Patrick George over at Jalopnik takes a closer look at today’s Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal story and puts it into perspective. The automaker is facing tremendous EPA fines, almost certain recalls of half a million vehicles, and most likely criminal lawsuits from the US Justice Department. Volkswagen’s not done or anything, but they are going to be hurting for years from this. So how did it work? George explains it’s all about the blue pee in your diesel gas tank:
First, we need to start by talking about urea.
In order to meet tougher emissions regulations that went into effect in 2008, most automakers started supplying their diesel cars with tanks of a urea-based solution (often referred to as “AdBlue”) that cuts down on nitrous-oxide emissions.
Many larger diesel engines on big sedans and SUV, including some from Audi as well as competitors at BMW and Mercedes, use such a system. But VW and Audi said their 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine was able to meet the requirements without a urea injection system — although many people have wondered exactly how. (Update: Just to clarify, newer TDI models like the MK7 Golf, made from 2015 on, do include urea injection.)
On Friday, the EPA announced they found the TDI cars contained “a sophisticated software algorithm” which detected when the car was being tested for emissions. When that happens, the software drastically reduces the emissions as compared to normal driving, indicating to testers that the car had passed.
Basically, it’s like taking a test when you already know what the answers are. It appears the cheat device was present on all TDI cars, not just ones sent for emissions testing.
And the fines alone are going to pretty much cripple the company.
We’re talking about a maximum possible fine of $37,500 per vehicle, which could add up to as much as $18 billion for Volkswagen and Audi. That’s astronomical even for what is now the world’s biggest automaker, but then again, this appears to be a staggering violation of the law.
In addition, the EPA is working with the U.S. Department of Justice on the case, so criminal charges could arise from the situation too. And with a self-professed renewed focus on white-collar crime, VW could be the target the Justice Department is looking for right now.
The best part? Volkswagen was busted because an NGO wanted to prove that Volkswagen’s amazing urea-free “cleaner diesel cars” sold in America would work in Europe.
The Volkswagens were spewing harmful exhaust when testers drove them on the road. In the lab, they were fine.
Discrepancies in the European tests on the diesel models of the VW Passat, the VW Jetta and the BMW X5 last year gave Peter Mock an idea.
Mock, European managing director of a little-known clean-air group, suggested replicating the tests in the U.S. The U.S. has higher emissions standards than the rest of the world and a history of enforcing them, so Mock and his American counterpart, John German, were sure the U.S. versions of the vehicles would pass the emissions tests, German said. That way, they reasoned, they could show Europeans it was possible for diesel cars to run clean.
“We had no cause for suspicion,” German, U.S. co-lead of the International Council on Clean Transportation, said in an interview. “We thought the vehicles would be clean.”
Precision engineered….to cheat on emissions tests. Nice work, Volkswagen.
Frankensteinbeck
Sigh. It had to be the company that actually treats their employees kinda sorta decent.
Grumpy Code Monkey
See also these stories at Ars Technica.
Volkswagen is in deep shit. 20% drop in share price, and an almost-certain class-action lawsuit from hundreds of thousands of customers who’ve seen their resale values plummet to near 0.
Ruckus
My first thought.
Is any other mfg doing this, gas or diesel?
Also I predict that the fine will not be the maximum. It will hurt but the maximum fine is more than the retail cost of the cars. A lot more than the average. That said, they deserve the maximum and I bet there will be a few civil suits as well, IANAL but I’d guess for fraud.
Keith
Man, what a pisser.
ShadeTail
Let’s get another Democrat into the White House in 2016, guys, or else this kind of enforcement will come to a very sudden stop on January 21, 2017.
Flatlander
VW wins the automotive evil genius award. I would find this hilarious if it weren’t my car. And my stock.
Now my wife’s going to make me buy a Tesla. Dammit.
Ruckus
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
Well the cars can be fixed and still will get pretty good mileage so the resale value should go back to reasonable although not as high as it was. Looking for a replacement car, a Jetta TDI wagon would be nice, maybe now’s the time to buy.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@ShadeTail:
Need a Democratic Congress to make sure the DOJ gets the funding it needs to pursue cases like this.
Dem Presnit isn’t enough; we at least need to win back the Senate as well.
Elizabelle
Sorry to hear VW has been engaging in these practices. Don’t mind when egregious actions result in being made an example of what NOT to do.
Sorrier still that this kind of teeth was not applied to the banksters. Their owning too much of the American political system paid off for them.
Ruckus
@Frankensteinbeck:
Opens the question, is there any large company that isn’t in some way, evil?
Zandar
@Ruckus:
That’s the “$500 billion a year in U.S. sales revenues” question, isn’t it?
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Ruckus:
I imagine we’re going to find out real soon. I fully expect other manufacturers of doing something similar.
debbie
@Ruckus:
The real question is whether capitalism can even be practiced benevolently.
Roger Moore
The most frustrating line for me is the “hey, they didn’t kill anyone like Toyota and GM did with their recent safety recalls”. Apart from the fact that this was deliberate and premeditated rather than an engineering mistake, it isn’t true, either. The best estimate is that vehicle exhaust causes more than 53,000 premature deaths every year in the US. Since these cars produced about 40x the legal limit, that means that the 500K cars in question produced as much pollution as 20M cars that obey the law, which is about 8% of the total exhaust. Even assuming that NOx is only one part of the total pollution problem, that’s still contributing to thousands of deaths per year. VW’s blatant and deliberate rules violations are contributing to far, far more deaths than the safety flaws that have made so much news recently.
Roger Moore
@Flatlander:
Poor baby.
maya
Kinda like that yellow cake from Niger certification that Cheney invented which “proved” that Saddam had a nuke program. Only more inventive.
Cacti
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
A shareholder suit against management is a near certainty also.
Elizabelle
OT, not clicking, and don’t want to see a thread dedicated to this later, but WaPost headline:
Don’t throw us in that briar patch! Their brains just don’t work the same, do they? It should terrify all of us, and for reasons that may not have occurred to Mr. Thiessen.
Cervantes
This is incredibly evil, and incredibly stupid, because they were bound to get caught eventually. However, what is most astonishing is that there must have been hundreds, if not thousands, of VW employees who knew about it, and nobody ratted on them. That really says something about the psychopathy of corporate culture.
