorities seem to think that if we lock down all the variables, we get a good guess as to the actual figures. Which wouldn't be a bad way to do things if you were doing a science experiment.

If we're trying to avoid gaming the system, wouldn't it be better to drive around a bunch of cars, using the natural variability of the conditions to defeat the cheaters? Sure, it's not as precise, but you get better accuracy because people can't trick the system.

How will you handle all of the "its not fair" complaints that claim competitors were tested under better conditions?

And also, how will you ensure that certain manufacturers aren't actually given better conditions?

Have a large number of tests, let the law of large numbers rule (eg let 1000 random people borrow each type of car). Have a think about whether there's some bias between the manufacturers built in and adjust your sampling accordingly. Make the data available to scrutiny.

That doesn't sound expensive

I agree. Paying people to do comprehensive tests in a few locations will probably cost less than a single brand new car, of which they're making thousands to millions. Even a thousand test drives is not that much; 20 cars borrowed for a month is more than enough to do those.

>How will you handle all of the "its not fair" complaints

You look at them with disbelief and ask why they designed it to skirt the edge of illegal levels of pollution and be so likely to fail.

The essence of tightening emissions and CAFE standards (as currently implemented) is that they are hard to meet and even passing manufacturers are generally "just barely" passing.

For CAFE, makers sell some high mpg models at cost/slight loss to allow them to sell high-margin luxury and sports models.

The need for testing is the problem, and the realisation that car makers - all of them - are working on the test score over everything else, and that the test scores (which should represent emissions and air quality) have been getting "better" to the extent that that they are increasingly diverging from the real world.

I suspect that in a few decades time this will be regarded as a heavy blow to the internal combustion engine - or at least against Diesel. It is an inflection point at which a scandal pushes into public conciousness and mass media the mounting evidence against Diesel engines and the health effects of smog, and the insufficient actual progress fixing it. Meanwhile electric cars are gaining fast.

The politicians are in "something must be done" mode, which is the usual reaction to a problem that has been ignored for a while and now is in the news.

e.g.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/france-consider-phasing-diesel-tax...

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/10/03/uk-volkswagen-emiss...

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/oct/01/uk-governmen...

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