Feds cuff VW exec over diesel emissions scam The FBI has arrested a senior Volkswagen executive for allegedly coordinating a cover-up over its diesel emissions cheating. Oliver Schmidt was nabbed in Florida over the weekend. He is expected to appear in court in Detroit on Monday on charges of defrauding the United States. A court filing [PDF] lodged by the Feds in the …
"The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success."
Seems VW still following the rulebook of their political founders.
...and all of this wrapped up in the American legal system where you very publicly "arrest" someone and make sure the papers carry your one sided view of what happened just to make sure of a "fair" trial.
I'm not saying VAG did nothing wrong but I doubt we'll find out what really went on.
I'm not saying VAG did nothing wrong but I doubt we'll find out what really went on.
Since they are about to pay a stonking great fine, pay big sums in owner compensation, and senior execs have resigned, I think VW have effectively admitted their guilt, don't you? There are some questions as to whether in the letter of the law VW really did anything wrong, but given the fall-out so far I'd suggest that such niceties are all but irrelevant.
>>I'm not saying VAG did nothing wrong but I doubt we'll find out what really went on.
I think we can reconstruct the most likely scenario of what occurred:
--------
VW upper execs told their engineering team that they need better performance AND better emissions. Engineering team told their middle management to pick one, but not both. One hapless engineer then joked about programming the computer to act a certain way depending on if it's being tested or not during a meeting. Management heard this and told them to do it. The engineer then posited that this was likely illegal. To which management responded by saying to just work it out and that the legal department would worry about whether to deploy it.
At this point it gets fuzzy. Of course management would never have emailed Legal asking for their blessing so if such a conversation happened it was in the elevator or at the pub. Then again, this conversation might not have taken place because any lawyer worth a damn would have gone to the CEO to talk about "exposure" and "liability" and that perhaps this manager would be happier in a different position...
In any case, management would have had an elevator conversation with the engineer telling him that legal had blessed the whole thing and to just stick with the things he knows. After all, laws are complex and there are loopholes everywhere... idiot engineer takes this as gospel and makes it happen.
--------
The engineer then posited that this was likely illegal.
I work for a German based, German managed company. On the basis of my experience there's ZERO chance of a few bad apples, or of engineers giving legal opinions. I suspect a huge misjudgement, that VW had engineering and proper legal opinion, and hoped that by meeting the letter of the test standard they'd comply with the law.
So the law says "meet this test under these conditions" and VW did that, exploiting the fact that the law didn't exactly say "...without fucking around to create a static test mode or other dodge that is wholly unrepresentative of the real world".
I must say, this kerfuffle hasn't dented my view of VW. In fact, I bought a VW group car AFTER dieselgate had broken, and against my high expectations for a mid-range car, it has surpassed them. As it happens, it wasn't a diesel, but that reflected a pre-held view that diesels are now too expensive and too complex to justify the additional economy, and curiously enough its those cost and complexity issues that seem to be at the heart of the matter. If my car gets stolen tonight, it'll be replaced with a similar VW group car the moment the insurers pay up.
It's a good start, but won't be over till ex CEO Winterkorn is in jail - BILD documents show he knew about the coverup and it needed his stamp to be so widespread.
Not that I expect that since he can just buy his way out, especially in the EU (it's bad enough in the US, but there is at least one exec in handcuffs).
Yes the EU is very susceptible to being "bought", just look at how well it worked for Microsoft and all the other firms who've been fined one way or another.
The problem in the EU is that it appears that VW didn't break the law, just that the law was badly written.
"The problem in the EU is that it appears that VW didn't break the law, just that the law was badly written."
What law are you talking about? I hope it's not this myth that cars only had to perform to a certain level under testing and so you could manipulate it if you used specific conditions in testing as that is not true.
VW broke the law in the EU and certain countries (like the UK) are now being pursued by the EU for failing to take action against them.
"Err, are you unable to drive a search engine?"