Ruckus
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
Well it was a specific issue with one engine so I’m not so sure but as Zandar pointed out there is a lot of money in this section of the economy so the idea that more than one company might be doing this sure bares looking into.
Betty Cracker
We have a diesel pickup that requires adding blue shit to a special tank every something-something miles. I had no idea it was basically pee and water!
Amir Khalid
From the story at the link:
Volkswagen wasn’t skirting the rules. It was flouting them.
debbie
@Elizabelle:
I don’t know. Auto companies had a chance to make right after the bailouts, and instead of this, they’ve kept up their conniving, cheating ways.
Not so different from banks. Not even that different from Enron (who wrote the book on cheating). Maybe it’s time to end second chances for an inherently evil system.
Soylent Green
My Audi A3 will soon be recalled to “fix” the computer. The result will be reduced power, torque, and fuel economy. Resale value will take a hit. I bought the car because it won the “Green Car of the Year” award a few years ago. Now I know why.
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
Other companies have been caught doing the same general category of cheating, but never anything quite so sophisticated. As I understand it, some of the other companies would change their engine computers to produce less pollution under the kind of light load that’s typical of emissions testing but would shut the controls off under heavy load. That’s bad, but it still left the car in emissions control mode for a lot of ordinary driving. In contrast, VW tried to recognize specific patterns associated with testing and left the emissions control off the rest of the time, so the cars were in heavy pollution mode essentially all the time.
redshirt
Is it legal to fine a company into bankruptcy?
Oatler.
@Ruckus: No large companies are evil, or else the jails would be bursting.
[straight line setup]
raven
@Betty Cracker: Pee IS water.
trollhattan
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
Commercial truck makers got caught doing something similar, just not this sophisticated. I suppose the VWs can be reflashed to comply with emissions regs, but at some unknown mileage hit. This is yuuuge.
OzarkHillbilly
@Ruckus:
That should have no bearing on the fine (take note, I said “should”). The fine should be based on damage to the environment with a punitive measure added in.
@Flatlander: At least you can afford a Tesla…. Can’t you?
trollhattan
@Amir Khalid:
It’s a little like discovering your Prius battery is actually a tiny coal powerplant.
Ruckus
@debbie:
Benevolent Capitalism? Is that an oxymoron?
It can be but the way our system is run now I’d say, NO. And I’ve been a capitalist, owned two small companies. And I’ve known quite a few other smallish companies. Most tried to be but even at that small level, not all managed or even tried. And yes I have specific examples. Some days made me wonder why I even tried.
Roger Moore
@redshirt:
Yes. It’s often politically unpalatable, so there will undoubtedly be strong pressure to go easy on them, but it’s at least theoretically allowed.
Amir Khalid
By the way, as someone who has studied German, I find the common American pronunciation of “Volkswagen” (also the common pronunciation here) a leetle bit annoying. The Germans say it “folks VAH gen”.
Fester Addams
What do you know, cheating to evade a technical regulation. I guess Volkswagen really is ready to get back into Formula 1 racing.
NotMax
Synthetic urea (process for which was discovered nearly 200 years ago) is a component of many, many useful products, lots of fertilizers included among them.
Helmut Monotreme
@Cervantes: Given that this was a programming issue in an engine control unit, I think it’s possible that the number of people that knew about it was less than 100, maybe even a lot less.
MomSense
I was really close to buying a TDI sportwagen just a couple days before this story broke but I didn’t have time to get to the dealer.
Whew, that was a close one.
Elie
@Cervantes:
Yes, it does. Mostly it just seems unbelievably stupid and if they actually modeled a scenario, they had to know it would be hugely expensive and a PR disaster if caught. I just don’t see the cost benefit for them and leads me to question their leadership and their entire engineering process. It is very weird —
ThresherK (GPad)
@debbie: Sounds like a Mayhew refereeing thread. In each case it often boils down to “If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.”
But soccer teams don’t suggest they call their own fouls at the World Cup.
WereBear
@debbie: If there were regulations pushing them in that direction, perhaps so.
We’re seeing what happens with unregulated capitalism, which will end up with people sold into debt slavery and fed to furnaces for their thermal value.
Amir Khalid
@debbie:
VW wasn’t a recipient of the 2009 bailout funds, was it? As I recall, that money went to GM and Chrysler.
Anoniminous
@Amir Khalid:
The word “fraud” leaps to mind. However IANAL.
WereBear
@Elie: Naw, they felt clever and never thought they’d get caught.
They’d already phased in compliance in their newer models. This was some bright bulbs with MBAs doing their usual “business by spreadsheet.”
(Spreadsheets are marvelous tools. They were never meant to crunch numbers like “if we murder everyone who is drawing a pension.”)
boatboy_srq
@Flatlander:@Soylent Green: I was seriously thinking about trading my A4 2.0 TFSi for a new A3 TDi. Humph. Now I have NO reason whatsoever to trade: she still runs fine and she easily has another 100K miles in her.
Ruckus
@Oatler.:
Glad you added that last line. Should have known without it but still, this kind of stuff has to be done by someone. Someone willing to design it, build it, test it and sell it.
Brings me to a second thought. If the companies actually are as evil as the drug/poor are made out to be we have plenty of jail cells for them to occupy. And it might revive the lagging lawyer industry.
Richard Mayhew
@Roger Moore: given that is it not an American company, I think the political will could be there.
Sloegin
Even a $0 fine won’t necessarily stop corporate destruction; the lawsuits alone by stockholders and car owners will be enough.
SteveinSC
@trollhattan: It’s a little like discovering your Prius battery is actually a tiny CLEAN coal powerplant.
Fixed
Also too: German advice to Greece on belt-tightening, Do as we do, cheat.
Amir Khalid
@Sloegin:
Typo?
Betty Cracker
@raven: When we first bought our truck (the only diesel either of us has ever owned), I remember being mystified by the owner’s manual section on the blue stuff. Basically, a special light comes on that tells you to refill it within X number of miles. IIRC, it’s a generous mileage range that could get you from the boonies to an auto supply store easily.
If you ignore the light past the original range (which we have never done), the manual says after X2 number of miles, the speed is limited to X, then limited even further, etc., until basically you have to idle to Advance Auto Parts and buy the damned stuff.
Since I know absolutely nothing about cars, I figured it was a mechanical thing. But I guess that setup is to coerce people into adding the exhaust pee in a timely fashion?
trollhattan
At this time, many in VW upper management are greatly relieved Germany has no tradition of seppuku.
