Yes, the defeat device VW employed for emissions is an environmental tragedy, but this is just a symptom of a much more central issue. That is, VW was actively promoting technical and business leaders that lacked any sort of moral compass. How can we have faith in global corporations and their (grossly overpaid) leaders if these are the choices they're making and the examples they're setting?
The 'trust but verify' model of your morality was broken. If you give the opportunity to cheat, there will be cheaters. The emissions tests were bad and made it easy to cheat.
Providing an environment which makes cheating easy and profitable is just as morally corrupt as the cheating itself, and entirely more predictable and preventable.
Solve solvable problems like bad testing and not unsolvable problems like unscrupulous businessmen.
"Providing an environment which makes cheating easy and profitable is just as morally corrupt as the cheating itself"
No, it isn't. This is called victim blaming. It is like saying not locking your door is as morally corrupt as the thieves that walked into your unlocked house.
We create standards for emissions. And companies should comply with the tests even without the need for tests. We expect people should follow the laws, and we should use the minimal amount of enforcement to get compliance. But it's silly to blame the epa for poor tests. The vault is with VW for selling cars that didn't comply with emissions standards.
Well said, and in addition to asking leaders to abide by the law, why aren't we holding our leaders to some kind of moral standard? I just can't believe that we need laws to prevent executives from choosing to elevate their careers (and companies) by committing crimes against humanity.
why aren't we holding our leaders to some kind of moral standard?
Because I don't care about their morals. Be as corrupt as you want, as immoral as you want, that doesn't (for this example) make the air dirty. However, if we catch you not meeting the standards put forth, the hammer will fall swiftly and hard.
But suppose we publish a moral standard to be met. Who's chosen deity do we use? Because for the majority of people, there's at least a nod to some form of god when aligning our moral compasses. In some cultures, a little corruption is just part of it. From my POV, most of our systems of laws have a little morality baked in, but those systems are more concerned about outcomes. "Don't do this, or punish shall befall you." "If you manufacture these, they must meet a minimum standard, or you will be fined."
Then what exactly are we paying them for? End the agency if they aren't responsible for regulation. We can rely on the morality of random people all over the world, and lament the human condition when multi-billion dollar incentives turn out to dominate the complete absence of reward for doing the lawful thing.
In general, regulatory agencies like the EPA are grossly underfunded. To answer your question, “we” are “paying them for” doing the best they can with a huge set of problems and limited resources while navigating challenging competing political pressures.
If “we” want better, it would take shifting tax money toward those government functions and adjusting the law to give regulators a stronger mandate.
If you personally want to see such a change, the easiest first–order action you can take is helping get out the vote or donating money in competitive congress and senate elections, working to replace Republican Party lawmakers with ones from the Democratic Party. (Party affiliation is obviously not a perfect proxy for support of the EPA, but it’s not a bad start, since opposing environmental protection and denying global climate change are a core plank of the GOP platform.) If you want to do better than that, you’ll have to educate yourself more thoroughly, and take on more deliberate activism and/or involve yourself significantly in the political process.
I can accept that we don't fund the agencies, therefore they fail; what I can't accept is that they have no responsibility for their tests being so easily defeated because the responsibility of bad people is to not try and defeat them. Funding can be fixed with a change in priorities. That magical worldview cannot.
If we're to trust in morality to keep people from defeating tests, we could replace the entire agency with a mail merge: "Do your vehicles comply? If yes, reply to yes@epa.gov, if no, reply to admittingtoacrime@epa.gov"
The fault lies with both of them. It is VW's responsibility to be moral and comply with laws. It is the EPA's responsibility to catch those who attempt to cheat. They both failed, in easily preventable ways. They are both at fault.
VW's management should be jailed, and the EPA should probably be reprimanded or have someone fired for letting this go uncaught for so long.
Then we can as well say that the whole general public of USA has failed. Because it is their responsibility (indirectly and ultimately) to see that the legal and enforcement machinery works as expected. Let's see how do they (the general public) behave now. Do they push heavily for severe punishment for these criminals (both individual leaders and companies) or not?
Or do they keep mum even if the leaders (like the recently resigned VW ceo) who not only got scot-free but also were rewarded millions if not billions of dollars ultimately for such crimes by the company and its shareholders?
Or we might as well say all humanity has failed, or God has failed, if we're going to ignore people's job descriptions, and their direct connection and responsibility for the design of all systems involved.
I am not saying we should ignore people's job descriptions; in fact, I was responding to one comment in the thread that was trying to put equal blame on the EPA too.
