EPA caught VW cheating - how does the car know it's being tested?

[Winston_Smith]

Notice that they had from 5 to 45 times the LIMIT (which is a lot!).

The lower/higher numbers were due to city/highway mode, I think. (I assume the city numbers are the higher ones?)

The variation in the low and high figures themselves was due to the different vehicles tested.

I think, as someone mentioned, and as the news noted, the code is actually covered by the DCMA (it would be nice to find a cite).

It wasn't so much that VW /couldn't/ explain, but that they wouldn't explain it. They only admitted guilt when both CARB and EPA said they would not certify 2016 diesels because they couldn't be certain of the manufacturer's own certification process.

Only then, when VW knew their stock price would take the hit, did VW finally confess. And even then, they didn't confess to the fact that it's not half a million vehicles, but more than twenty times that number!

[Winston_Smith]

I must agree, unfortunately.

At this point, we don't know WHO was involved.

Please post when anyone finds out WHO the guilty PEOPLE were.

[Winston_Smith]

You have to keep in mind that there are DIFFERENT laws when safety is involved (NHTSA) versus the environment (EPA).

The NY Times, I think it was, discussed the difference, which essentially said that the EPA actually has more power to fine them than does the NHTSA.

We should look up the details, but, my point is that the laws and maximum penalties are totally DIFFERENT for safety violations versus emissions violations.

Inexplicably, the emissions violation laws appear (at first inspection) to be more stringent.

Go figure.

[Winston_Smith]

Again, let's remember the laws and maximum fines are very DIFFERENT for emissions laws versus for safety laws.

Different laws. Different agencies. Different penalties.

You could be arguing that we should make the laws more consistent between SAFETY violations and EMISSIONS violations; but the fact is they are very different - so - you can't really compare them that way and be fair.

[Dean Hoffman]

My dad had a 1976 Chevy pickup. It was one of those with the gas tank outside of the rails. GM was supposed to allow an extra $1000 as trade in value as part of a settlement with the government. That deal smelled bad from the beginning.

[Ashton Crusher]

We are talking about two different codes. The code I'm talking about is the "real code" that doesn't have any special switches in it. The code you are talking about is code someone slipped into the "real code" to turn off the emissions controls.

was to first determine if

That is my point exactly. They looked at what came out the tailpipe. Looking at "the code" isn't going to tell them anything, it's not like it's just a 1980 15 line BASIC language do loop to count how many times the wheels go around in a minute where you could look and see they were inserting an extra 10% every 120 seconds with two extra lines of code. It's undoubtedly got thousands and thousands of lines of code, much of it interrelated, much of it doing periodic "turn this off and see if sensor X reacts" to verify sensor X is still working. If sensor X is not working turn the CEL on and depending on the fault code it might make it flash. No one is going to be able to look thru that and find some hidden loop aimed at fooling the system unless the author of the illicit code wanted to be caught and put in "ILLEGAL CODE - NEXT 12 lines!!!" And even if this presumed code looker found something suspicious, so what? If the car passes both the emissions test and ALL on road verifications what do you think EPA should do? Fine them for writing code that's looks funny to EPA but still meets emissions standards?

[Vic Smith]

The most important thing here is that puts an end to those incessant and tasteless TDI ads on TV, with those offensive dirty old women. Good.

[Ed Pawlowski]

GM's answer to any problem was always to buy a new one. I no longer drive GM cars and the associated problems.

[Tony Hwang]

There may be others cheating too, just not caught yet. Big corp. mentality like VW cheating. They should be fined $$$ as an example and top guy should do some jail time as well. VW chief said, "we screwed up" So they intentionally cheated.

[Vic Smith]

Yeah, those disgusting ads on TV should have been a clue that VW was an immoral company. A thorough investigation is necessary. When the congressional Benghazi committee wraps it up in the next

10-12 years, they should take this up. They'll get to the bottom of it.

[Ed Pawlowski]

I cannot imagine a big corporation intentionally doing something like that and figure they would not get caught. Too many people work on projects like that and superiors have to sign off. The cost t fix it is in the billions and for what?

[Winston_Smith]

Apparently VW yanked *all* those youtube ads, completely. Amazing how quickly that marketing team can move!

[Winston_Smith]

Actually, the USA chief said "we screwed up". The Germany chief is just "endlessly sorry".

[Winston_Smith]

I realize some things are "political", but is *this* issue really a "congressional" issue?

Isn't it simply that CARB & the EPA have procedures which are backed up by force of law (admittedly, made by Congress), which VW broke?

[Winston_Smith]

I wonder, out loud, how many people inside of VW knew about this?

Do you think it was a small cadre? Or basically everyone?

[Ed Pawlowski]

In a corporation that size, even a small cadre could have been 20 to 50 engineers. Someone had to come up with the idea, design, build, test, and approve everything. The guys on the line installing would probably have no idea, just another part. Higher level in engineering would know.

[Vic Smith]

That was tongue and cheek. But a congressional committee can investigate a ham sandwich if they please.

[trader_4]

AFAIK, there is only one set of code under discussion here, that's the code that is in the actual VW cars that were cheating.

If competent investigators choose to actually do the investigation, to find out what was happening, to look at the code, they could show that the code was written to detect when the car was being tested and to then do a different emissions control algorithm. It's right there, in the code. It would be much easier to decipher if it was documented and labeled "cheat code", but it can still be done.

It's undoubtedly got thousands and thousands of lines

Of course it can be found and determined. It's not trivial, but it certainly can be done without the code being documented.

If the car actually met the EPA standards, then I agree that having the cheat code there might not violate the law. But the fact is that the cars don't meet the limits by 10 to 40x. If you're point is that it's not worth it for the EPA to be routinely demanding source code, analyzing it all, deciphering it, etc, for all cars, I agree with that.

[trader_4]

That will probably come out at some point in the future. If I had to guess, I'd say that like many things like this, they probably didn't start out intending to cheat. They probably thought that their TDI diesels could meet EPA without using the urea system that MB and other manufacturers use. That would give VW a cost advantage, a marketing advantage, etc. It may turn out that the cheating started when they couldn't deliver on the promise and had a lot already sunk into investment, bragging, marketing, etc. That's just a guess, we'll have to wait and see.

And in this case I think the damage to VW will be way beyond what it would have been to most other auto companies. A lot of the VW buyers are the hippie, tree hugger type and half of them are probably driving their cars to the junk yard right now.

[Dean Hoffman]

They shouldn't be parking in the special parking spaces for low emission vehicles. The Missouri welcome center on southbound I-29 near Rock Port has the parking spaces next to the ones for handicapped folk. It looks like a waste of six parking spaces and sign material to me.