JPL
My son has a S5 and his fiancee has an A4 but neither is diesel. I assume thought that the brand is hurt by this.
Roger Moore
@Helmut Monotreme:
It can’t have been just the programmers, though. The decision to do something other than the standard urea injection method was not made by a programmer. That was a high-level engineering decision, and it had to be made by somebody who had some idea of what the outcome would be, which implies tests on the possibility of various forms of emissions controls. There also must have been some people involved in testing to make sure that the evasion routine worked, and they had to have known what was going on. No matter how you slice it, there was a substantial conspiracy involved.
Patricia Kayden
@ShadeTail: Just one reason to get another Dem in the White House. There are so many.
Ruckus
@Cervantes:
They weren’t caught because the EPA found them, there is more to the story.
Link
The cars passed the tests. Until they were taken into the field and tested while driving, no one knew. There was less risk than it seemed to VW.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Flatlander: They are beyond amazing. Hope you’re actually going to get one. You can look at it two ways: it’s a very expensive economy car, or it’s one of the cheapest high performance/race cars out there.
Yes, I have driven one. My parents own it. The day Musk comes out with the truck I’m getting an equity loan and buying one. They’re that great.
ETA: definitely agree with the other posters who are asking “how did they think they would not get caught?” and “how did they think they’d survive if they did get caught?”
What a fuckup. And not limited to a few dozen folks either. A whole engineering staff had to sign off on that design.
Roger Moore
@Elie:
I think there are two partial answers to that:
1) They thought they could get away with it. People always think they can get away with it. Sometimes they’re even right and we never find out; we don’t know how many other cheaters are still out there waiting to be caught.
2) There have been previous examples of emissions cheating that resulted in modest fines and relatively little bad PR. That probably helped to convince VW that the penalty for getting caught would be minor.
trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
As an idle hunch, the discovery will trigger many similar investigations and VW will have company in their new doghouse.
Brandon
I am surprised that the response here is more resignation and concern about resale value, rather than the corporate executive mindset that led to the perpetuation of a massive fraud on consumers, the government, the environment and commons, and in particular Americans that have or are at risk of respiratory disease.
If ever there was a case for piercing the corporate veil and pursuing criminal prosecution, the facts as we know them right now suggest that this is the case to do so. You have pre-meditation, intent, and conspiracy. I know everyone likes their VWs and Audis, but if the allegations are true people deserve jail time.
Also, read Mark Kleiman on this. I agree with his stance completely.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
Didn’t they look into their crystal balls and know we might have another Democratic administration and actually try to enforce our laws against……
Roger Moore
@Betty Cracker:
It may be to keep the emissions within legal limits. VW was actually able to keep the emissions within the limits just with software, albeit at some kind of cost in lost performance. Your truck may be doing the same general thing when the supply runs low.
trollhattan
@Brandon:
If your surprise is the lack of surprise here, you just have yet to discover the depths of our cynicism. It’s what’s for dinner.
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
I suspect that mobile testing equipment is going to be a new part of the EPA testing routine.
boatboy_srq
From the cars.com piece:
So, we go from “let’s fool the inspectors” to “Ha ha! You thought you could drive this car all the way into the garage for maintenance at 10,005 miles…”
Interesting also that BBC is hinting that the problem is bigger than just VW. Given that the 2.0 TDi is a “common rail” platform, and that a number of European makers are using it including Fiat and Alfa, this could be even more yooge than it now appears.
Frankensteinbeck
@Brandon:
‘The people deserve jail time’ is irrelevant unless laws were broken that have jail time as an enforcement option. You can’t make those up whenever you want them, which is why nobody went to jail for destroying the economy with mortgage defaults. It wasn’t illegal, just disgustingly immoral.
What we need, as has been mentioned upthread, is much tighter regulations. I’d start with stock regulations, removing the incentives for short-term stock growth over long term stability.
Which leads us inevitably to… the Republican Party has got to be stopped. Forty years of this bullshit, if that was what it took to keep the blacks in their place.
BGinCHI
I had a 2002 Jetta TDI and Mrs. BG had a Beetle TDI. Sold mine in 2008 and the Mrs just sold hers before we moved. We bought them for mileage and because we like VWs.
But this sucks, since we thought we were driving pretty clean diesels, especially when we were running biodiesel.
I have a GTI now and it’s the best car I’ve ever owned. Wonder what the hell is going to happen to the company?
JoeShabadoo
@Roger Moore: It is almost guaranteed to be widely known within the company in my opinion.
The boss in charge of diesel doesn’t just say “I wonder how we can do this without urea? Who gives a shit, we are magic!” Something like this effects sales, marketing, R&D and more. It was either an open secret in that area of the company (most likely in my opinion) or the bosses knew what was happening and instructed those underneath to not talk with them about it.
Ruckus
@Brandon:
I think you are reading the thread wrong. Most seem to be at least miffed about VW doing this. But yes we are consumers and wages/financial meltdown have left a lot of us in a poor position to argue that propriety should win out over cost. And how many peoples first response to an issue this big is how does this affect me. Most. It’s the natural order of survival. The trick is how many take the next step and wonder about the affect on all of us. I’d bet only about half the human population in most advanced societies ever take that second step.
LanceThruster
Ach du Lieber!
Roger Moore
@Brandon:
I don’t think that means what you think it means. “Piercing the corporate veil” isn’t going after the executives for the company’s misdeeds; it’s about going after the stockholders (usually in closely held corporations) because they are treating the corporation as an extension of the shareholder(s) rather than an independent entity.
Amir Khalid
Amazingly, no one here has gone Godwin and pointed out that the Volkswagen company got its start thanks to the Third Reich.
Thoughtful Today
hahahaha
My inner cynic is laughing … painfully …..
evil ^%@#$%
Thoughtful Today
pffffft….
“a self-professed renewed focus on white-collar crime”
my inner cynic’s still laughing ….
RSA
@JoeShabadoo:
I’m not seeing a third option, and yet it’s still hard for me to believe. Germans are huge on the environment in so many ways. And German workers have strong unions, so that a threat like, “Don’t tell anyone or you’ll lose your job,” doesn’t have nearly the power that it would in the U.S. Okay, there’s also a lot of company loyalty, but I’m actually pretty shocked that this could happen.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@BGinCHI: I’ve got an 04 Jetta TDI wagon. It’s a great car.
