DIYbanter - View Single Post - EPA caught VW cheating

Ashton Crusher[_2_]

On 22 Sep 2015 10:07:28 -0400, (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

Mayayana wrote:
I'm more curious about how the EPA didn't
figure it out earlier. Reports say the EPA saw a
discrepancy between testing and on-road
results. But they've been haggling with VW
all this time and somehow never thought to look
at the software. Is the software accessible to
EPA? Do they have developers who could
understand it?

No. The software is a black box both to vehicle owners and the EPA. Not
only that, but under the DMCA it would be illegal for vehicle owners OR
the EPA to attempt reverse-engineering it from the object load.

How the test is faked is just a technical issue.
How the EPA didn't figure it out seems to be the
important issue. They only found out because they
threatened to hold up sales and at that point the
VW execs admitted what they were doing.
(Have they disclosed everything? Surely if there's
more dirty dealing they're not going to tell if they
don't have to.)

Gaming the system is a longstanding tradition among car manufacturers and
I am _sure_ that if the source code were made public that all manner of
interesting games would be found.

... Then of course there's the question that begs
to be asked: How could all of those executives,
in a company whose clientelle tend to be liberal
environmentalists, have possibly decided it was
a good idea to be so dishonest and shortsighted?

THAT is the best question of all, yes. But that is a question that
needs to be asked by stockholders, and I have a suspicion that the next
annual meeting at Volkswagen will be interesting.

There should be arrests. Either way, it's likely
to be a serious, perhaps fatal, blow to the company.
If it were Chevy I'm sure rednecks would come out
of the woodwork to support "the company that denies
global warming". But VW customers are almost a
cult following, and mostly liberal.

Arrests will do nothing. What has to happen is that vehicle control code
needs to be documented and available to the vehicle owner and to the
government inspectors.

I don't see the logic of this. The purpose of the code is to produce
a specific level of emissions. As the EPA found, and I doubt it was
hard, the on the road emissions didn't match what was produced during
dynamometer testing. How would anyone realistically look at the code
and be able to figure out that it "worked" as far as controlling
emissions? You can't, you can only tell if it "works" by measuring
what comes out the tailpipe. Sure, a good code reader, if they had the
time to look thru god knows how many lines of code, *might* spot a
weird program execution loop but that it highly doubtful and certainly
not a sure thing. And even if they did, it would not prove that the
emissions out the tailpipe FAILED, it would only show that someone put
some weird stuff in the code. You would still need to measure actual
emissions to see if the car met the emissions requirements.