But I want to bring out an important aspect here: if the USA (mainly its people) fail to punish VW and its criminal leaders (along with the shareholders who backed, rewarded those leaders) in an exemplary manner, then some people will keep on blaming its capitalist economy based democracy for being too soft on "big and rich" while punishing severely only "poor people" even for smaller scale crimes.
The VW leaders should be put behind bars for something like 30 years and its big shareholders (the ones holding more 0.1% of its total shares, say) be punished monetarily by legally declaring their shares to be void. If US cannot do this because Germany wouldn't allow it to do so, then USA should ban the VW and all the companies associated with VW or its parent companies to do any business in US.
What has currently happened with VW in the name of punishment is pure farce. Its shares are still trading at non-zero positive value. And its leaders enjoying multi-million dollars in rewards for the criminal behavior. The justice has become farce in this case.
>>Or we might as well say all humanity has failed, or God has failed,
Yes, you can say so. But at least now we don't have a world-wide single state. As a god or gods (whether he, she, it or they (multiple gods)) are concerned, we don't know for sure whether the things called gods exist or not, so saying god failed doesn't get us much far.
if the USA ... fail to punish VW and its criminal leaders ... in an exemplary manner
By and large the USA has chosen to punish companies by fines. Very rarely do we put executives in jail.
There have been a few. E.g. Jeff Skilling is a poster boy for corporate malfeasance, and he wound up being sentenced to 14 years. But Enron was, overall, a cesspool rather than a legitimate company. In the greater scheme of things, VW's transgressions are minor compared to Enron's. So it's unlikely that the USA will try to put anyone in jail for them.
But VW has already set aside $18 billion. If we look at what happened to BP (another foreign company, and consequently easier to treat as a whipping boy than a US company), that $18 billion will prove wholly inadequate. VW will be lucky if it only costs them $18 billion for their USA fines, etc. And then everyone else in the world will then pile on.
Even if VW's total cost is "only" $18 billion, I think that's a big enough number that it will get the attention of CEOs and boards all around the world. It's unlikely that any other company will be so brazen in the near future.
There are those that are directly responsible (manufacturers, regulators), and those that are indirectly responsible (the people in a state, shareholders in a company, humanity, God, etc).
The people don't get to vote on specific issues, they get to vote on representation. The people representing them are directly responsible. Hold the people directly responsible to account, remove and replace if ineffective.
>>Hold the people directly responsible to account, remove and replace if ineffective.
And who is going to do "that"? and what if those who are responsible to do "that" don't do that?
Then who is going to hold 'those' people who didn't do anything to hold those people responsible for the VW?
I mean somewhere down the line, the general public must become active and show that it is not sleeping altogether, if that doesn't happen, well, society as a whole has to pay its price, and this price generally is very big, it can be so big that society may be crushed under its weight.
My point is let's see how USA deals with this VW crime and the other important criminal called Saudi Arabia for its role in 9/11. The government and enforcement agencies have already shown that they won't punish them much. So it remains to see if the general public holds them accountable or not.
So it remains to see if the general public holds them accountable or not.
That's not likely to happen. The American public is generally quite apathetic.
For example, one of the current leading candidates to become the next president of the USA had the following good fortune a while ago[1]:
- did not have any previous experience trading commodities futures
- deposited less than $1000 in cash into a futures trading account
- Made hundreds of trades. Each futures trade incurs a significant bid/ask spread, much greater than stock trades. And yet: Two-thirds of her trades showed a profit by the end of the day she made them and 80 percent were ultimately profitable. Many of her trades took place at or near the best prices of the day.
- cashed out for $100,000 nine months later
To me, that $100,000 was nothing more and nothing less than a bribe. And, although corruption is endemic in many parts of the world, one would hope that in the USA such obvious grift would unequivocally disqualify someone for the office of the President.
But if you took a poll, probably 99% of the electorate wouldn't even be aware of this little incident. And the majority probably wouldn't care.
So don't look for "the general public" to hold anyone accountable about anything. That's no longer how this country works. Not in 2016, anyway.
>>So don't look for "the general public" to hold anyone accountable about anything. That's no longer how this country works. Not in 2016, anyway.
It's sad. With all the "information age tools" at hand, we see that people are just choosing to remain ignorant. Reminds me Huxley's brave new world [1]
Who creates standards? Equally corrupt and money driven politicians? I certainly don't remember having a debate and getting to vote on what the standards will look like, and why. They seem arbitrary.
