I’m having some difficulty understanding why this was illegal. If I take a college class and manage to pass the final exam by memorizing factoids rather than fully mastering the course concepts, have I “cheated” in an officially sanctionable way? VW submitted a car for testing, and the government couldn’t be bothered to test it more rigorously.
It isn’t a matter of cheating - this is fraud. The particular cheat mechanism was simply a way of enabling the fraud. There are probably legal components in this as well, the test probably involves VW making certain contractual agreements with the government agencies about the cars sold and the validity of the test done.
If you obtain a degree via useless rote memorisation of the course, and then proceed to practice the profession, and you are no good, and cause harm because you are no good, things could be interesting. Eventually, you will mess up, and you will get sued. You claimed that you could do the job to a level of quality commensurate with your qualification. You couldn’t. If you knew you couldn’t, and this could be traced and documented, you are in big trouble. VW knew the cars didn’t comply. The difficulty with the analogue is that a student cramming via rote memorisation doesn’t think they are cheating. The example would be closer to cheating in the exam (with perhaps a technological cheat) and complaining that the invigilators of the exam should have been checking for the method of cheating you used, but “couldn’t be bothered do it properly”.
VW presented the cars as compliant. They marketed the cars are compliant - so the customers have a significant beef with VW as well (especially if the only fix provided by VW causes a rise in fuel consumption and/or a reduction in performance).
You can hardly characterise the testing done as “couldn’t be bothered to do it properly”. Industry accepted best practice is not “couldn’t be bothered”. That fact that, like almost everything in life, the system can be gamed, is not something that can be used as an excuse. Even the on-road testing that caught them out could be gamed with enough effort. This style of test gaming has had a long history. Fuel consumption testing was in the past - the ECU would recognise the particular pattern of throttle openings used in the test.
I’d say the difference is, as a student of the college, you never agreed to anything regarding what learning methods you used. You did pass the exam, given the same way to a whole cohort of students, and the school itself has certified that you passed it all and awarded you the degree. If you turn out to suck in the real world, well, frankly, no one will conclude that you cheated through school, they will conclude that you just don’t have any talent and that the testing didn’t find that. It’s extremely common in the real world for there to be graduates of elite colleges with good GPAs that turn out to have limited talent, making mistake after mistake as engineers until they get promoted to management. Talent can’t be taught.
Almost no individual gets sued, what Francis is saying is pure bull. The lawsuit game in the United States requires two things (1) a sueable mistake and (2) a target with deep pockets whom that mistaken can be pinned on. Individuals don’t have deep pockets, with rare exceptions. So the filing fee of the suit won’t even be paid.
Volvo, on the other hand, did something more akin to a student walking in to each exam with set of glasses with a HUD and an integrated video camera, and someone elsewhere who actually knows the information is typing the answers to each and every question and the student is copying. I personally never saw a college course where you could just memorize “factoids” and do better than a charity C at best. Now, you could memorize every last line of the professor’s notes and the homework assignments, ignoring or just skimming the walls of text in the textbook, and yes you could get an A doing that. That’s a lot more than factoids, though. One course I did this for, I spend about 16 hours going through the material several times over, thousands of slides. I read fast, though.
In the US, and pretty much anywhere, lawsuits follow the money. Professionals take professional indemnity insurance and get sued all the time. The medical profession devote a significant portion of their income to such insurance. Engineers similarly will have such insurance, but it isn’t as expensive. Of course, if the said professional didn’t have such insurance one might not bother to sue, although it does happen. You might get their house. Almost any contract for professional services with any big client (where they dictate the terms) will require that you show proof of current insurance up to a specified level. This is in addition to public liability insurance.
Correct. I have some of that insurance now, the premium is $1000 a year for a million in coverage. This tells me that lawsuits of individual engineers are vanishingly rare. Moreover, salaried engineers - who I suspect tend to be the people who suck more often, because contract engineers like myself don’t even get paid if our stuff doesn’t work - are protected by their employer.
Indeed, if you have an employer that will have much more serious insurance. My point is about incompetence and legal liability, and rotten education.
If you really were pretty dumb, but were able to make it through an engineering degree by, say, just a good memory, and the examinations were not really geared to test true understanding. You then go out and start working as a consulting engineer. You do a few jobs, and really, you don’t do a very good job, and you know you really can’t hack it. You have a paper trail of things that you have stuffed up, and maybe even correspondence that makes it clear that you know you really are not on top of the game. But you take another contract, make yet another mistake, and someone gets killed, or something really expensive and bad happens. What next? Well you get sued. Normally as an engineer you should have done a good job, and a very solid defence is one of industry best practise, standards adhered to, process etc. But you don’t have that, you didn’t do it right, and you knew that you didn’t have the skills to even know if you did it right, and there is a paper trail that says you knew. Different story. You are really fraudulently representing your capabilities. One of the key aspects of engineering practice and ethics is to never take on work that is outside of your competence, even if you have a bit of paper that notionally says you are qualified.
VW knew that the engines didn’t make the claimed performance specs. They had gamed the system, and they knew they had cheated. That is fraud.
