EPA caught VW cheating - how does the car know it's being tested?

Actually, the USA chief said "we screwed up". The Germany chief is just "endlessly sorry".

I realize some things are "political", but is *this* issue really a "congressional" issue?

Isn't it simply that CARB & the EPA have procedures which are backed up by force of law (admittedly, made by Congress), which VW broke?

I wonder, out loud, how many people inside of VW knew about this?

Do you think it was a small cadre? Or basically everyone?

In a corporation that size, even a small cadre could have been 20 to 50 engineers. Someone had to come up with the idea, design, build, test, and approve everything. The guys on the line installing would probably have no idea, just another part. Higher level in engineering would know.

That was tongue and cheek. But a congressional committee can investigate a ham sandwich if they please.

Actually the fuel mapping would be the reverse of that. Running rich on a diesel reduces NOx because the extra fuel cools the burn. Lean it out and create more heat and you get higher NOx.

This is the reason why 99% of the VW owners bragged about getting better mpg numbers than the EPA tests as well.

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Steve W.

The only real change is in the code map in the ECM. They basically had a "normal" map for constant driving and a "test map" that only engaged when undergoing tests. I would bet it took fewer that 10 people to do the entire thing.

You need to consider that the engineers already know how to make the engine run and get good mileage and wrote the software to do that. However that programming didn't pass the EPA testing.

The actual program change is easy. It could be hidden just about anywhere but is likely very simple. Something like IF the engine is running at XXX rpm but there is a connector in the OBD test port, with no input from the steering rack and the parking brake is set, add 2% fuel enrichment to the drive cycle.

Extra fuel cools the fuel burn and drops the NOx to legal limits. Car passes.

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Steve W.

The CEO of VW is stepping down.

It's too bad he's German. We might run out of candidates for U.S. President.

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Using Opera's mail client:

The VW case is a conspicuous textbook example of how and why emissions testing is a doomed to failure approach similar to solving drug abuse by arresting individual users. As even the admitted guilty party have undeniably exposed, emissions control MUST be properly addressed at the point of manufacture.

The VW case is a conspicuous textbook example of how and why emissions testing is a doomed to failure approach similar to solving drug abuse by arresting individual users. As even the admitted guilty party have undeniably exposed, emissions control MUST be properly addressed at the point of manufacture.

Thanks for explaining.

I just wonder why many people think EVERYTHING is caused by one party or the other.

In this case, VW simply cheated. They broke laws on purpose. And they repeatedly lied (probably to avoid detection).

All to make money. At the expense of everyone else.

If I was a competitor, I'd be livid that I had to spend money to meet a standard that VW didn't even bother to meet, and yet profited for years by not meeting.

I don't know how VW works, but, in one newspaper, they "speculated" that this kind of cheat had to be approved at the top level.

But don't you think the code, which clearly had legal implications known to all involved, would have to be signed off at the highest level?

That's an interesting observation!

Not so sure about that. There is probably an exemption for law enforcement purposes.

Plus the fact it is really not worth copyrighting. It's not like Microsoft Office or anything, all it does is engine control.

That's assuming none of the other auto makers pull(ed) the same trick. I think this is the tip of an iceberg...

John :-#)#

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Pick up a history book sometime and see what a "goof" it is. Government has always been a criminal enterprise whose primary activities have been theft, extortion, murder, and slavery.

Volkswagen lied, but they lied to a motley collection of liars, thieves, thugs and other miscreants. (As a practical matter, the total emissions are still very low with no actual effect on air quality vs. the arbitrary EPA "standard." The environmentalist crowd has never really grokked the concept of "diminishing returns" or the fact that causing a vehicle to use more fuel just shifts emissions elswhere to provide the extra fuel.)

Screw the EPA and the horse they rode in on (the federal beast). The best comment I saw on the VW situation was this on a political site:

Translation: Slaves rebel; caught trying to escape from The Plantation. Massa plans to whip their asses.

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  Roger Blake (Change "invalid" to "com" for email. Google Groups killfiled.) 

  NSA sedition and treason -- http://www.DeathToNSAthugs.com 
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This reads more like a comedy routine than a serious protest.

Screw the lead, asbestos and dioxin, full speed ahead.

That much is true, Felipe Massa always hopes to beat every driver.

Yes. The real mystery here is who implemented this and who all knew about it. I think they have to run the cars on test tracks for 50 or

60K miles to verify they system holds up but even if not, surely during development of any engine system they must run them fully instrumented for quite a while to see what the "real world" results look like as well as how well the "lab strategy" works in the field. Surely *someone* at VW must have noticed that when they tested instrumented vehicles on the road they were not meeting emissions standards. It's inconceivable they never tested these "in the wild" but only tested them back at the shop on the dynamometer and the "switch" kept those engineers from seeing that things weren't as they should be.