It's funny, we sit around HackerNews and laugh at the ineptitude of politicians trying to regulate the internet, but yet we assume they know what's best regarding pollution regulation? That's hypocritical.
A lot of the issues we face with technology today are pretty new in the grand scheme of things. Companies polluting the environment isn't only a recent phenomenon.
This isn't just a matter of cheating. VW knowingly manufactured millions of vehicles that polluted at unprecedented levels. These managers and executives chose to destroy the environment, affecting their children, my children, and all future generations in order to elevate their careers (and company).
Edit: Deleted text about global warming since it was incorrect.
tl;dr: a late 90s diesel light-truck engine puts out about the same levels of NOx, far from unprecedented.
--------------
One of the main violations is NOx emissions. Current EPA standards are 0.043g/km. The TDI engines tested under real world conditions at 0.61g/km - 1.5g/km.[1]
A quick google brought me to some testing in 2004[2] of a 6.5l diesel engine typically used in the military version of the Humvee and most Chevrolet light-duty trucks from around 1994 to 2001. The testing shows NOx output levels between ~55g/hr to ~355g/hr.
Comparing that to the VW output, lets take an average speed of 100km/hr so the VW is pumping out between 61g/hr and 150g/hr of NOX. Likely closer to the 61g/hr as most of the engine power is used during acceleration. Yes, a 6.5L is more than 3x the displacement of the 2.0L CBEA engine, however, the power output is only about 30% higher.
Far from 'unprecedented,' though clearly in violation of EPA regulations.
Sorry for citing wikipedia. It's late and I'm tired. Source 63 is the one you want.
Actually the pollutants in question are not greenhouse gases. Quite to the contrary, it is likely that these cars would have used more fuel and produced more greenhouse gases if they had been designed to meet the emissions standards.
You can't have your cake and eat it, too. Reducing NOx emissions basically means reducing the engine's efficiency, increasing consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
To reduce NOx, you'll need to reduce the temperature in the combustion chamber and reduce the excess oxygen levels in the exhaust (Oxygen in the exhaust being a requirement for generating NOx).
One common, cheap way of doing this, is to use EGR (exhaust gas recirculation, feeding some of the exhaust gas back to the inlet). This cools the combustion chamber AND ensures less oxygen is available for NOx generation.
A more complicated way is to add urea to the exhaust before feeding the mix through a catalytic converter; the hot exhaust converts urea to ammonia, and ammonia reacts with NOx to create nitrogen and water.
This latter approach, if I've understood it correctly, is what VW tried to avoid by cheating - presumably to not have to pass on the added cost and complexity to their customers, making their offerings less competitive.
To expound on your point, in SI engines there is an additional requirement to run richer than at max efficiency as running too lean will burn up catalytic converters.
Unfortunately, in the prevailing rhetoric the lack of a moral compass of corporations and their executives is a feature, not a bug. Ethical concerns are often at odds with short-term increase of shareholder value.
This is far beyond ethical concerns and distinctly into fraud territory. They planned to generate false data to convince customers to buy their products, and to get governments to approve their shit.
And of course, when they get caught, they throw their subordinates under the bus:
> "This was not a corporate decision from my point of view," Horn said while under oath.
> "To my knowledge this was a couple of software engineers."
Now we find out:
1) It was management that came up with the idea to commit this fraud, and they hired government consultants to find out exactly how the testing happened, and used them in a management-directed project to figure out exactly how to commit this fraud.
2) Martin Winterkorn, the top of VW management, REPEATEDLY prevented project proposals by engineers to fix this issue (reason: "More effective emissions equipment would have made Volkswagen vehicles hundreds of dollars more expensive")
3) Top management actively studied how much they'd be punished for this ("An American law firm hired by Volkswagen to examine regulatory issues, Kirkland & Ellis, told the carmaker in an August 2015 memo that the previous record penalty was $100 million")
4) Senior management asked engineers to study the chances of getting caught ("Court documents filed by Volkswagen indicate that the technicians thought the chances of being caught cheating were slim when the deception began in 2006")
5) Management refused to even stop cheating as a result of getting found out, when the courts weren't involved ("Signs of irregularities in Volkswagen cars were discovered in 2014 by a nonprofit group, the International Council on Clean Transportation, based on testing performed at West Virginia University")
At what point do we start talking personal responsibility for these assholes ? This is fraud, plain and simple ... they planned to lie to the government, and to the people buying their products. Then they executed on their plan to commit fraud, involving large amounts of subordinates, then they were discovered and attempted to throw others under the bus.
