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Comment by bitmapbrother | Hacker News Reader

I was watching a german program on the VW scandal and was surprised to learn that the German government allowed VW to issue a software patch to correct the problem instead of offering to repair or compensate owners for the cars they purchased. Even with the software patch the vehicles still released emissions that were well above the norm.

Also, I don't believe any VW executives have ever been charged in Germany.

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I was also very curious how they managed to get my '09 "fixed" somehow via a simple software patch. I would have understood it if it had lost 20% performance or got 20% higher fuel consumption - but that didn't happen.

So: if it was that easy to fix legally why did they cheat in the first place??

Of course it can't be that easy. So of course my car is still polluting over the limit. And I think this is a story that isn't getting the coverage it needs. A proper fix for my car would have been to install an AdBlue system into it, at great cost. Had they been forced to do that - or buy back the car - they would be in serious financial trouble.

That also answers why the German government is giving them some leeway here: it's not exactly in their interest to kill Volkswagen.

There are a lot of different parameters they can change, but the main ones are turbo boost and injection time. It is easy to find one set of values for each power output request that will make the engine run. Now you optimize. The combinations that is over the limits might not be that different than the values that is over the limits, so it is just a matter of trying them all to see what happens. This is done as an educated guess and refinement: we don't know exactly what any gives set will produce, but we have a good guess.

> That also answers why the German government is giving them some leeway here: it's not exactly in their interest to kill Volkswagen.

While the federal government does not have a direct stake (apart from all the tax euros), the fine state of Lower Saxony holds a 20 % share (which actually causes the MP and his economics minister to always be on the board of directors).

The country has a huge stake regardless since they likely pay unemployment benefits if they were to go under etc.

Interesting. Does that mean they could have been aware of the problem (from being on the board), before it became public knowledge?

Why would prosecuting the executives kill WV, though?

If VW is forced to make all regulations-breaching cars to be compliant and compensate the owner for down-time and loss in fuel-efficiency or performance, that might mean the end to VW. VW is touched softly, just like Intel, for example. I think both the car and the IC industries should be more regulated, and the regulations should be effectively enforced.

As far as I know, they did have to make the cars compliant. At least my colleague, who had an affected Skoda, got it "fixed" for free, including a temporary replacement car.

If there was a demand that the "fixed" cars were actually tested and were now under the limit while not losing more than say 5% in economy or power (or else owners would have to be compensated) it would likely find that the cars fail one or more of these requirements.

I believe it's now a middle ground: cars lost "only" about 5-10% performance/fuel eco, and they are still only half way to the NOx limit.

"if it was that easy to fix legally why did they cheat in the first place??"

Your car did take a performance hit and fuel economy hit. Not a big one, but enough to make it less competitive during instrumented tests by journalists. Tests are showing about 5-6% fuel economy hit which is not trivial, and also engine performance hit in higher RPM band.

Luckily, most car buyers don't push their cars enough to notice.

It totally can be that easy, though. Imagine the software in the car has the following pseudo-code…

    if (emissions_test_running()) {
       run_efficiently();
    } else {
       business_as_usual();
    }

… which could get replaced with …

    run_efficiently();

No, you have that backward a bit: the NOx emissions are high when the car runs efficiently (high compression/temperature)

So you can make the engine run at high temp, do 5L/100km and output 200hp, but with lots of NOx produced

Or you can run it cooler, with less NOx produced, but then it does 6L/100km and ouputs 175hp (say)

So basically the bad code was

    if (under test)
       run_cool_inefficient_lowNOx
    else
       run_hot_efficient_highNOx

The reason why many diesel manufacturers cheated is because the numbers for diesels are only good if you run hot. All that low consumption, high power etc comes from its ability to run hot, but then it spews NOx.

This was made worse by EU regulations that focused 100% on CO2 - which is proportional to consumption only.

In order to sell cars in the EU they needed models that stayed under 120g/km CO2 (say 5L/100km) and of course they couldn't be lower power than the competition, and to stay under price limits for company purchases they needed models that stayed under the price limit where they could fit AdBlue systems

No Microsoft or Intel executives have been charged for grossly anticompetitive practices either. In my mind it is very simple: no country hurts its own industry too much. Effectively, other countries need to step in.

Are the emission standards in the US equivalent to those in Germany? From what I recall, the US has tougher standards. Granted, the cars will still be polluting, but they aren't technically illegal; in the US they are illegal to use.

The new US EPA laws do have higher standards but they only went into effect for the 2016 model year when the EPA adopted the California standards. So cars not registered in California and before the 2016 model year aren't held to the California standard unless these states adopted the California standard before the 2016 model year.

The EU does have fairly strict "limits" for NOx emissions from diesel vehicles. The affected VW models, along with many other diesel vehicles, are known to far exceed these limits in real-world driving.

However, legally the cars are only required to meet emissions limits in test conditions, and the rules allow for emissions control devices to be disabled if necessary "to protect the engine". So it's not clear if any laws were broken by Volkswagen's use of a defeat device.

If there are to be any successful lawsuits against VW over the emissions scandal in the EU, they will likely relate to consumer law - i.e. that VW's cars were deceptively sold as being clean when they were not, and people's vehicles lost value due to VW's actions when the emissions problems became known.

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