Volkswagen Emissions Investigation Zeroes in on Two Engineers
wsj.com
wsj.com
There are a lot of different ways that this type of cheating can develop over time, and simply saying "lots of people knew must have known about this" isn't very satisfying to me.
There are plenty of ways that upper management can stay in the dark. In the case of Deepwater Horizon, BP didn't make the decisions that lead to the blowout, but created excessive pressure for cost-cutting. In the case of Barings Bank, the managers were genuinely unaware of the rogue trader's fraud, but allowed him to bypass internal controls.
There are important lessons that will come out of the VW case and I'm very interested to learn them. The dismissiveness of the comments here is really disappointing, on the other hand.
Knowledge of the act, not knowledge of the law. There are very few contexts in which you can be punished for not knowing an illegal act took place, and they are all situations where you should have known but were negligent.
When you're audited, have fun claiming you didn't know that you were committing tax evasion.
Try buying something for a ridiculously low price down the pub. When the police come to take the stolen goods away, try claiming you didn't realise something selling for a tenth of its value was stolen.
>'When troops commit massacres and atrocities against the civilian population of occupied territory or against prisoners of war, the responsibility may rest not only with the actual perpetrators but also with the commander. Such a responsibility arises directly when the acts in question have been committed in pursuance of an order of the commander concerned. The commander is also responsible if he has actual knowledge, or should have knowledge, through reports received by h'un or through other means, that troops or other persons subject to his control are about to commit or have committed a war crime and he fails to take the necessary and reasonable steps to insure compliance with the law of war or to punish violators thereof.'
The basic principle is liar's reports are worthless. When reporters want to create a particular outcome (no executives should do hard time), what you end up with is fundamentally dishonest. And since we have reasonable doubts about the integrity of the investigation -- it's being performed by employees of the original deceivers -- the whole thing is garbage. You can't take it and unshade it a little bit; people who have proved their untrustworthiness simply cannot be trusted. Not just a little bit; not at all.
ps -- what constitutes a believable report? One done by criminal investigative services belonging to a country where the government doesn't own a major stake in the company being investigated.
I read this as an exec saying: "Just get it done. I don't care how it's done, and I don't want to know how it's done, just do it."
May have watched too many movies, but whatever is more plausible is usually correct.
If they knew about it, they were wrong. If the didn't know about it, they were derelict/incompetent in their duty to supervise, AKA, wrong.
> In the case of Deepwater Horizon, BP didn't make the decisions that lead to the blowout, but created excessive pressure for cost-cutting.
Oil drilling operations are very much different from any other company structure/hierarchy you are probably familiar with. BP's "Company Man" (Jobsite supervisor) made those decisions and BP gets to own the consequences. BP also made a lot of other poor decisions along the way, and afterward, which are also their responsibility. None of the parties comes out of the DWH disaster looking good, but BP gets primary responsibility, and they earned it.
Regulator's aren't stupid enough to be fooled by a couple of junior engineers being offered up as a sacrifice. They'll definitely go after the highest-level people they can get.
Two men are named in the article. One is on the Audi board of management. The other is on the Porsche board of management.
I understand where the cynicism comes from, I really do, but it's exhausting to wade through all the uninformed naysaying in this discussion. The above information took me less than a minute to find.
Maybe in a just world. I don't hold out too much hope.
I can't imagine something this important not having to go through multiple people for inspection. So of those people that are saying they "don't know", though it may be true, for some of them it was their job to know, I think that should (and probably is) being taken into account in the investigations.
Huh? VW's diesel engines had been TDIs for well over a decade at that time, for example my 1996 Golf was a TDI. The TDIs are awesome engines. I previously had a gasoline engine with the same horsepower rating, but the TDI was better in every way: unkillably high torque at low RPMs (I could go from a standing start to 4th gear without ever pushing the gas pedal), great acceleration at high speeds (at 160 km/h, hit the pedal and it goes, whereas with the gasoline engine it was hit the pedal and ... wait ... wait ... still trying to accelerate ... wait ). And of course far, far better gas mileage.
That said, the main issue with diesel is that while they have a much better torque curve, diesel engines have a much lower RPM limit. This plus the emissions issues make for pretty big compromises.
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/Volkswagen-...
So VW is telling us that this year of lying to the EPA was done completely by these two engineering managers and nobody else in the VW executive staff?
I decided that it's because even though my boss and myself will have good intentions, we can both mutually decide (without ever discussing it) that the tests should slide - I will try to meet his deadline, he won't check too hard.
Unless there are credible institutions that take that decision away from us (a build bot that refuses to deploy untested code for example) we will slip towards worse.
Management does not need to apply pressure towards misbehaviour - they simply have to not constantly strive for best behaviour. Our expectations fill in the rest.
As such, we are unlikely ever to find an email from the board saying "Hans, frig the tests next week, we can't be arsed to invest in catalytic converters", but the organisation decided that anyway.
I think it's to do with lack of candour - see the Pixar book out recently
A closer analogy to the VW case is if the build bot actually did exist, but you wrote some nefarious unit test that just spit out all OK results regardless of what the exercised code did, so that you were allowed to merge whatever crap your team produce, as long as it actually compile.
If that is the case, we can discuss different possible assignations of responsibility, but you cannot claim that some good intentioned people just slide into misbehavior due to not paying enough attention. Someone had to be aware they were actively cheating!
Cars that don't go through the recall process will continue to pollute at a greater rate and will earn the ire of the EPA (here in the US).
It's going to cost them a huge amount of money to satisfy both the EPA and their customers.
It seems much more likely that there will be parts replacement involved, and we may soon discover that the entire engine must be swapped out. This is unlikely to be feasible for cost, but bricking cars to intolerable driving conditions is also not enough. It's going to be really interesting to see how this develops. Done properly, this would probably be the end of VW. So I'm sure we'll see some half-assed solution that doesn't work for the consumer, but lets the company survive for a few more years until they finally collapse from consumers taking their future business elsewhere.
The amount of restraint I have to exercise as an ex-consultant who made his living working for the likes of Audi, VW & Siemens nobody here can possibly comprehend.
e: And hilariously for you, according to Wikipedia, Piëch himself is in fact a dyslexic atheist. Zounds!
Even if their superiors did honestly not know that they were loading fraud-ware in the vehicles, this is most likely the result of systemic social dynamics and perverse incentives. Mutually exclusive goals get set with no regard to the laws of physics or reason. Everyone who dares mention this self selects outside of the management hierarchy, so the whole chain of command becomes an echo chamber of overconfidence.
Then, at the end of the day, something has to give. It was the emission control testing in this case. It could have been much worse.
I understand everyone who thinks that this looks like presenting scapegoats. This stinks. The whole article shouldn't have been published like that, and we should not upvote it.
Another odd thing though, is that VW apparently puts their compliance responsibilities under engineering management. Our compliance department, which I work in, is an independent department. That has its own difficulties with being less integrated with development, but we don't have any competing goals.
> “It will be difficult for Volkswagen to replace them,” he said.
Genuinely legendary engineers, and allegedly with the balls to cheat (but not quite the balls to stand on principle). It will indeed be hard to find that combination among the remaining legends.
So the aim of the regulation is to push the industry in the direction you want them to go at a rate which gets everyone to the destination without destroying the industry. And every so often the regulations need to be tightened to keep the development process moving forward.
"head of" is a low level (entry-level) mgmt position in these places. No idea why anyone would down-vote you.
I hear people say the general statement a lot, but I'm not sure who specifically they're talking about.
There tend to be lots of unintended consequences to punishing stupid politicians like that, or people outside the government following the government's prior orders.