Interesting retort, but you seem unable to add a link to a post. Have a look at this http://lmgtfy.com/?q=add+a+html+link
Either way your attempted link points to a news article not a law and doesn't and it doesn't reference a particular law, just a testing regime. So the question stands, what particular law is badly written - because VW did break the law on emissions testing and the law which you would seem to refer to specifically outlaws so-called 'defeat devices'.
A Google search for "what law did VW not break" could result in a compendium of laws such as murder, GBH, prohibited fishing, running a brothel etc, but I presume the OP had a particular law in mind.
Meanwhile the UK government does nothing.
Anyone know what the "official" penalty in the UK is for cheating the emissions regulations? I don't, and I suppose that it is not impossible that the penalty is, er, not much.
I suspect that HMG is keeping its powder dry as a bargaining chip for the Negotiations That Must Not Be Named, rather than upsetting the German government and industry before The Article That Must Not Be Named is signed.
HMG may be content to allow VW owners to pursuse VW in a Class Action, although not being a lawyer I'm not sure what its substantive basis will be. Fraud? Maybe, but I have a feeling that unless owners can demonstrate a loss of some sort that idea may not work. I'm not sure that "my car does not meet its emissions specification under real driving conditions" would be seen as grounds for being compensated; where is the "loss"?
Ha; got away without mentioning Brexit!
Oh bugger...
You can google it, the fraud is that owners paid extra for "clean" diesel and didn't get that. So they lost that extra money. In the US, owners also got compensated for the lower resale value when the issue became public. There's some complaints about people having sold the cars cheap, and the new owners unjustly enriched getting the free money.
There is actually a more serious problem besides the 'clean diesel' and 'poor resale value'. Since those vehicles did not meet US emissions, it was illegal to import them into the US. They were approved officially, but under fraudulent circumstances. All involved are lucky the federal government hasn't come by and scrapped all these cars. US auto companies have been forbidden to sell diesel cars in the US because they didn't meet US emissions. The reason these emissions were so stringent is because 'the Germans can do it". Ford, GM, and Chrysler should all sue VW for loss of marketshare due to this fraud. Chrysler, for example, was forbidden from importing several diesel vehicles it sells in Europe because they didn't meet US emissions. That cost them marketshare and money that went to VW.
"urea-based system success ..."
I don't think that assumption warrants belief. No-one has said "how deep" the cover-up goes, but perhaps all diesel scrubbing tech is fundamentally flawed, in one way or another. I believe that MB is being investigated in the US for performance & compliance issues, similiar to VW. Urea is a relatively recent development, and companies seem to have shifted to it as a last resort.
The Civil Service Motoring Association (CSMA) magazine did a small piece on dieselgate and in it they stated the UK Govt knew a car manufacturer was fiddling the diesel emissions tests and it was not a VAG car.
So which car manufacturer was it? Maybe you should look over the pond to start your investigation....
In the mean time, I cant help but think the US Authorities have the wrong Schmidt in custody for covering up crimes. Perhaps this guilty person has a first name called Eric!
I got a new company car a few months ago. The specs on the website claimed 80mpg. I'm struggling to get 60mpg average when with the previous car, claimed 60mpg, often got 65mpg+. In particular, over the Xmas break where it was all short urban trips barely getting the engine up to running temp, fuel consumption was more like 45mpg when I would have expected 50mpg+ as with the previous car.
Same make model, but a slightly bigger engine. Not bigger enough to give such a drop in mpg though.
So, is anyone investigating other brands of car outside of VAG?
Kia, since you ask and no, nothing "blu" related in the name or specs.
What about all those other cars (especially SUVs) that belch out smoke and stink? Take a walk along any major inner city road and just watch and smell - the problem goes way beyond VW. I assume all those cars need their engine 'protected' when the accelerator is pressed. Maybe it's time everyone grew up and realized that you cannot drive a 3-ton truck with zero emissions. If it looks too good to be true ...