By contrast if you can't be convicted for committing fraud on your customers, and lying to the government to get approval, what's to stop companies from selling Chinese-style "100G" flashdrives ? What's to prevent companies from putting FDA approved stickers on different medicines than the ones that were approved ?
Unfortunately, such behaviour is all too widespread. I don't think anybody believes that the fraud is limited to VW, or that this type of fraud is limited to the automotive industry.
If you previously thought that your car was environmentally friendly, you are being forced to think again.
What do you still believe to be true?
Do you think your bank account is protected from thieves?
Do you think that your railway journey is safe?
What about your flight to your next holiday destination?
What about the nuclear power plant down the road?
The systems that we have to keep our weapons secure and safely out of the hands of terrorists?
All these things depend on software. We have to think again about complexity. We have to think again about the role of software in our society. We have to think again about what transparency and trust really mean for a technologically advanced society.
Sure, this is a particularly egrecious case. But law is merely codified morality, and without a conscience the question of whether to break law becomes merely a cold calculation of expected (dis)utility. This is what you get when your utility function tries to maximize shareholder value.
Well, then we better make sure that the risk never is worth the gain. Maybe give courts the option to nationalize a corporation when the law violations are big enough? As in, immediately displace entire management layers and void all publicly held stock?
This level of criminality requires some kind of response, or really, lets just drop the idea of crime as a concept and just monetize "justice". At least we could dispense with some of the more galling hypocrisy, without changing how the system works one iota.
Indeed, one wonders why the government (of the US or of Germany) continues to tolerate the existence of this company at all. They've clearly conspired at the executive level to mislead regulators. The corporation is a figment of the government's imagination. It seems like the government should just stop imagining it.
If the US were to push too hard they are at risk of souring relations with Germany. For Germany the problem is damaging their own economy. In a democracy a recession is an existential threat to the current government. That's much scarier than a company flouting emissions standards.
It's not about shutting down VW, it's about jailing one person, the CEO. Or, if he proves he wasn't aware or wasn't in control of his company, the lower level of management, recursively. It will lightly hamper VW, but provide a personal responsibility baseline for all management in car companies. It's mass, oragnized crime we're talking about here.
> Or, if he proves he wasn't aware or wasn't in control of his company
That's not how the burden of proof works. That said, would this case actually be prosecuted seriously, they would find information relating to how he was informed.
>Indeed, one wonders why the government (of the US or of Germany) continues to tolerate the existence of this company at all
The State of Lower Saxony (one of the German States) holds part of VW's shares. So there's some incentive by at least the state government to protect the company.
Exactly. If private citizens tried fraud on this scale they'd be in prison until they died. Surely dissolution is the least that VW deserves at this point.
Yes, because all those tens of thousands of employees that work at VW were complicit.
/s
Dissolution is definitely not the way to handle this.
What should be done in my opinion is criminal proceedings against the management at the time of VW up to and including Winterkorn.
That would clear the air. Destroying VW for this makes no sense, it would leave 100's of millions of vehicles out there without support and it would cause job losses and economic damages to Germany that are dis-proportional.
Dissolution is definitely not the way to handle this.
Nationalisation would keep all low-level employees and remove the existing money/power structure. And since the banking crisis, we actually have precedent for this.
What an incredible way of thinking. If getting rid of you means losing a lot of jobs, you can break the law for decades with a sneer and hold us all hostage?
Its common for competing companies to test each other's products as a benchmark for their own. So all of these companies will have known that other companies were doing the same and no-one said anything. That's thousands of people.
Those Germans, always meticulous in their record keeping. It amazes me what people will upload to a server and communicate through email. If whistle-blowing hadn't been as under attack as it is I'm certain a lot of other companies would be found to have been knowingly violating laws in order to squeeze additional profit.
When a company willingly and knowingly foils rules put in place to increase lifespan and reduce the death toll of cancer due to air pollution, shouldn't these top-executives be charged with mass murder? Why can't we compare this with a war crime? Millions of healthy life-span-years could have been lost due to these acts.
Because most people make decisions with a bit of perspective. Trucks (I'm not talking semis, really anything over 6000 pounds, I think) are still allowed far more emissions than any VW diesel car, and anything built before the new law went into place is still on the road doing it's carcinogenic thing.
Any car company is in the business of polluting the hell out of the environment (save Tesla, unless you watch a lot of Fox News). VW polluted a little bit more than they were allowed to for a few years and the executives are "mass murderers"? That's a hell of a president.
