VW says rulebreaking culture at root of emissions scandal | Hacker News Reader

VW says rulebreaking culture at root of emissions scandal

arstechnica.com

45 pointstetrep56 comments

So Chairman Pötsch said "All of this was caused by a desire to expand diesel sales in the US, a desire that wasn't matched with sufficient time or budget to develop engines that fully complied with the tough NOx emissions regulations of the US." The unsaid implication being that someone was pushing that desire, and the very much danced around implication of either "Management said we have to sell more cars no matter what it takes" (indicating management knew about it and didn't care) or possibly even "Management wants to sell more cars and you must make cars more sellable at all costs" (indicating that the developers were afraid for their jobs if they spoke up about potential misdeeds while making cars more attractive to consumers.)

Someone, somewhere, either felt like they couldn't blow the whistle without getting fired (obviously a problem) or management knew about the rule breaking and just didn't care (which is a bigger problem.)

> Someone, somewhere, either felt like they couldn't blow the whistle without getting fired (obviously a problem) or management knew about the rule breaking and just didn't care (which is a bigger problem.)

Don't forget somebody blowing the whistle to the hierarchy and a middle-mangler (of justice) "losing" the call. Feynman recounts multiple instances of manglement ignoring or railroading warnings and whistleblowing from engineers and workers, both in and out of NASA, when they didn't fail to consult with their report entirely.

Here's a verbatim quote from "Why do you care what other people think" (norton paperback, page 185)

> When I left the meeting, I had the definite impression that I had found the same game as with the seals: management reducing criteria and accepting more and more errors that weren't designed into the device, while the engineers are screaming from below, "HELP!" and "This is a RED ALERT!"

And top manglement may not only know (and not care) about the issues but cause them, see this other quote a few pages further (194) in the Software Group section (Feynman had been very impressed — positively — by the engineering discipline of the shuttle software group)

> One guy muttered something about higher-ups in NASA wanting to cut back on testing to save money: "They keep saying we always pass the tests, so what's the use of having so many?"

process driven cultures tend to generate a lot of apathy from the standpoint that speaking up is systematically discouraged as there is no reward. doesn't matter how right your position is, far more will follow a process to any end as the process itself provides cover from fallout and failure

Feynman recounts very much the opposite (of apathy), that engineers and even factory workers had remained surprisingly (to him) involved, interested and high in morale, e.g. recounting his meeting with the workers reshaping and reassembling the solid rocket booster sections:

> the point is, the workers were thinking! I got the impression that they were not undisciplined; they were very interested in what they were doing, but they weren't given much encouragement. Nobody was paying much attention to them. It was remarkable that their morale was as high as it was under the circumstances.

apathy does not necessarily manifest in bad morale, if anything it can be a coping mechanism. let alone in such groups the idea of not rocking the boat is similar to the Wilder effect; you be what they expect when asked because to disagree causes discomfort or the need to be seen as a team player is real

> apathy does not necessarily manifest in bad morale

Apathy is defined as a lack of interest, enthusiasm or concern, the text I quote is about Feynman finding none of these lacking.

It's entirely possible that nobody wanted to blow the whistle. This scandal involved making the cars pass some foreign emissions standard by tweaking the engine software. The people responsible for approving engine compliance were also the people responsible for making it compliant (something that VW says it will change now). Even if a bunch of people were involved, they might have liked their solution.

The CEO created pressure with his ambition for VW to become the world's largest auto manufacturer; meanwhile the company had a culture and structure that would allow for shortcuts to be taken.

eh, I find it hard to believe that this was a conspiracy by a restricted group.

engineers are know to know how to calculate an engine efficiency. this is not the 60's and they can have a pretty decent knowledge of an engine performance profile by their simulations and knowledge of previous iterations of the same engines.

if this really was an internal 'conspiracy' it should have run from the engine engineers of this engine iteration, the previous iteration, the software developers that touched near the code, all the testers testing that software code, all the qa that ran the endless benches run for the engine to qualify for robustness (a very tight and monitor environment [1]), whomever touched that data afterward etc etc.

