I agree with this. He may be guilty as hell, but he may not be. I know someone, let’s call them “B,” who was an executive at a corporation that got busted for fraud. There were lots of people involved and it happened in B’s department with people in their oversight.
B should have known, but other executives had hatched the fraud idea and cut B out of the loop. The employees were giving B “hunky dory” reports and they weren’t the type of thing an executive would normally dig into. The first hint B had that something was wrong was when the FBI raided the place.
If a CEO is not held responsible for all the wrongful things his company does, then he has no motive to prevent wrongful things. His best course of action would be to sit in his office and encourage people to do things behind his back.
But if you fire the boss for all mistakes, even the ones he doesn’t know about, he’ll get out of his office and go looking for mistakes and stopping them.
I think it’s pretty clear from the fact that VW hasn’t said “an outside contractor did this” that it was done in-house. And it can’t be a rogue programmer because the effect of the cheat is so huge. This wasn’t an optimization that yielded a 2% gain. This took cars which were spewing garbage and made them test as if they were fine. The people who do the testing would have noticed that the cars were suddenly much cleaner. They wouldn’t have said “Yay! They failed yesterday but they pass today so all is good”. They would have said “There’s got to be something wrong with our testing equipment because the cars which failed so miserably yesterday now pass.” Then they would find that the testing equipment is fine and report the results to engineering, who would say “We didn’t do anything that would account for such a dramatic improvement.” And then they would hunt it down, find the hack, remove it, and fire the guy who did it. To do this without being caught implies a conspiracy. Was the whole company in on it? I doubt it. But a lot of people had to know about it and allow it.
I don’t think you understand how huge an operation this must have been. Its not just programming. The car detects the difference between when its being driven for real, and when its being tested. Then it adjusts the combustion to lower emissions significantly when in the second more. That involves, programming, sensors and the mechanical combustion system.
Then you got the guys testing the finished models. And the other engineers who’ll ask “How did you DO that?” when the news of the improved emissions break. At the very least this has to have involved teams of programming, mechanical/chemical engineering, testing and sensors. Who made a system with no purpose but to defraud emissions regulations. And carried on for years across changes of employees and management.
Where did the budget for setting this up -designing it, testing it etc come from?
If he wasn’t aware of this, half his company where running an illegal fraud scheme under his nose, and siphoning off funds for it without him catching it.
I find conspiracies with thousands of employees hard to swallow in general. I’m betting it will be much smaller.
That article claims it could be as simple as a single line of code. There definitely wouldn’t need to be a custom engineered and developed sensors, modern cars know when they’re being driven.
Some articles say it was done by detecting movement in the steering wheel, which would work, but I don’t think that’s been proven. The hood sensor is a possibility and much simpler to envision. On many cars, when you open the hood, a little light comes on to show the hood is open. One line of code could turn the emissions system on and off in sync with that light. It would be interesting to know if the VW diesels have that hood sensor and, if so, when it was introduced.
According to this article, heads are going to start rolling tomorrow. At least 4 execs, including the head of VW’s US division, will be getting the axe.
The US guy puzzles me a bit. I don’t think any of the engineering is done in the US, and from what I’ve read elsewhere this guy has been on the job for less than 2 years. The choice of the head of their Czech division to replace him really puzzles me. That’s like hiring the head of a little mom & pop store as your CEO.
I’m not sure a pink slip is as big a fear as an orange jump suit.
After the Peanut guy got hammered yesterday(granted not by the EPA, and not a foreigner) I bet there are some bricks going down the executive toilet while people count up what 37000 counts of polluting adds up to.
He’s not like a Captain who is sailing into a storm, he is like a Captain who is sailing so close to the shore that the ship tips over.
He is an engineer and the former head of R&D, not a clueless accountant. I don’t know if he knew or not, but clearly the executive committee who no doubt strongly recommended that he retire did not consider him blameless.
This kind of thing, on the finance side, is why we have SarbOx. CEOs cannot benefit from fraud and then claim they were clueless.
There are two things wrong with this. First, the code was put in to sell more cars. The benefit to VW of the code is to let the diesel cars pass emissions at lower performance and go on the road with higher performance that violates the emissions standards. Why would an outsider care about VW’s bottom line?
Second, even if some rogue contractor put in some bad code, VW insiders had better review every line they get from them. Bad automobile software can kill people. You don’t hack together some code and throw it in a car.
Plus, this stuff is in 11 million cars, so clearly stayed in many, many revs of the code.
Skoda is not VW’s “Czech division”, that’s like saying Mazda was Ford’s “Japanese division”. they are a brand of significant size with a big market presence in many countries.
Count me as another one who was surprised at the amount of discipline that VW apparently instills in their employees. I would think any normal engineer would have drunkenly spilled the beans about those chumps at the EPA that they’ve been hoodwinking for 8 years to some well endowed female journalist long before things got so bad.
Its a nice thought, but in the real world why would the CEO hang around for 5 years without pay?
Modern cars know when they are driven because of those sensors. And you know what part fails the most on modern cars? The sensors.
Say for example it was nothing but a hood sensor. I guarantee that on some percentage of vehicles that sensor fails and falsely tells the ECU that the hood is open. When this happens the effect will be a decrease in the vehicle fuel efficiency, because now the correct emissions technology is working all the time. The customer will complain about the warning light for the sensor and the fact that their car isn’t running right, it seems more sluggish and heavy on fuel than normal.
Mechanics will go do their thing, techline will do their thing, and eventually word will spread about the link between the sensor and the strange fact that the vehicle runs differently when the hood sensor fails.
Again, we know our vehicles, and I guarantee the VW guys know theirs. Whatever the technical details of this case I also guarantee that it wasn’t a few rogue engineers that programmed a nifty feature, this was known about right to the top.
Imagine it is 2008. George Bush has invaded Iraq and it’s all gone to pot. A huge mess with no clear end in sight. Would you vote to re-elect George Bush because he’s got all the experience of being in the shitstorm and surely knows how to get the United States out of that mess, or do you want someone else in charge who didn’t make a horrible, awful, truly bad decision in the first place?
Like others have said, I think people are not actually understanding the scale of this at all. VW made 11 million vehicles that grossly exceed pollution limits, but claimed that they did much better than those limits. They claimed that the engines did this while maintaining quite high performance, and without the use of a liquid that other diesel manufacturers (like Mercedes) use to achieve the same results. And VW charged a few thousand dollars premium for this magical engine that had high performance, very low emissions, and no extra maintenance required. And again, they sold 11 million of these cars.
This isn’t like the case where another car company claimed its hybrid got 50 mpg, but most people only got 40 mpg. This is more like advertising a car as being a hybrid, and when people bought it, the car actually had no battery in it at all - just a regular gas engine.
I wonder how their competitors didn’t notice this and squeal.
I mean, with the kind of performance WW claimed, without the additives other diesel engines use, surely their competition would be all over those engines to figure out what they were doing?
My problem is that the resignation is an empty gesture. The CEO resigns with a huge golden parachute and lives on a beach somewhere with no real repercussions while someone else picks up the pieces. Does the company at least get to sue him for malfeasance?