It is likely they have broken rules for far longer (25 years perhaps? [1]). And after we (as in, we the tax payers, who pay for all the health bills) have asked scientifically grounded questions, strict rules were put in place. Rules that deal with life and death... Rules that reflect the severe impact on us, our surroundings, our planet. It can be expected of an academic executive that the basis of these rules lie in extending our (healthy) life span. It can be expected thusly, that the decision of knowingly breaking these rules by 10- to 40-fold, will have cost the lives of thousands world wide [2]. This is not a victimless crime.
It is very uncommon for people to be held criminally responsible for so-called 'statistical murder', which is actually quite common. The case has been made that airbags have killed more people than they have saved; should the people who wrote the airbag laws and regulations be put to death?
While I disagree with the original comment - your airbags analogy does not work here, airbags were not created to work around a law, there is a law on emissions and vw deliberately built a workaround to "comply" with a law on tests, but they knew that outside the test facility their cars would violate that law.
The airbag case is extremely complicated. There have been multiple technology generations since airbags were introduced. People can misuse their cars by placing small children in the front seats without two-stage airbags. And on top of all that, some airbag inflators were improperly reformulated with a propellant that apparently breaks down and explodes, with deaths attributed to this flaw.
Yes, but you cannot simply compare the results of industrial activity with the results of breaking rules governing industrial activity. The rules were the trade-off and breaking them breaks the trade-off.
Such a defeatist approach, but I won't argue whose benefit these rules are. Fact is that they are put in place and they help to prevent disease and death. So, now to liability:
[1]: "If a corporate officer "authorizes, directs or in some meaningful sense actively participates in the wrongful conduct," personal liability will attach even though the actions were taken by the corporation. "
Identifying the problem is not defeatist. The concentration of power in government makes it attractive to abuse by the powerful and the rich.
It is not against the law to pollute the environment, and reduce its future habitability. Companies are not charged for adding CO2 or NOX to the environment. That may change n the future, but right now they do not have to pay the people they harm.
I feel that this is only the first of a series of scandals in which respectable companies and institutions will be found to have done nefarious and harmful things: attempting to secrete their misdeeds in the seemingly impenetrable and arcane minutiae of everyday software.
The submitted title was "Volkswagen seriously made a PowerPoint deck on how to cheat emissions tests". That's more linkbait, which is driving the wrong way down a one-way street.
It might be a good idea to link to or explain submission title rules on the submit page as most new submitters probably won't go looking for the Guidelines page. Many new users could be coming from forums or sites where editorializing headlines it the norm and/or expected.
Any product feature like that would most likely need to be known to a number of teams such as marketing, engineering, production, documentation, compliance, supply chain, QA, tooling, support, or whatever they call those inside VW. So many teams would be coordinated by a pretty high level exec.
It's an interesting case study in regulations not being complied with. I guess the lawmakers expected the car companies to take the financial and performance hit to meet the emissions standard. Instead the car companies cheated.
I imagine governments will be more careful in checking manufacturers are actually meeting standards after this.
Right, because the air in Los Angeles is barely breathable, just as it was in the 70s. Wait, I got that wrong; the air in L. A. isn't too bad these days. What were we talking about? Oh, yeah, the effectiveness of regulations. On that topic, now I'm not saying there's direct cause-and-effect here, but...
Cleaner air in LA is primarily due to two technological breakthroughs: positive crankcase ventilation, and catalytic converters. That's the proper way to do regulations: once a cleaner tech is invented, make it mandatory. The other way around, mandating a steady decrease de-coupled from technological advances, is more likely to lead to cheating.
A concrete solution which would have avoided "Dieselgate" is if the EPA had made urea NOx removal tech mandatory on all diesel vehicles. Saying "cars in the future must be X% cleaner" is needed, but it's not a complete solution.
Plus, more often than not, the technology to make cars cleaner is available, but expensive and so manufacturers don't use it.
Water-methanol injection, for instance, is well proven tech (since WW2), but not adopted at large scale because it requires changes to gas pump infrastructure etc. The only way to overcome a chicken-and-egg problem like that is governments making it mandatory.
Edit: The rest of your comment is false. The day the news came out, Winterkorn posted a video acknowledging the problem but not mentioning resignation -- he did not resign that day. And when he did resign, he explicitly said that he was not aware of any wrongdoing on his part. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/24/business/international/vol...
That's an interesting translation. He said he took the responsibility, but was unaware of wrongdoing when he resigned (I read the original announcement).
So, no, my comment isn't false — but yours isn't either.