[1] think like this, photi not actual wv center: http://assets.slate.wvu.edu/resources/1117/1304968590.jpg

Can German HN readers can explain this to me. My interpretation of German culture was that rule breaking was looked down upon. My own experience traveling in Germany was that rules were deliberately followed, for example, no one ever crossed the street until the Walk sign was present, regardless of it being busy. Honking your horn by an irritated driver happened only once in my 3 weeks there (and the cyclists took the driver to task for it).

The name escapes me, but an expat friend of mine living in Germany mentioned there is a government group that is in charge of making sure posted signs follow strict laws (can't find this on Google).

German engineering culture is known for high precision and quality.

Made in Germany has the same brand power that Made in Japan, and Made in the US have.

Given these stereotypes of German culture, to me, it seems out of sorts that VW (arguably one of the most public of German Companies) would have a culture of rule breaking.

We Germans are not perfect at all. Yes, we are good at engineering and yes, we take our rules a bit more serious than other people, but all in all you will find the same problems here as anywhere else. The rulebreaking is just toned down a bit but it still exists.

'Move fast and break the law' might not have been the best slogan to put on the wall....

It's working alright for Uber ;)

Arguably the laws Uber is breaking are themselves immoral.

When it comes to emissions controls, though, even the worst lawbreakers among us need to breathe.

"Arguably the laws Uber is breaking are themselves immoral. "

By whose standards/judgments?

That's a complicated question. But I'd start by pointing out that the taxi laws certainly don't have the consent of the governed behind them. If they did, Uber would never have taken such a big chunk of the taxis' market share.

When the laws do not respect the people, the people will not respect the laws. That's not a statement of moral value, it's a statement of fact.

Mine, among many others.

You're free to see it differently. I think that makes it "arguable".

"It's all those damn engineers' fault."

This sounds like such a German corporate reaction - almost as if it were a caricature - "they didn't follow the process - how can we be responsible? we better double down on process."

How about failing in building a corporate culture that rewards openness and learning from failure?

This gives me very little hope for VW, and to an extent, for Germany. These top of the crop german execs just don't get it.

Is the incident with GM's ignition switches that killed 100 people the kind of learning from failure we should shoot for?

Please read this:

http://www.governing.com/columns/smart-mgmt/col-culture-open...

"Creating a culture of openness and candor is critical to organizational success. It takes a strong, concerted effort by leaders."

"How could this icon of U.S. industry allow the ignition-switch problem to fester for a decade without recalling the faulty vehicles and without notifying federal authorities (as required) and the public?

The answer seems to lie in the company's culture. For decades, GM was plagued with warring fiefdoms, so it wasn't in one's interest to surface problems in front of your colleagues. And even when problems were brought to senior managers' attention, action was often impeded by poor communications between GM units. As crisis-management expert Gerry Meyers puts it, "In any big organization, there's an effort by lower-level management to insulate upper-level management. And the more layers there are, the less [likely] that a very serious matter can get to the top."

And come to think of it.. WTF! Do you seriously believe that what is wrong with German auto makers is that they don't have enough process? Come on... reality check please.

One man's rule breaking is another man's disruption.

Rulebreaking!?!?! They must be PuertoRicans! :-D

Disclosure: I am PuertoRican

I just wish one government would say to VW - 'sorry folks, those cars do not meet emission standards, they are destroying the health of the general public to an extent that our health services do not want so please take those cars off the road today.'

Thereafter the police being instructed to stop any offending VW found on the roads and tow it to the yard, to be released once VW fixed it, with yard storage charges applied at market rates for the locality. The police have automatic number plate recognition, this talks to the licensing authority and a few lines of code could be added to flag up the emission-spewing diesels. Simple.

This would also be an experiment in air quality. If overnight a sizeable percentage of cars were no longer on the roads, would there be a noticeable increase in air quality?

This would also be handled by market forces, I am sure my VW driving friends would sort out alternative rides or find garages that could add some fancy exhaust pipe that makes them compliant.

Draconian? It depends on whether air quality matters or not. That is a fairly black and white thing - either it matters or it doesn't.

The 'rule breaking' culture in VW is all very interesting but neither VW or our elected governments have done a thing to take those polluting machines off the road until they are fixed. It is this culture of complacency that bothers me more because it is happening now. The 'rule breaking' culture continues.

You would not breathe diesel fumes if you could see them.

