
German regulator says it discovered new illegal software on Daimler diesels - Tomte
https://www.wsj.com/articles/daimler-slashes-outlook-on-fresh-diesel-allegations-11561367960?mod=rsswn
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legitster
This is further proof that everyone was doing it.

There are so many valuable lessons to takeaway from this, but weirdly for me,
it's to _never depend on innovation_. Especially _specific_ innovation.

It's important to remember that everyone a decade ago was riding high about
the potential for diesel. Consumers, car producers, and regulators. And
everyone was making promises about how good diesel was going to get - based on
the expectation that you can just dump resources into a certain technology and
get innovation, magically and predictably. But it feels like everyone just hit
the innate limitation of the resource and tried to pretend it didn't exist.

~~~
pedrocr
This is such a defeatist attitude that lets VW off the hook. We may yet find
that everyone was doing it but this isn't it. No one has been found to be
doing large-scale cheating like VW so far. And the technology to make diesel
cleaner has always been there. The VW scandal is exactly that they cheated to
make the cars cheaper by avoiding having extra emissions hardware. Even after
all the scrutiny diesel cars are still being sold and as far as we know pass
emissions.

~~~
Retric
Not just hardware but also just using less adblue fluid.

That seems even crazier on the surface. Let’s kill a few people so our users
don’t have to refill a tank as often.

~~~
legitster
Yeah, I scratch my head on that one. Is a DEF system that expensive for the
end user? It seems like it would have been a trivial thing to include.

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deogeo
Isn't it about time all software/hardware in cars should be required to be
open-source? There should be no room for secret functionality on something as
pervasive and dangerous as cars and trucks. Especially if it's also kept
secret from their supposed owners.

~~~
londons_explore
Yes, but that won't solve the issue.

The issue is regulators write regulations for one thing, but want a subtly
different thing.

If you and I start a game of poker, but rather than winning through skill, I
call the FBI and get them to search all your cards, have I broken the rules of
poker? It wasn't a written rule not to call the FBI...

Regulators across the world have similar gaps in the rules, and both humans
and automated design tools will start to exploit them, possibly unknowingly.
Instead they need to make far more watertight rules. They should simply
require all cars to measure their own emissions, and bill the companies for
any cars which either mis-measure emissions, or measure more emissions in
their lifetime than an allowed limit. Then manufacturers will have an
incentive to upgrade cars in the field.

~~~
mikeash
“It wasn't a written rule not to call the FBI...”

But it _was_ a written rule not to use a defeat device.

This isn’t a case where manufacturers found a loophole and regulators got
upset because they wanted manufacturers to obey the spirit of the rules rather
than just the letter. This is a case of manufacturers blatantly breaking the
explicit written rules.

~~~
londons_explore
Same thing.

If I am designing a printer and you say "it must be able to output 10 pages
per minute printing black and white text, and make it as light as possible",
then I, the printer designer go to work, tweaking the design of the printer to
meet that goal, while keeping the weight down.

Seeing nothing about the color printing speed, I don't care about that. It's
just black and white speed that matters! I make the black cartridge super fast
and super wide. Whoa - gotta keep the weight down! Oh well - I'll make this
colour cartridge smaller/cheaper/slower/lighter.

Suddenly, we have a printer that does 10ppm of black and white, and only
0.1ppm of colour, because it has to crawl along.

We now have a 'defeat device'. It performs great in test conditions (black and
white text), and badly in general use (colour pages are common).

Did the designer explicitly make a defeat device? Not really... They just only
made it work well in the test conditions, and performance in all other
conditions suffered.

~~~
chmod775
This analogy is just _wrong_ \- as in completely incorrect.

Car makers didn't optimize what they were told to optimize for, they optimized
for the test they knew the regulators would perform.

A correct analogy would be you telling manufacturers, "the printer must use at
most X grams of ink per square centimeter", but then they go and only optimize
it for the specific test printouts you will do. In truth their printer is
exceeding that threshold just so they can also advertise higher printing
speeds.

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sschueller
With these OTA updates how can regulators determine if there was "illegal"
software on a car?

Daimler doesn't do OTA but Tesla for example could remove autopilot code in an
update that caused a death and there would be no way to test for it without
getting access to the old firmware or source code. Tesla would not hand those
out without court order which would require suspicion.

~~~
vkou
> With these OTA updates how can regulators determine if there was "illegal"
> software on a car?

Raid an office, check the source repo and the release log, question engineers,
asking questions about what was pushed out OTA, and what wasn't. If your
company did not keep such audit and repo logs, you are probably not SOX-
compliant (Or the european equivalent thereof), and they should assume the
worst in your intent.

Regulators and police aren't some kind of unthawed-from-the-ice-age caveman
lawyers. They have as many tools to answer this question as any engineer
working at these firms.

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jonnycomputer
So, the software in question was no longer in production by 2015, the year
that VW got busted. Makes one wonder. Maybe regulation is effective?

~~~
martin_bech
Or it wasnt needed any more. Some of these cheats, are to protect the engine,
in certain scenarios, these might not be needed, with newer engine designs.