This did publicize how weak the government tests were. This would be like the professor giving closed-book tests but allowing you to take the test home. Of course people will cheat and it’s naive to think they won’t. And even the honest people would be forced to cheat because otherwise they would be at a disadvantage.
The government tests should be structured in such a way to gauge emissions and make this type of cheating not possible. Part of the test can be static on the dyno, but other parts should involve some level of real-world driving to ensure the results are similar in both cases.
VW’s “defeat device” is explicitly prohibited under the Clean Air Act. The analogy would be if you went to a test where calculators were excitability prohibited and hid a calculator in your pants. It’s pretty cut and dried and VW isn’t disputing these facts at all. The EPA was lax in testing all the cars on the market because to cheat in the way that VW did would be pretty easily discovered (e.g. any of VW’s competitors could easily have bought a VW diesel and tested it themselves to find out how VW was meeting these strict standards that their own engineers seemed incapable of meeting) and monumentally stupid given the penalties, but apparently they underestimated VW.
Yeah, really. The government should have just bought a random car at a real dealership, drove it around with an emission sensor up the real tailpipe, and then resold the car or kept it. (knowing the government, they’d want to keep it in a warehouse as evidence, but the government can afford to spend 30k like that)
No, it’s not. Fraud requres, among other things, an objectively false statement, knowledge that the statement was false, and reasonable reliance by the victim. What false statement did VW make? If it was a statement to the effect that their cars were emissions-compliant, then obviously we can see that the US government did not reasonably rely on that statement, as otherwise they would not have actually gone ahead and, you know, actually tested the cars. The fact that the government went ahead with testing actually shows that they weren’t convinced that the cars really were compliant. The fact that the government did do testing shows either that no such statements were made by VW, or that statements were made but were not believed by the victim. Either of those circumstances negates the existence of fraud.
I still don’t agree that the analogy holds. If a medical student enrolls in a Pharmacology course whose syllabus says “In this course, the students shall master the use of and selection of prescribeable drugs”, but notices that the syllabus also says that the final grade will be based on a 50-question multiple choice test and thus decides to take a gamble and memorize the top 100 most frequently prescribed drugs and their uses according to the Physician’s Desk Reference and hope for a C-, then sure, he’ll probably be a crappy doctor (who might lose his medical license for incompetence because he keeps prescribing Prozac for everything), but he didn’t cheat in such a way that he could lose his credits or degree. If I am taking a multiple choice test and don’t know the answer to Question 23 and decide to guess, have I been dishonest? Am I required to disclose my uncertainty to the instructor?
The student obviously didn’t commit fraud, since the school didn’t rely on lies made by the student. If the student had used bald-faced lies to trick the school into believing that he was already competent, then the school would not have had any reason to give him the final exam, and would have considered giving the exam to be an insult.
Ignorantia juris non excusat.
robert_columbia, you seem to be arguing that the very fact that the gov’t tests cars to verify the manufacturer’s compliance claims, demonstrates that the gov’t wasn’t relying on those claims. (Because if it were, then why do the test & verify exercise?) While, OTOH, if the gov’t really did rely on the mfg’s claims, it would have seen no reason to test & verify, but it would also therefore have never caught the fraud.
Note, in the specific case of this VW fraud:
[ul][li] Apparently, some large number of vehicles were sold (and are now out there on the roads), before the fraud was caught. How could that have happened? Presumably because the gov’t had somehow trusted (relied) on VW’s compliance claims.[/li][li] Gaming their cars to falsely pass those tests is a form of deliberate lie, and the gov’t relied on VW’s cars to not deliberately falsify those tests.[/li][li] If I remember reading it right, the fraud was first noticed and reported by someone outside of the gov’t. (Am I remembering that right?) This shows that the fraud against the gov’t was successful, and the gov’t did rely on its own tests (and thus, on VW’s compliance with those tests), only to be put wise by some outside agency.[/ul][/li]So the argument that this was NOT a fraud falls flat any way you want to cut it.
The EPA is lax in testing all cars on the market because they can’t afford to. That’s like asking the IRS to audit every single tax return, or trying to put a cop on every single street corner. Instead, they test some small percentage of every model-year (something like 15%); some of this is selected at random, and some are chosen because of direct suspicion of some sort. I don’t know when/whether the EPA ever tested any of VW’s cheater vehicles - and if they did, it would have been on a chassis dyno, unless there was suspicion of a defeat device.
Bottom line, it’s likely that in at least some model years, the EPA was relying on VW’s word that their vehicles were passing chassis-dyno tests - and clearly in all model years (until very recently), the EPA was relying on VW’s word that there was no illegal defeat device involved.
Yes. Some researchers at West Virginia University wanted to show how clean late-model diesel passenger cars are, so they road-tested (rather than dyno-tested) a VW and discovered that NOx levels were far higher than expected. They got pretty repeatable results, and eventually notified CARB and EPA.
No, because they’d run the EPA test drive cycle, and the VW PCM would have gone into “cheat” mode.