This scandal is for 2009-2015 models. Mine (and yours) don’t have the urea injection system (and the diesel emissions rules were less strict back then because the fuel had too much sulfur in it to be cleaner).
It’s a huge scandal and VW needs to be taken to the woodshed for it. But I, like others, wonder if they’re alone in this cheating.
Cheers,
Scott.
Frankensteinbeck
@JoeShabadoo:
Why not? Sales and marketing don’t need to know. You want them to act like the low urea use rates are legitimate, so you don’t tell them how you do it. They wouldn’t understand the technical details of a legitimate solution. Top management doesn’t have to know, although as a very small group with the most to personally gain, I would suspect they did. You just need a few programmers, the boss in charge of diesel, and enough testers to cover your tracks. That’s a dangerous number of people to know such a secret, but small enough it might be managed.
EDIT – And since the change specifically targets testing conditions, you wouldn’t even need many testers.
Ruckus
@JoeShabadoo:
As you say this has to be known about at the higher end of the system. It doesn’t though have to be known to wide swathes of the employees of the company. I’d bet wider than the 100 someone above posted but it doesn’t have to be all that much bigger. Sales probably wouldn’t know, other than maybe at the very top, easier to keep a straight face if you don’t know you are lying. Production wouldn’t need to know and not all that many in engineering.
Remember that the first stealth planes were built by a lot of people without anyone outside knowing, until those planes saw the light of day and in a public area.
ETA Damn you Frankensteinbeck. Lost the race again.
Poopyman
I’m really surprised and pretty impressed that a large group could keep such a secret for years. Clearly, the German psyche is not like Americans’ psyche.
Now, is my 2003 Jetta with the old A4 (pre-pee*) diesel at 310,000 miles worth more or less than it was last week. Still gets 47 mpg.
* – This was before they pretended to care about emissions.
@BGinCHI:
Only as far as sulphur, with the biodiesel. Otherwise, not so much.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Ruckus:
It doesn’t have to be. As long as the capitalist ecosystem is built up of small, diverse, regional businesses that build and keep capital “in the neighborhood”, then it’s almost always a good thing.
The problem occurs when the ecosystem is taken over by a few large multinational corporations with revenues that rival most small governments. That’s when you start running into problems.
Poopyman
@RSA:
It was written into the software. No other subsystem need be involved, and dollars to strudel the software folks are NOT unionized, although in Germany that could be very different from here.
Bobby Thomson
@SteveinSC: in many areas, it kind of is.
Cermet
They at VW all just followed the cheney administration’s method of execution of a lie. Sick but effective …
catclub
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
yeah, I guess so. I was about to post a disagreement, based on the specifics of the diesel market in the US.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Amir Khalid:
Heh. James May’s “Cars of the People” series went into great detail about the “Kraft durch Freude wagen” (what became the VW Beetle) and how it started life as an honest-to-God “instrument of evil”, used by Hitler to fund his war machine.
But as instruments of evil go, it was a damned good piece of engineering.
Jparente
@Ruckus: I have a TDI Sportwagon. I’m very sorry to hear this and I will gladly do whatever retrofit necessary. I love the car.
Laertes
Are their engineers unionized? I wouldn’t think this would get all the way down to line workers. They won’t be reading source code. As for marketing & sales being in the know, I’m skeptical. Nobody outside engineering needs or expects to know the details of what the engineers get up to. That they’ve found a way to reach low emissions targets without some additive that the competitors all need just means that our engineers out-clevered the other guys this year.
I wouldn’t be surprised if nobody knew of the fraud except for several dozen engineers and a few steps of their chain of report.
Unless their corporate culture is diseased beyond repair, Legal would have been kept entirely in the dark. I’ve never met a corporate laywer who wouldn’t kick down the CEO’s door over something like this. Lawyers do not let engineers overrule them on stuff like this, even at engineer-driven companies.
Frankensteinbeck
…Hell, if you get lucky with how the emission tests within the company are carried out, even management doesn’t have to know. All you need are a few programmers who were told ‘Our project is to reduce emissions by X%. I don’t understand technical stuff and don’t care if it’s impossible. Everybody at the board meeting agrees that’s the solution.’ Desperate, pissed off programmers cheat up a method to get out from under the management pressure.
I don’t think this is the scenario, but I could see it as possible.
guachi
Guess who just bought a 2015 Golf Sportwagen TDI two weeks ago?
This guy! It’s a great car and was relatively cheap. I got $4000 off MSRP. The mid-level SE is a bit light on the features and options, but if you get a gas version it’s not very expensive. Great interior. And it’s a wagon. Wagons are cool. Everyone should buy a wagon.
JoeShabadoo
@Frankensteinbeck: Sales and marketing don’t need to know but it affects it greatly. The point is that their “solution” is so far reaching the boss would have to have looked into it. Judging by how an outside NGO were the ones to try and push these cars in Europe instead of VW themselves it was known by a lot of people.
Ruckus
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
It is not limited to large companies. I know this by personal examples. From people treated like shit by bosses, by companies moving to areas with weaker environmental laws, hiding income to avoid taxes…… and on and on. And these are all examples that I know of by small companies (less than 10 employees) and I’m one person.
It’s easier with big companies because they have bigger resources but it is not in any way limited to them.
Amir Khalid
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
“Strength through Joy”? I’ve always thought that a strange name for a car.
catclub
@Frankensteinbeck:
In the mortgage collapse there was lots that was illegal. Fraud in applications, fraud in property appraisals, fraud by the bond rating agencies is probably trickier.
Not to mention the fraud in the document signing scandal. There were probably millions of those, that all got consolidated in the AG agreement. VW is not a bank so will be hammered as an example of the new crackdown on bankers. haha.
Amir Khalid
@guachi:
You may have to give it back to VW for a while.
catclub
@guachi:
A kindred spirit. Now try to find a wagon from Toyota, Ford or GM.
Tripod
@Brandon:
Because most posters here are VW branded in some way or another. Hey, they’re sorta, vaguely pro-union, and the hippies drove them back in the day,…it’s all good
They have a sleazy management regime, make shit products, and have for a long while.