~~~
ladberg
Damn it's Christopher Walken!

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olivermarks
It's a nightmare for car manufacturers right now - they had a gun held to
their heads in europe to go diesel, then the politicians changed their minds
and decided to push EV despite there being little effort made to create viable
supporting grid infrastructure. Jaguar Landrover bet big on diesel and are
digging out, but the chances of recovering from the diesel debacle while
succeeding at innovating EVs is slim. Meanwhile dozens of Chinese EV firms are
going to the wall, despite China being the big transportation growth market

~~~
fasicle
Jaguar Land Rover even built a huge diesel manufacturing facility [1],
finished in 2014. I visited it around that time, the site was very impressive
but cost them a huge amount of money.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_Manufacturing_Centre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_Manufacturing_Centre)

~~~
olivermarks
Tata have been wonderful stewards of Jaguar heritage, it's disheartening to
see the whipsawing they have been getting from the EU

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JorgeGT
> _The KBA believes that a coolant thermostat that is activated during normal
> driving to protect engine parts in [sic] an illegal defeat device_

This badly written line is the only technical information in the article.
Since a thermostat is only a temperature sensor, I don't get how it
constitutes a defeat device of any type. I also don't get how activating a
sensor to read coolant temperature _protects_ anything. And why would an
installed sensor be turned off anyway?

~~~
Glawen
The wsj has too few infos, however if you can read german, there are very
detailed articles:

[https://www.sueddeutsche.de/auto/daimler-mercedes-glk-
rueckr...](https://www.sueddeutsche.de/auto/daimler-mercedes-glk-rueckruf-
kraftfahrtbundesamt-1.4495109)

As i understand it, the motor seemed to artificially open the thermostat to
keep the engine colder than usual. Now my guess, as an automotive engineer, is
that they did this to reduce the time where the engine is in the normal
operating range. It makes no sense to me, unless the emissions test only
applies when the engine is in normal temperature. Or, second guess, as the
engine is colder, it emits less NOx, because NOx appear when the combustion
temperature is too high.

Or simpler: the thing activates when the coolant is 20 deg celsius, the
starting temperature of the test

~~~
toast0
> Or, second guess, as the engine is colder, it emits less NOx, because NOx
> appear when the combustion temperature is too high.

That's a major issue. NOx emissions are caused by engine heat interacting with
nitrogen and oxygen from outside air, which gets you to a nasty trade-off. Run
the engine hotter and get more efficient combustion, therefore less CO2
emissions; or run the engine cooler and get less NOx emissions. By design,
Diesel engines combustion happens at much higher pressure and temperature than
gasoline engines, which is why diesels produce much more NOx.

Diesel emission fluid can reduce NOx, but also reduces efficiency, meaning
more CO2 will be released.

~~~
Glawen
True, it is a constant compromise that the engine is doing at each injection.

For the article, i think the journalists just didn't understand the
explanation, and it is probably the simpler solution : they enabled the
emission cleaning algorithm when the coolant at startup is 23 degrees, so
clearly a defeating device.

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intopieces
>The US Environmental Protection Agency accused VW Group of including illegal
software on its diesel vehicles to ensure that the diesels would pass
emissions limits imposed by the US.

Is this worded correctly? I thought the issue was that the software detected
when it was being tested and then output emissions that were substantially
less than during normal operation.

This sentence from the article makes it sound like the software made the
emissions be under the limit all the time.

~~~
chabes
> This sentence from the article makes it sound like the software made the
> emissions be under the limit all the time.

The use of the word “pass” leads me to assume that it’s referring to levels
when being tested

> ...would PASS emissions limits imposed by the US.

(Emphasis added by me)

~~~
dmurray
It's worded poorly and should say "would pass emissions TESTS...", I think.
What does it even mean to pass a limit?

~~~
mitchty
Not to exceed it. Aka your limit is 500ppm, passing the limit means you did
not exceed the limit.

~~~
dmurray
That's not English.

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kall1sto
As a german I sometimes have the feeling that our automobile industry has more
advanced software than the government.

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pkaye
Rogue engineer strikes again!

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techrich
Some people need some serious prison time to put a stop to this.

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eisa01
Why isn’t there an EU wide recall?

I though the type approval was EU wide

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dang
Url changed from [https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/06/german-regulator-
says-i...](https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/06/german-regulator-says-it-
discovered-new-illegal-software-on-daimler-diesels/), which points to this.

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theredbox
I dont see the reason why sw should be open source.

~~~
alexandernst
Neither hardware IMHO.

Unless, you could somehow prevent competitors from stealing I+D. Which you
can't. So closed source it is (that makes things harder for competitors).

~~~
adrianN
You prevent competitors from stealing by requiring them to open source their
stuff too.

~~~
alexandernst
Yes, that will be a complete success with anything coming from/going to China.
Because we all know that they respect IP.

~~~
adrianN
If they want to sell their cars Germany they'd have to open source their code.
I see no problem.

