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Comment by emcrazyone | Hacker News Reader

Actually one or two people could have gotten away with this. As a software developer on large automotive projects, I was often writing code to do things I didn't understand. My coding came from hand written specifications that often had sequence diagrams which is basic software flows. I.E. Do this when you see these conditions. I typically didn't understand the conditions.

Additionally, modern ECUs in vehicles are modifiable at run time through something called XCP/CCP programming. You can think of of this as calibrating the ECU. ECU = Electronic Control Unit.

The thing that really bothers me about all this is from the article

"Carder said he's surprised to see such a hullabaloo now, because his team's findings were made public nearly a year and a half ago."

It seems nothing was done until the media outlets got a hold of the story?

Why didn't this blow up happen a year and a half ago before all these additional vehicles were put on the road?

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This didn't blow up a year and a half ago because VW had not yet confessed. The timeline as I know it is that these results were published a year and a half ago, which got the attention of the EPA. The EPA did their homework, and about a year ago, started pressing VW on this issue. VW denied for a year, and just recently finally admitted. It's an unfortunate timeline, but I think a reasonable one. Source, from molecule in this thread: http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/adva...

And great insights on the software side of this.

EPA doing their homework is fine, but what exactly is reasonable in VW denying this for a year?

Nothing. I'm assuming that VW is in the wrong and not reasonable. I interpreted the original question to mean, why did every one else (media, government, public) not pay attention to this until now? Given the timeline, it's reasonable that the media, government and public did pay attention when they did.

Here is the letter (PDF copy) that was sent from the EPA to VW, VW America, and Audi. It was sent last Friday, which is when the story "broke".

The initial investigation 18 months ago kicked off an investigation by the EPA. VW denied any wrongdoing but admitted to a "glitch" and started issuing ECU updates. This is why some people think there is already an ECU fix for this out there. There is a "fix" from last year that says it's an ECU upgrade for emissions, but it was a stalling tactic / red herring while VW continued to cover up the extent of the deception.

http://www3.epa.gov/otaq/cert/documents/vw-nov-caa-09-18-15....

I thought exactly that, for the software developers. They may not have known what the ultimate aim was.

But someone with managerial skin in the game decided, and it's hard to see someone up high enough to have that skin in the game being able to push their goals down to the developer. Which means there's at least a chain of people, and at each level there's probably a small number of peers who know what's going on.

Someone decided, and needed help to get it pushed down to implementation.

People who spec'd power requirements had a very good understanding of what's possible with power vs economy vs emission control. If they got the power they wanted, they must have known how they got it.

There must have been a lot of people who either conspired or looked the other way.

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