Frankensteinbeck
@catclub:
The fraud in document signing scandal is an excellent example. That wasn’t even illegal. It didn’t follow the regulations, and thus who owned the mortgages was up in the air. That’s it, the only punishment was that judges might have decided the banks didn’t own the mortgages, which isn’t how it played out. I remember this being discussed back when it came out. Apparently ‘fraud’ is much, much tighter a definition than anybody would believe. I invite the lawyers – you, if you are one – to correct me in detail, if I’m remembering wrong.
EDIT – @JoeShabadoo:
Why? Nobody but engineering knows how these things work. That the boss doesn’t know, doesn’t care, is proud of his ignorance, and routinely demands things a high school kid could see is impossible has become a widespread joke.
guachi
The upside for the redesigned 2015 2.0 TDI engine (the 2.0 is the engine subject to the investigation) is that it uses urea. Any fix will likely just result in more urea being injected and the engine using as much as he MB and BMW engines use, about 3%, compared with the 1% the VW engine was using. I guess we now know why it was so low.
The cars with the older engines are probably screwed.
Ruckus
@Jparente:
VW will have to reflash your computer and you’ll be good to go. You may (probably) experience a difference in performance and mileage but it will still be good and you may not notice all that much. Other than time this shouldn’t hurt you that badly in my opinion, as long as you don’t get pissed and try to sell the car immediately. You like it, continue to drive it. If you planned to drive it into the ground, keep that plan.
JoeShabadoo
@Frankensteinbeck: I don’t see that possible at all.
What about everyone researching engine improvements and the non software engineers who know what the engine is capable of? This also went on for years.
catclub
@Roger Moore:
Yes. The fixed route/ procedure for the EPA tests was a sitting duck. Probably still is.
Instead, you go on a route, and record the acceleration/deceleration/speed and compare after you get back.
Frankensteinbeck
@JoeShabadoo:
‘Some other department found a way to reduce emissions.’ It’s not their job to know the details. Maybe they think it’s weird, but they don’t know how it happened, and they have no reason to care. Even engineers don’t know how different kinds of engineers achieve results.
catclub
@Ruckus:
You know that if they could maintain the basic performance without the cheat, they would do that, right?
It will be a BIG change in performance and MPG.
schrodinger's cat
@Grumpy Code Monkey:When you have economies of size and scale you can set the prices not be a price taker. Your profits increase dramatically if you can do that. So there is always going to be drive towards consolidation.
Laertes
@Laertes:
I rush to clarify that absolutely everyone in the set of chains of report starting with every engineer with actual knowledge of the fraud is responsible. Every last such manager/executive either knew or should have known of the fraud.
I’m dying to know how this secret was hidden for so long. It’s got to be a fascinating story. I wonder how much of it we’ll ever learn.
catclub
@Frankensteinbeck: i think engineers are curious about how things work.
I also think that corporations like to patent every little improvement they come up with. Some one probably should have wondered why there was no patent application for a huge breakthrough.
Luthe
Anybody else notice the key researchers on this were from West Virginia University? Finally, something decent besides Cole emerges from that state!
Belafon
@debbie: VW wasn’t part of the US bailout.
As for diesel, most diesel engines had the adblue system. My dad’s truck does. It was the VW cars without them that got into trouble.
Amir Khalid
Speaking of the Third Reich, I suppose this reaction was inevitable.
catclub
@Frankensteinbeck:
So submitting a false, signed, document to the court is not perjury? I am confused.
Frankensteinbeck
@catclub:
I don’t think a lot of engineers go through the whole chain of how the multi-department process of designing a big product works. Again, the way in big companies they often don’t and their own work becomes difficult or impossible is a joke among engineers.
RSA
@Laertes:
Yeah, I could see that. That seems plausible.
Ruckus
@JoeShabadoo:
From what I’ve read on this issue and what I know about mfg in several different industries you seem to be jumping to some conclusions that rarely hold water. You may be correct but in an industry like autos there is a lot of secrecy all the time. A lot of people are need to know and only when that becomes necessary. And in this case having them not know would be relatively easy and relatively necessary.
Most people don’t know how things work, especially things that require more advance knowledge to understand without explanation. People on here drive diesels with urea tanks and have/had no idea what that is or why they need it.
Frankensteinbeck
@catclub:
Correct, if that document is a title. I definitely remember it being discussed (for example) that misrepresenting the value and reliability of mortgage default bundles was not fraud, and the only possible legal recourse was law suits by specific investors who were given false marketing documents – nothing criminal at all.
WereBear
@Frankensteinbeck: I agree that it didn’t take many people to pull this off, and not many needed to know.
Marketing, for instance, prides themselves on not having a clue about how those engineers do something.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Belafon: Eh? See #76.
VW got in trouble, apparently, for turning off the urea injection system on their 2009-2015 model 4 cylinder diesel cars. Older VW TDI cars didn’t have urea injection and aren’t part of this.
Cheers,
Scott.
Roger Moore
@Frankensteinbeck:
Or it could be that there are several engineering teams exploring alternative solutions to the emissions problem, some working on extending conventional solutions and some on new approaches. One of the teams that’s working on new approaches discovers that they can meet emissions targets by changing the engine programming, but that it costs too much in performance. Then some genius gets the idea of cheating the test, and the rest is history.
Frankensteinbeck
@catclub:
Let me put it another way. If the legal system was simple and definitions were obvious and intuitive, we would not need lawyers. Try representing yourself in a law suit over a mortgage sometime.
EDIT – Or a third way. The whole point of 30 years of deregulation was to create more and more loopholes to let bankers get away with shit that should be illegal.
JoeShabadoo
@Laertes: I can easily see how it was “hidden” for so long. I imagine there was talk about how the other care companies are all cheating in their own way and its not a big deal. Due to the environmental consequences indirectly affecting people it is further looked at as harmless. Everyone feels like clever, mischievous tricksters instead of people breaking the law. It doesn’t take long for these things to become “the way things are done here” either. New employees quickly learn its okay, after all everyone else is okay with it. Furthermore what are most people going to do about it? Go to the boss who surely knows? Even if you do report it and they do something you become the employee who destroyed VW’s huge advantage. It doesn’t matter that you did the right thing, your career is over.
Soylent Green
For three years I have been boasting to friends that my Audi had lower emissions than the equivalent gas-powered version. This feature has been widely touted in the marketing materials for Vdubs and Audis with the 2-liter TDi motor. In the States, this claim has surely contributed to the success of these brands in recent years. Hard to fathom that the company’s entire marketing department would not have been let in on the engineers’ little secret.