> If overnight a sizeable percentage of cars were no longer on the roads, would there be a noticeable increase in air quality?

We've already done this experiment a number of times. C.f. the hospitalization rates during the Atlanta Olympics.

Unfortunately, such a draconian rule would hurt the owners of the cars more than VW. It would essentially force every car buyer to buy a new car.

Plus, there are plenty of cars on the road built before 2000 that have even worse emissions than these VWs. Would you propose taking those cars off the road as well?

Well, the potential EPA fine per-car is $37,500.

An amazing move would be for the EPA to force the cars off the road, and force VW to pay for the affected customers' new cars.

Or the EPA could force VW to release an update for the affected cars' ECU, and avoid sending a million perfectly serviceable cars to the landfill.

Which, I believe, is what is supposed to happen.

Any such update will be effectively optional, though, won't it? (I don't know, I don't own a car anymore and the last one I had used an ECU probably dumber than today's toasters.)

States with state inspection could plausibly require proof of some form that the update has been applied. States which use OBD-II diagnostics should generally already be capable of doing this by reading the CALID supplied by the ECU (it's part of the standard), so they could work off of that.

Hell, if we're lucky maybe the testing center can flash the update themselves right there on the test rig over OBD-II if the car doesn't have it. Would save everyone- the State, the consumer, even VW, a lot of heartache in handling a mandatory update.

Or a nice market for VW diesels might develop in non-inspecting states.

They already effectively are. Aftermarket ECUs that completely ignore emission standards are (and have been) widely available.

In Norway there has been talk from the DMV equivalent [1] that people who don't have their cars updated in the recall will have their registrations cancelled. So if you keep driving, the police will stop you. Automated license plate scanners and all that, I don't think many will skip it.

What's more likely is that if many people feel their cars are sluggish after the update, aftermarket diesel tuning will become (even more) popular.

[1] Source (in Norwegian): http://www.vg.no/forbruker/bil-baat-og-motor/dieselskandalen...

It could be quite easy to enforce through registration data and refusing to renew until proof of a fix is provided.

That only works if the issue can be resolved via ECU. The problem isn't just that the cars are reporting wrong data when being tested, but that the cars are producing more gasses than they are supposed to. If the update only fixes the software to report correctly, then the car will fail the emissions test. I rather doubt it's only a software fix that will solve the problem. Chances are there will need to be a hardware alteration to resolve the underlying issue. In that case, an update to the ECU wouldn't resolve the problem. You will need to bring your car to a dealer (Likely a VW-certified dealer) to have the solution applied as well as the software patch to make sure it is reporting correct data while undergoing emissions testing.

I believe the issue lies in the cars' ability to fallback to a lower-performance mode when the system recognizes that it's being tested. The low-performance mode passes the tests. The ECU update would require that the "emissions-passing low-performance mode" be engaged permanently. It's not that the cars can't pass emissions, it's that they choose not to.

> The problem isn't just that the cars are reporting wrong data when being tested, but that the cars are producing more gasses than they are supposed to.

Perhaps my understanding of testing processes is incorrect, but I was under the impression that testing relies on an external testing device, not the car's internal reporting. The cars passed not because they all told the same lie, but because they all behaved properly when they knew they were being watched.

Then you have a separate problem: All the people who already forked money over to Volvo will suddenly have their possession downgraded/crippled without compensation.

True, though Volvo != Volkswagen.

We're left with three options, each of which is unappealing to some group.

1) Leave affected VWs as-is. Fine VW as necessary. Cars will continue to pollute above the permitted amount.

2) Neuter affected VWs. Fine VW as necessary. Owners will suffer performance loss.

3) Neuter/recall affected VWs. Require VW to compensate owners the price of a replacement. Not sure how VW would fare with such a steep fine.

If they did that, VW would be sued by customers for not delivering the product they paid for. It has been shown that VW can't eat the charge that would result of even small numbers of customers doing that, and it has been shown that the German state is not willing to destroy VW.

So suddenly the fix is "intensive dialog with the authorities" instead of fixing the problem.

> It depends on whether air quality matters or not. That is a fairly black and white thing - either it matters or it doesn't.

If you really mean that you should only accept zero emission vehicles.

