On Tue, 22 Sep 2015 22:47:55 +0000 (UTC), Winston_Smith
wrote:

On Tue, 22 Sep 2015 14:22:22 -0700, Ashton Crusher wrote:

You would still need to measure actual
emissions to see if the car met the emissions requirements.

I think this makes sense.

The VW cheat code does NOT appear to do anything clever.

In the official EPA pdf letter to VW, they called it a "switch".

Basically, the cheat code determined that the car was not moving but
that it was running as if it was moving, so, under that circumstance
(i.e., under what the EPA called the "dynamometer" settings) VW
engineers simply reduced the fuel to the engine, which lowered the
NOx emissions.

Under all other circumstances, which the EPA called the "road" settings,
VW engineers let the car have as much fuel as it wanted, NOx emissions
be damned.

There was nothing sophisticated at all about it. It's like me stealing
money from my own relatives. It's easy to do because they leave their
wallet out on the kitchen table without checking.

The audacious part isn't how clever it was (it wasn't at all clever).

The audacious part is that we trusted them, just as you trust a house
guest, and they violated that trust, just as it would be as if a house
guest stole money out of your wallet.

Yes. The real mystery here is who implemented this and who all knew
about it. I think they have to run the cars on test tracks for 50 or
60K miles to verify they system holds up but even if not, surely
during development of any engine system they must run them fully
instrumented for quite a while to see what the "real world" results
look like as well as how well the "lab strategy" works in the field.
Surely *someone* at VW must have noticed that when they tested
instrumented vehicles on the road they were not meeting emissions
standards. It's inconceivable they never tested these "in the wild"
but only tested them back at the shop on the dynamometer and the
"switch" kept those engineers from seeing that things weren't as they
should be.