It’s the best car that I have ever owned and I intend to drive it until the wheels fall off. But if there’s a class-action lawsuit I can join, count me in.
Laertes
When engineers in a far-away group still within the company achieve some amazing result, it’s common for them to explain to the rest of us, broadly, how they did it. Maybe the auto industry’s engineering works are way more silo’ed than silicon valley’s? I dunno.
Cermet
@catclub: Only for the poor and middle class is this true – for Bankers, never. Simple as that …or the 1% Solution in law (with apologies to a rather bad but more modern version of Sherlock Holmes story … .)
Belafon
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
I saw this in the article above:
There is a note that the newer models, from 2015 on, have the urea system, but the older ones don’t.
burnspbesq
As a former owner of a VW diesel, I am outraged by this.
As a professional Debbie Downer (a/k/a a lawyer), I would suggest a quick perusal of the U.S. – Germany extradition treaty before buying any popcorn for future criminal trials of VW AG senior management. I haven’t had time to do any perusing, but it worries me, and I have no doubt that if there is any wiggle room in the treaty, the German authorities will come under intense pressure to wiggle. Keep in mind that one of the largest blocks of VW stock (somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 percent, IIRC) is owned by the government of the state of Lower Saxony.
Frankensteinbeck
@Soylent Green:
Why is that hard to fathom? You didn’t know, and they have less desire to know than you do. You’ve really never heard jokes like ‘Marketing asked for a circle with 7 perpendicular lines.’?
gian
I seem to recall they didn’t sell the TDI in California. I went to check on when CA started using a dyno with the emissions testing and I can’t remember but I now suspect the dyno testing is why the TDI wasn’t sold here.
Laertes
@Soylent Green:
Marketing would of course know that the engineers had achieved an amazing performance gain. It’s their job to know that and to capitalize on it. It’s not, however, key to their mission to understand the details of how the result was achieved, and it’s emphatically not their mission to question such things deeply enough to uncover fraud.
Blame falls here most directly on the officers whose units perpetrated the fraud, and on up the chain. Other departments, like sales and marketing and especially legal, it seems reasonable to presume that they were in the dark, until we learn different.
burnspbesq
@gian:
They did. I bought mine in Santa Ana in 2010.
Ruckus
@catclub:
I didn’t say it wouldn’t be a change. But the mileage on prior yr VW 4 cyl diesels was not that bad, people are satisfied with it, a person who drives in a way that reflects the best aspects of a diesel may not notice that much change. Remember you still have to drive in an economical way to get the best mileage out of any vehicle.
The mileage possible with one of these cars is quite good. The average mileage that most people get is not the possible mileage. I’ve seen reports of people getting 70-80 mpg out of one. But you normally wouldn’t drive like that at all and mileage noticeably less is not out of the norm. Still 50-60 mpg is nothing to sneeze at. So if mileage dropped to 50 from 60 that would be noticeable but still would be pretty good mpg. If I owned one of these (and I have been thinking of looking for a used one) I’d be pissed but if my mileage is still pretty damned good, and better than most small cars and I liked the car, I’d drive the thing and not worry that much about it.
burnspbesq
@Laertes:
If in-house lawyers got hoodwinked, they should get fired for being hoodwinkable. They only have one job–keep the company out of deep shit–and it pretty clearly didn’t get done here.
Ruckus
@Frankensteinbeck:
Again, the way in big companies they often don’t and their own work becomes difficult or impossible is a joke among engineers.
As well as the people who have to make the stuff they engineer.
Roger Moore
@catclub:
It’s a sitting duck, but at the same time, a fixed routine is the only realistic way to make sure your testing is reproducible. You don’t want to disqualify somebody because they’re close to the line and your testing today is a bit stricter than it was yesterday. But some kind of genuinely unpredictable testing is helpful as a sanity check. You can’t rely on the results to tell you if the vehicle meets the standards, but you can see if the performance is grossly different under more realistic conditions. That tells you if somebody is cheating.
catclub
@Laertes:
My point about an awarded patent, and a bonus for said patent, remains relevant. Why no patent for this achievement?
Kylroy
@Amir Khalid: Yes,and Ford. The “Big 3” of American car manufacture were bailed out by the American government; I’m not aware of any money being given to other car manufacturers, by any government.
JCJ
@guachi:
I have had hatchbacks and wagons for over thirty years. Can’t imagine ever having a sedan. If you spontaneously buy eight large mums where do you put them if you have a sedan?
Amir Khalid
@burnspbesq:
That is indeed the figure cited by Wikipedia for Lower Saxony’s stake in VW. Wolfsburg, per its own Wikipedia article, is the wealthiest city in Germany, mostly thanks to Volkswagen.
I saw an article in al-Jazeera saying the German transport minister is very concerned, because the good name of the German car industry at large, particularly VW’s rivals in Stuttgart and Munich, could also be at stake.
Roger Moore
@Soylent Green:
Very easy to understand. It’s much easier to make that kind of marketing pitch if you don’t know you’re lying. Marketing people who honestly think they’re selling a brilliant advance are going to be much more effective than ones who know they’re lying through their teeth.
Ruckus
@Kylroy:
GM and Chrysler were bailed out, Ford decided that they could go it alone with the line of credit they had secured and didn’t take any bailout money.
Gex
@Cervantes: I think it says more about income insecurity than it does about people’s innate willingness to participate in this kind of evil. Wage slavery has a way of making people put up with things they otherwise would not.
Belafon
@JCJ: My favorite car was the 2002 Ford Focus wagon I gave to my son when he went to college. It was a small car with a big trunk area. The new Focus wagons suck specifically because there’s no room in the back.
Flatlander
@Roger Moore: You don’t know how much that’s going to cut into my hookers and blow budget, Roger.
Linnaeus
@Amir Khalid:
I’ve studied German as well, and this doesn’t bother me. In fact, I generally pronounce “Volkswagen” in the “English” manner as well. It’s not unusual for people to pronounce foreign words, especially if they are loanwords or brand names, as they would in their own language.
I mean, my hometown (or rather, the large city that my home town is a suburb of) has a French name. But no one there pronounces it the French way and hasn’t for centuries.
deep tin
“18 billion for Volkswagen and Audi”
Any guesses on what percentage of this they will actually pay?