This is the problem with "real world driving"... people don't drive the same way or under the same circumstances.
I've no particular tie to VW and have owned cars from many brands over the years. By chance three of the last four have been VAG. Two of those three generally do the official mpg or sometimes better about 75% of the time. The third car did about 30% worse than the official mpg.
I've had to adapt the way I drive to get the best mpg (I refuse to become to severe and tend to drive near the speed limit where possible and I don't accelerate like a snail!). It took several months of experimenting with different ways of driving.
Other people I've spoken to roughly match the official mpg with little effort and yet others get nowhere near. It doesn't seem to depend on the make of car.
Why do mega corporations like GM and VW get to make these defective (and in the case of GM, deadly) cars, then blame lower-level employees while saying those "in charge" are blameless. Just because you're too ignorant to notice the defect (or just pretending you were) shouldn't excuse you from the guilt of managing a company that ignored or purposefully engineered faulty vehicles. Why does the captain of a corporation never have to go down with the ship?
If corporations are people, isn't the CEO the head?
Got a lovely issue with Ford Kugas in South Africa atm. Seems some models will spontaneously combust on the highway, to tl:dr it.
Ford SA, of course, is taking their time. Already existing Kuga owners face a loss of 40% of their resale value.
Seems the motoring industry is in dire need of a shake down.
> Seems the motoring industry is in dire need of a shake down.
A shake down?
Over here shake down is a euphemism for blackmail. And a shake up is what is needed in the car industry. I was only eleven years old when I lived in ZA, and shake down was probably not in my vocabulary; if shake down is really the expression you lot use over there then I've learned something new.
Surely there's some mistake?
If convicted, maybe he could try a body double.
"The criminal malpractice which merely happened to benefit our company/organisation/nation was the work of a few junior employees acting entirely without the noble, honest leadership's knowledge or consent ..."
- until the evidence amply demonstrated we're a bunch of lying f***ing crooks, of course.
All manufacturers have been fudging their cars to perform well in the tests, it's just that VW have bee caught out with their software which blatantly detected when it was on a rolling road and made very large changes to the way the car operated (dumped a big load of pig piss into the exhaust I believe, much more than it did on the road).
But they're all at it in some way. Plenty of cars are now advertised with a disclaimer that the mpg is a lab figure. If anything they're getting worse not better.Of my last 3 cars the oldest two I could beat the lab figures by a small margin, that latest one claims 69mpg and I can't get any more than 52mpg.
Motorbikes (not sure about current ones) used to have a flat spot in the power profile of the engine and that was mapped in to the point in the rev range where they did the noise testing in the lab.
Was Kia not sued in the states for misrepresenting mpg figures recently as well and Fiat was allegedly making people sign disclaimers when they bought their TwinAir engined cars that they wouldn't sue when they found out how bad the real world mpg was.
The sad thing is that the lab tests are driving cars to be made which get great mpg in the lab but much worse real world mpg that more powerful and allegedly polluting cars.
"dumped a big load of pig piss into the exhaust I believe, much more than it did on the road"
That'd be none and none, respectively. VW boasted that their new engines are so bloody marvelous and do not need AdBlue tanks. Emission control was supposedly achieved in ICU software. Well, yes, in some way it was, except...
Other makers are using piss tanks. So no, they're not "all at it". If others are scamming, then these are different scams.
Opel have been caught with something slightly more subtle. It only operates it's emission controls in a very narrow temperature range which luckily coincide with lab conditions. It doesn't operate whilst revving beyond 2400 rpm which again luckily isn't needed in the lab. That it hops out the way when you give it the beans isn't surprising (safety first), but the fact it remains off even when the engine is just ticking over once the need for hard acceleration is done means that in real world city stop start driving you will likely disable the emission controls on pretty much every trip. That doesn't excuse VAG. There is enough criticism to go around.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
