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Comment by neya | Hacker News Reader

Yeah sure, the company behind Dieselgate and single handedly destroyed the diesel market is worried about compliance? Give me a break.

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Yes? These things directly follow one another: VW are obsessed with letter-of-the-law compliance, so things like end-runs around test routines are obvious solutions.

And VW didn't single-handedly destroy the diesel market; economics and physics did. Almost every other manufacturer was also fudging the tests results in some way. But more importantly, building a passenger car diesel that meets NOx targets doesn't work; by the time a passenger car diesel meets modern NOx targets honestly, the car contains a ludicrous precious metal loading in the catalyst and is only a few percentage points more efficient in terms of consumption and CO2 emissions than a petrol car and the math doesn't add up. Diesel is just not a practical solution for passenger cars; it never was in most ways, but it took the EU a long time to restrict NOx pollution to a sustainable level and expose the physical issues at hand.

You can have high-mileage diesel cars or low-emissions diesel cars but not both at the same time.

VW knew this but lied to customers and told them they could have both. Dieselgate was their attempt to convince everybody the lie was true.

This was official EU policy, based on french reports, as the french and italian manufacturers actually came up with common rail diesels first. The EU then changed regulations to tax based on CO2, which diesels are better at. They also made diesel taxes lower, to offset the higher prices for diesel cars (often 2000+ euros more than the petrol versions). This was all done in the framework of reducing foreign oil imports.

What VW did was to save money from ThinkBlue systems. Not every manufacturer failed the tests, especially the ones who used exhaust gas treatment did pass, and were more economical than petrol engines. After that, the EU changed emission standards and made them more strict, so VW switched to using dual exhaust treatment. Which made the cars more expensive.

What finally killed diesels was the removal of the tax reduction on diesel fuel. Since it is now taxed the same as petrol, there is no more any advantage that can offset the higher purchasing costs of the cars.

VW is large enough that different parts of the company can have very different opinions.

That itself though speaks for a broken company culture. If one part of the company is completely disaligned with the values of good engineering, why should anyone still trust the company as a whole? It seems they at the very least severely lack a good vision then, to uphold the company values or what should be the company values.

That’s how megacorps are. VW has almost 700K employees. Enforcing a company culture on that scale is a very diffuse and difficult thing. If you are evaluating whether you should trust a company based on their ability to enforce values throughout all their orgs, you really shouldn’t trust any company unless it’s a tiny one where this sort of thing can be a lot easier to hold the line on.

I mean, the app services department doesn't exactly have a track record of perfect compliance (privacy) either, so there is that.

You don't understand, both comes from the same motivation and way of thinking: You see, compliance in Germany is about pretending to be super-compliant and not getting caught. Everyone will do the dance, make all the moves, and if you seem to make all the moves, you are assumed to be compliant. Supervisory authorities will not really check thoroughly except if you are annoying them or making them look bad. Especially if you are partially state-owned like VW.

In Dieselgate VW got caught, made the supervisory authorities and politicians look bad, which is why the authorities also weren't inclined to sweep it under the rug completely. They just shielded VW from the financial consequences in Germany (German VW customers got shafted).

Blocking GrapheneOS is the useless "pretending" part of compliance. They don't really want to do security, because that would cost money, so they pick some actions that seem drastic, harsh and don't cost them anything to implement. Later, when there is a security incident, they will point to their huge heap of pretend compliance, whine a bit about state sponsored actors, high criminal intent and other obvious deflecting bullshit. But they will get away with it, because they did the compliance dance, so they are obviously compliant and did nothing wrong. Nobody in authority will look twice als long as they are neither annoyed or made to look bad.

tl;dr: compliance in Germany is performative

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