We all saw what happened when BP “paid” for the damage done when they ruined the Gulf for decades.
I’m guessing they will pay less than 1%.
Amir Khalid
@Linnaeus:
A propos of cars, is it by any chance Detroit?
Linnaeus
@Amir Khalid:
It is. Well done!
Belafon
@Linnaeus: Amarillo, Tx is pronounced with an “l” (el) sound, not a “y”.
Linnaeus
@Belafon:
Which reminds me of the time I once pronounced “San Jacinto” in the Spanish way (or something approximating that) to a couple of Texans and they gently corrected me that the “j” was pronounced like a soft “g” and not an “h”.
Gian
@burnspbesq:
I had to search around, and there was a time frame from the late 90s through about 2007 that they may not have (I found a USA today article about Mercedes coming to the California market with a “bluetec” diesel circa 2007 or so as the first company to plan to sell new diesel cars in Cali since the 90s.
On the other hand I saw posting on TDI fan forum saying they’d bought them in Cali in 2002 or so and that a consumer reports story was wrong about the TDI not being available in CA or NY due to emissions issues.
usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/autos/environment/2007-10-16-california-diesel_N.htm
in light of this volkswagon news, this quote about the Mercedes, is interesting:
Linnaeus
@Amir Khalid:
I should also quickly add that sometimes (with no rhyme or reason) I do pronounce foreign brands as they would sound in their original language. So it’s funny because I say “volks-wagon” for Volkswagen, but I say “ow-di” for Audi and not “aw-di”.
Belafon
@Linnaeus: Texas also has two other “mispronounciations”: There’s a town named Nevada but the first “a” is pronounced as a long “A”, and the name Palistine is pronounced with the last “i” having the short sound.
Amir Khalid
@Linnaeus:
If you pronounce “Detroit” the French way, how do the locals react? And, since I’m asking, how would locals react to the French pronunciations of place names like “Fond du Lac”, “Baton Rouge” and “Coeur d’Alene”? With amusement or confusion?
boatboy_srq
@Ruckus: Agreed. It’s also a much smaller hit for the US (where clean diesel is just beginning to take hold) than Europe (where it seems 3 of 5 vehicles if not more are TDi). EPA may be levying a heftier penalty, but the remediation globally is going to be far nastier than the fix for just the US. The p!sser here is that a lot of us were looking forward to getting into both more-efficient and cleaner-running vehicles (good for our wallets, good for the environment), and now both of those values are jeopardized. Diesel promised to handle US driving habits far better than hybrids; now, who knows? Anger at VAG for leaving us (individually) in the lurch is today; anger at VAG for fudging the testing and pulling a fast one on the regulators is coming.
There’s also a simmering anger at auto makers from the last time diesel was pushed in the US for passenger vehicles. European and Japanese makers sent over made-for-diesel powerplants; the US makers simply retooled petrol engines for diesel. Results – especially for the US badges – were predictably horrible, both in performance (fuel economy and acceleration both) and in engine life (the US ones failed very quickly). The current scandal has the appearance of a similar marketing failure, and that doesn’t help any; consider that a lot of people won’t buy any diesel now, and there are a lot of diesel-powered cars out there that do meet EPA standards (including new VAG products), so all the advantages will be squandered because VAG were dumbfvcks.
Linnaeus
@Amir Khalid:
I can’t speak for people in other parts of the country, but if I said “Detroit” in the French way to people there, I’d get a funny look and a likely assumption that I was 1) being pretentious or 2) trying to be funny in some way and failing.
ETA: Unless one is an obvious foreign visitor. Then the reaction would probably be a gentle correction.
mr_gravity
I blame Bill Belichick.
zzyzx
@Amir Khalid:
How else do people pronounce Couer d’Alene?
Mike J
@Amir Khalid: Cajuns are common enough in Baton Rouge that French is unremarkable.
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
That’s true, but Ford was actually pushing for the bailout for GM and Chrysler. They thought, probably correctly, that the collapse of one or both of the two would destroy the whole industry in the US. They all depend on a whole network of subcontractors and specialty firms, and those firms depend on them. If one of the big three collapsed, it would probably bring that whole network down with them, and that would destroy the industry as a whole. That is truly “too big to fail”.
Linnaeus
@Roger Moore:
IIRC, even the Japanese-based automakers with operations in the US supported the bailout for the same reason – key auto suppliers do business with multiple companies and if those suppliers go, it harms even those companies who didn’t take government loans.
Roger Moore
@Linnaeus:
Probably because that’s the way they say it in the ads.
Linnaeus
@Roger Moore:
Yeah, that’s probably why, come to think of it.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Linnaeus:
I haven’t heard anyone pronounce it “aw-di.” Even the TV commercials pronounce it “ow-di.”
Roger Moore
@Linnaeus:
Hence the monster airbag recall. Just about everybody bought their airbags from Takata, so when Takata had problems, the whole industry had problems.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Belafon: Ok, but it’s certainly not clear.
CandD:
I take that to mean that all of the 4-cylinder TDIs sold in the US from 2009-2015 are subject to this tampering, whether or not they had urea injection. On cars without urea injection hardware, I assume all they can tamper with is EGR and maybe injector timing and that certainly could affect the NOx emissions and performance.
This early reporting is the usual “fog of war” stuff. I assume it’ll be clearer over time.
Oh, and VW in Canada is stopping sales of the affected models, too…
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Barry
@Frankensteinbeck: “You can’t make those up whenever you want them, which is why nobody went to jail for destroying the economy with mortgage defaults. It wasn’t illegal, just disgustingly immoral.”
Wrong. There was widespread fraud. If nothing else, robosigning was forgery and conspiracy to commit forgery. Probably with obtaining money under false pretenses.
You try signing documents under another name, getting money and then getting caught. Neither the judge nor the jury is going to believe ‘immoral, but not illegal’.
Barry
@Frankensteinbeck: Frankensteinbeck says:
“Why not? Sales and marketing don’t need to know. You want them to act like the low urea use rates are legitimate, so you don’t tell them how you do it. They wouldn’t understand the technical details of a legitimate solution. ”
It isn’t sales and marketing, it’s the large number of people involved with designing and building the engine.
The fuel system
The exhaust system
The engine control software.