Even that is not enough. The vehicle itself may emit zero, but just moving on the roads with wheels on the ground will produce emissions, as tyres grind particles out of the road and turbulence lifts dust up in the air.

Emissions very definitely is not a black-and-white thing.

> Draconian? It depends on whether air quality matters or not. That is a fairly black and white thing - either it matters or it doesn't.

Nothing measured on an analog scale is black and white. Something is not "safe" or "dangerous" just because it is on one side or another of a semi-arbitrary limit.

That sounds a lot like punishing the consumer for being duped by VW.

On the bright side, VW is a very small portion of the market, and I suspect the cheating cars are not much worse than older cars that we allow on the road, which are held to less stringent standards. So while it's completely unacceptable behavior of VW, it's also not the end of the world if people keep driving them until VW issues the software update.

> On the bright side, VW is a very small portion of the market

In the US. In Europe Volkswagen accounts for 25% of new car registrations. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-17/volkswagen...

They weren't violating European NOx standards.

According to the article they were. They are implementing a fix for European cars because European standards are a bit more lax than the US ones but they still were violating European standards as well.

That said why does it make a difference? If anything, any manufacturer should be doing their best to reduce emissions as much as possible for the sake of the whole world. Just look at the situation currently happening in China. Would you like for your country to be having the same issue, be it France, Germany or the US?

We already "punish" people who are duped into buying stolen property (by confiscation of that property), so why should people duped by other illegal activity be treated differently?

In the case of stolen property, that's mostly because the property needs to be returned to the original owner. Zero sum and all that. You don't own the property because the thief who sold it to you did not have the rights to transfer to you; the rights are retained by the original owner.

Because this wasn't a guy fencing stuff off Craigslist, it was a multi-billion dollar global corruption that is operating in a highly regulated market. Consumer protection and all that. If someone is going to get hit in the nuts it's going to be VW and not the consumer. The cars will get fixed or VW will buy them back, but it's a ridiculous waste of resources to have police pulling over people driving VW's.

Let's be clear, every manufacturer was playing this "game". Yes VW played it harder than most and got caught out. The reality is there is no petrol/diesel manufacturer that has been found to be playing it absolutely down the middle.

When it comes to diesel emissions in the US, I think that's unfair. How many other diesel vehicles are sold in the US that do not include urea injection? Even "3/4" and "1-ton" trucks required it starting 5 years ago. Every other manufacturer I can think of used it. Including VW in some models.

I think VW may be the only manufacturer that sold diesels in the US, after 2010, that didn't include it. (Again, I'm not 100% on that.)

In light of that, while this may be a game "everyone" plays, it seems like VW was playing on a whole other level.

"It depends on whether air quality matters or not. That is a fairly black and white thing"

On the contrary, I don't think it could be less of a "black or white thing". It sounds like you're making an argument that these cars are producing a material increase in overall NOx, causing a public health hazard. I haven't seen that argument anywhere else. Do you have data on what the net increase in NOx is? .1%, 1% and 100% would mean very different things.

I’ve read conflicting arguments (which range from pretty bad to incredibly bad)… The Guardian estimates 230-950 thousand tons of NOx per year for seven years, “equivalent to the emissions of all power stations, vehicles, industry, and agriculture in the United Kingdom over a one-year period.”

Not a percentage, which would be more useful, but even the lowball estimates indicate a measurable change in pollution levels.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/sep/22/vw-scandal-c...

I am more willing to have the market punish VW long term, the owners of said cars already have suffered because of VWs actions but beyond any step the government can do public opinion has already shifted against VW and Audi.

If any punishment were to meted out I would assign a value similar to how insurance companies must when a vehicle is less than a year old is involved. There are loss of value rules already in place. Use those.

As for noticeable changes in pollution, that is laughable. You already see more significant changes to pollution just by the school year ending and all those buses being off road. Let alone in winter pollution goes up as more cars run rich to maintain operating temperatures.

We should not use government to punish innocent buyers. Government should be used to protect them

How would you implement this?

How does a police officer know which car is an offending VW or not?

Where does it end? Vehicles that were build prior to tougher emission standards? What about gas engines that are just inefficient, like lawn mowers?

The police just don't have the resources to make these type of nuances decisions.

Note: I own a 2016 VW Golf R, and a 2003 Golf GTI.

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