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Comment by samfriedman | Hacker News Reader

>Germany’s automotive regulator KBA found five unapproved software functions in Daimler’s Euro 6 diesel engines, affecting as many as 1 million vehicles in Germany, Bild am Sonntag reported Sunday.

And then,

>“We don’t see any evidence that Daimler was designing software to deliberately cheat on emission testing,” said Arndt Ellinghorst, an analyst with Evercore ISI in London.

If it's not a defeat device like the VW scandal, then what specifically is the prohibited function causing the recall? The article doesn't really explain what the device or function in question is.

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One way to reconcile these seemingly contradictory statements is the following.

The actual programmer & designer of the software is the supplier of the engine control units (ECUs), in most cases Bosch. The software that they supply actually already contains these cheating routines. These routines are delivered as a part of the software packages, and can be turned on/off with some flags.

It is up to the auto company how to set these flags.

Source: Close relatives working in the car industry.

So is the issue that those routines are supported regardless of the configuration, or that they were delivered in a way that the routines can still be used?

Exactly.

This very ambiguity makes it easy for both sides to just shift the blame to the other side in case this whole collusion gets discovered – which you can now nicely see in the wild. In the best case scenario for both companies, both just get away with it this way.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability

Obviously, no parts supplier would integrate these functions in the first place if nobody asked for it...

Taking this a step further, presumably an honest vendor only need flash a new firmware at the dealer to the ECU with the unused cheating codeblocks removed, while a secretly cheating vendor is suddenly trapped.

Which is reasonable, for a narrow definition of reasonable.

The emissions standards don't apply on a world-wide basis. Maybe they should. But disabling them for markets which don't require them, and gaining fuel efficiency, is at least not fraudulent behavior.

Some of the software in question spots test conditions and makes the engine behave differently during them.

Maybe it is a dumb question, but why couldn't the engine then always run like that?

Because the polluting mode has marginally better performance and fuel efficiency.

I know you didn't insinuate that, but I would like to point out that there's nothing wrong with detecting test conditions, per se.

It might have safety implications (e.g. deactivating airbags so they don't fire because of implausible-on-the-road vehicle states), or even enable certain tests in the first place (perhaps by disabling traction control systems confused by vastly differing speeds per axle).

Using them in order to cheat, however, is clearly not nice at all.

Speaking as a German, and as someone who has worked in the automotive industry, I'd really like for manufacturers to be punished hard on this.

The amount of complacency and disdain for regulations on the part of the manufacturers is disappointing, and the collusion by the German government distasteful.

Wouldn't it make sense for the car manufacturers to request to have these cheating routines to be totally removed from the code itself?

In a sense, yes.

It might even be a good thing to remove dead code -- what isn't there can't possibly cause trouble.

But it complicates product management: instead of a single binary and a bunch of feature flags, you now have a bunch of binary versions; and the number of permutations can get quite large quite quickly.

The cheating code is probably necessary. There are dozens of higher emission modes that an engine may go into to prevent damage in certain situations. E.g. low ambient pressure, high coolant temperature, slow wastegate response...

According the a German news site one of these functions can be used to disable some kind of filter system which causes higher nitrogen oxide emissions.

The last rumoured explanation what they did was that they disable the emission control system when the AdBlue (carbamide) tank fill level drops under 10%. According to the EU laws a diesel car isn't allowed to start if the AdBlue is empty so they didn't use it anymore, so it never gets empty...

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