Barry
@Frankensteinbeck: “…Hell, if you get lucky with how the emission tests within the company are carried out, even management doesn’t have to know. All you need are a few programmers who were told ‘Our project is to reduce emissions by X%. I don’t understand technical stuff and don’t care if it’s impossible. Everybody at the board meeting agrees that’s the solution.’ Desperate, pissed off programmers cheat up a method to get out from under the management pressure.”
Please note that this engine model worked (allegedly) very differently from others. That would tend to get noticed.
Barry
@Frankensteinbeck: “The fraud in document signing scandal is an excellent example. That wasn’t even illegal.”
Signing an application with a false name is not illegal?
Stamping a document with a notary’s stamp, and signing their name, is not illegal?
BruceJ
@guachi: .I’ve got a 2010 Sportwagen, it’s still the best car I’ve ever owned, but I am royally pissed off at VW right now…
Flatlander
@Linnaeus: But of course it should be “ah-oo-di.” No dipthong required.
This video should explain it.
Shantanu Saha
This has to have been known, or at least suspected, by diesel engineers at VW and at other companies. If I were a diesel engineering executive at one of VW’s competitors and saw that they were getting unreal results with fairly standard engineering of emissions systems, the first thing I would do is buy a few VW diesels and take them apart, piece by piece (and decompile the software too) to find out what the secret sauce of VW’s success with high performance clean diesel cars. Even if I could not technically replicate it given intellectual property considerations, I’d have a team ready to reverse engineer the system. If after taking the car apart I could not find any explanation for why the car got good performance while giving off low emissions, I’d start to suspect bullshit.
That none of their competitors turned them in is evidence that they refrained because of glass house syndrome.
boatboy_srq
@Shantanu Saha: Meh. I think it’s more a case of “diesel is a decent powerplant the way we do it, but if we out VAG for this we’ll never be able to sell an Ahmurrcan any diesel ever again.”
There’s good reason for European makers to be skeptical of the US market:
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
Absolutely.
But Ford didn’t take bailout/bankruptcy from the government. They did as you say take advantage of the situation, as probably anyone would. The bailout of GM and Chrysler saved a lot more jobs than just those two companies. Without it we’d still be in the middle of a rather large recession. And those jobs are not just from the sub contractors, auto dealers, mechanics, etc. And people who think they would be OK because they could buy parts for their old cars, who do you think makes those parts? Ford did themselves a favor, sure, but they also did a big one for most of the rest of us as well, beating that drum.
gian
@boatboy_srq:
My father bought a 1980 Volvo diesel.
88 horsepower and a source of a smoke screen capable black cloud if you ever gave it more than half the throttle. Shared the engine block of the Volkswagen rabbit diesel. I was a kid but I recall frequent repairs until he finally got rid of it
Kylroy
@Linnaeus: Seconded. Amir, I’m impressed you were familiar with Fond Du Lac. I’m a Wisconsin native, and we have so many butchered French names for cities here (Phonetically spelled: “Prarie doo Sheen”, “Laak Duh Flamboe”, “Prarie Duh Sack”) that attempting to say them as actual French words just sounds jarring.
But it’s the Native American names that separate the locals from the visitors. You’re not a real Wisconsinite until you can both spell an pronounce Oconomowoc.
Bigby
Look, if we can just get a Republican in as POTUS next year, we can get busy cutting funding to EPA enforcement, or eliminating it altogether, as 19 of the 16 GOP candidates advocate (who will never be asked their thoughts on this subject by our lie-beral media). THAT will solve this completely unforeseeable ‘issue’.
mai naem mobile
I saw this story yesterday. The test was done at West Virginia Univ(don’t know if its State Univ or Univ of.) Here’s the thing – this has been going on for years. Why didn’t the EPA or one of the state goverments catch it? Something similar was tried in long distance trucks,so the idea is not completely new. I’m disgusted. BTW I considered getting the Passat a couple of years ago, specifically diesel for the fuel economy. Luckily, I dodged that bullet!
boatboy_srq
@Bigby: D’you suppose VAG’s problem was presumption of a GOTea win in ’08? You can bet pResident McCain would never have empowered the EPA to look into this…
drkrick
My dad got one of those early GM diesels. Wanted a Cadillac all his life and when the time came it was so bad it would have had to be considerably better to be called a lemon. The topper was when the fuel gelled up on a cold Christmas Eve while we were on the way to church with both of my grandmothers (that’s right, his mother-in-law) in the car and I had to walk home to get a working vehicle. Put him off diesels and Cadillac for life.
J R in WV
@Amir Khalid:
Little town in Kentucky named Versailles, KY… pronounced ver-sales. More or less, anyways. There is a Kentucky accent , I’m not sure sitting here 50 or 60 miles east of the KY state line how they mangle it in detail.
Ver-Sales! Right?
How does that get said in France?
We are a little off topic. We have had and driven into the ground many VW diesel vehicles, starting with a 1978 Rabbit diesel, a white Rabbit.
Then a brown Rabbit PU truck. Then a Jetta, and another Jetta, and another Jetta. Last diesel was a 2006 that got traded in on a gasoline-powered VW SUV last spring – a 2013 Tiguan we bought in spring of ’14.
nuff said. Ver Sales, KY.
Blue Stater
@Tripod: Absolutely right. I bought a ’61 Beetle, $1104 delivered at the Wolfsburg factory, drove it 110K miles. Bought a ’66; quality had deteriorated, moved to Japanese iron. Bought a ’90 Bus, piece of crap. VW once had an excellent business making reasonably priced, very well made, mechanically simple cars. They threw it all away. They need to be fined out of existence and their executives need to do some hard time. That’s the only way we’re going to put a stop to this business.
Fred
This illustrates a problem with computers running everything. The damned things are an invitation to cheat. Like computer operated voting it is too easy for some clever scammer to build cheatware into the system and nobody can see it.
Who is to say that when your six year old truck starts effing up that it wasn’t built into the system just so you had to junk it and buy another? Same thing for a fridge, toaster, … If it took this kind of examination to catch the VW cheaters doing something really egregious what are the chances that anyone will find out about any number of such consumer scams that are not exactly illegal?
If a computer isn’t needed to interface a task (like voting or operating your car window) it shouldn’t be in the mix. That’s my ludite opinion.
chbnna
Was there a whistle blower? How did they find out the software was doing that? Were they looking for it? Seems like it’s something that someone would have to know about to find it, no?