
VW Presentation in 2006 Showed How to Foil Emissions Tests - abhi3
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/27/business/international/vw-presentation-in-06-showed-how-to-foil-emissions-tests.html?smid=tw-share&_r=1
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mjfern
Yes, the defeat device VW employed for emissions is an environmental tragedy,
but this is just a symptom of a much more central issue. That is, VW was
actively promoting technical and business leaders that lacked any sort of
moral compass. How can we have faith in global corporations and their (grossly
overpaid) leaders if these are the choices they're making and the examples
they're setting?

~~~
colechristensen
The 'trust but verify' model of your morality was broken. If you give the
opportunity to cheat, there will be cheaters. The emissions tests were bad and
made it easy to cheat.

Providing an environment which makes cheating easy and profitable is just as
morally corrupt as the cheating itself, and entirely more predictable and
preventable.

Solve solvable problems like bad testing and not unsolvable problems like
unscrupulous businessmen.

~~~
acranox
"Providing an environment which makes cheating easy and profitable is just as
morally corrupt as the cheating itself"

No, it isn't. This is called victim blaming. It is like saying not locking
your door is as morally corrupt as the thieves that walked into your unlocked
house.

We create standards for emissions. And companies should comply with the tests
even without the need for tests. We expect people should follow the laws, and
we should use the minimal amount of enforcement to get compliance. But it's
silly to blame the epa for poor tests. The vault is with VW for selling cars
that didn't comply with emissions standards.

~~~
darawk
The fault lies with _both_ of them. It is VW's responsibility to be moral and
comply with laws. It is the EPA's responsibility to catch those who attempt to
cheat. They both failed, in easily preventable ways. They are both at fault.

VW's management should be jailed, and the EPA should probably be reprimanded
or have someone fired for letting this go uncaught for so long.

~~~
tmptmp
Then we can as well say that the whole general public of USA has failed.
Because it is their responsibility (indirectly and ultimately) to see that the
legal and enforcement machinery works as expected. Let's see how do they (the
general public) behave now. Do they push heavily for severe punishment for
these criminals (both individual leaders and companies) or not?

Or do they keep mum even if the leaders (like the recently resigned VW ceo)
who not only got scot-free but also were rewarded millions if not billions of
dollars ultimately for such crimes by the company and its shareholders?

~~~
pessimizer
Or we might as well say all humanity has failed, or God has failed, if we're
going to ignore people's job descriptions, and their direct connection and
responsibility for the design of all systems involved.

~~~
tmptmp
I am not saying we should ignore people's job descriptions; in fact, I was
responding to one comment in the thread that was trying to put equal blame on
the EPA too.

But I want to bring out an important aspect here: if the USA (mainly its
people) fail to punish VW and its criminal leaders (along with the
shareholders who backed, rewarded those leaders) in an exemplary manner, then
some people will keep on blaming its capitalist economy based democracy for
being too soft on "big and rich" while punishing severely only "poor people"
even for smaller scale crimes.

The VW leaders should be put behind bars for something like 30 years and its
big shareholders (the ones holding more 0.1% of its total shares, say) be
punished monetarily by legally declaring their shares to be void. If US cannot
do this because Germany wouldn't allow it to do so, then USA should ban the VW
and all the companies associated with VW or its parent companies to do any
business in US.

What has currently happened with VW in the name of punishment is pure farce.
Its shares are still trading at non-zero positive value. And its leaders
enjoying multi-million dollars in rewards for the criminal behavior. The
justice has become farce in this case.

>>Or we might as well say all humanity has failed, or God has failed,

Yes, you can say so. But at least now we don't have a world-wide single state.
As a god or gods (whether he, she, it or they (multiple gods)) are concerned,
we don't know for sure whether the things called gods exist or not, so saying
god failed doesn't get us much far.

~~~
oarsinsync
There are those that are directly responsible (manufacturers, regulators), and
those that are indirectly responsible (the people in a state, shareholders in
a company, humanity, God, etc).

The people don't get to vote on specific issues, they get to vote on
representation. The people representing them are directly responsible. Hold
the people directly responsible to account, remove and replace if ineffective.

~~~
tmptmp
>>Hold the people directly responsible to account, remove and replace if
ineffective.

And who is going to do "that"? and what if those who are responsible to do
"that" don't do that? Then who is going to hold 'those' people who didn't do
anything to hold those people responsible for the VW? I mean somewhere down
the line, the general public must become active and show that it is not
sleeping altogether, if that doesn't happen, well, society as a whole has to
pay its price, and this price generally is very big, it can be so big that
society may be crushed under its weight.

My point is let's see how USA deals with this VW crime and the other important
criminal called Saudi Arabia for its role in 9/11\. The government and
enforcement agencies have already shown that they won't punish them much. So
it remains to see if the general public holds them accountable or not.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_So it remains to see if the general public holds them accountable or not._

That's not likely to happen. The American public is generally quite apathetic.

For example, one of the current leading candidates to become the next
president of the USA had the following good fortune a while ago[1]:

\- did not have any previous experience trading commodities futures

\- deposited less than $1000 in cash into a futures trading account

\- Made hundreds of trades. Each futures trade incurs a significant bid/ask
spread, much greater than stock trades. And yet: _Two-thirds of her trades
showed a profit by the end of the day she made them and 80 percent were
ultimately profitable. Many of her trades took place at or near the best
prices of the day._

\- cashed out for $100,000 nine months later

To me, that $100,000 was nothing more and nothing less than a bribe. And,
although corruption is endemic in many parts of the world, one would hope that
in the USA such obvious grift would unequivocally disqualify someone for the
office of the President.

But if you took a poll, probably 99% of the electorate wouldn't even be aware
of this little incident. And the majority probably wouldn't care.

So don't look for "the general public" to hold anyone accountable about
anything. That's no longer how this country works. Not in 2016, anyway.

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

~~~
tmptmp
Good post indeed.

>>So don't look for "the general public" to hold anyone accountable about
anything. That's no longer how this country works. Not in 2016, anyway.

It's sad. With all the "information age tools" at hand, we see that people are
just choosing to remain ignorant. Reminds me Huxley's brave new world [1]

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

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Aelinsaar
This level of criminality requires some kind of response, or really, lets just
drop the idea of crime as a concept and just monetize "justice". At least we
could dispense with some of the more galling hypocrisy, without changing how
the system works one iota.

~~~
thrownaway2424
Indeed, one wonders why the government (of the US or of Germany) continues to
tolerate the existence of this company at all. They've clearly conspired at
the executive level to mislead regulators. The corporation is a figment of the
government's imagination. It seems like the government should just stop
imagining it.

~~~
slededit
If the US were to push too hard they are at risk of souring relations with
Germany. For Germany the problem is damaging their own economy. In a democracy
a recession is an existential threat to the current government. That's much
scarier than a company flouting emissions standards.

~~~
tajen
It's not about shutting down VW, it's about jailing one person, the CEO. Or,
if he proves he wasn't aware or wasn't in control of his company, the lower
level of management, recursively. It will lightly hamper VW, but provide a
personal responsibility baseline for all management in car companies. It's
mass, oragnized crime we're talking about here.

~~~
_pmf_
> Or, if he proves he wasn't aware or wasn't in control of his company

That's not how the burden of proof works. That said, would this case actually
be prosecuted seriously, they would find information relating to how he was
informed.

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tonylemesmer
Its common for competing companies to test each other's products as a
benchmark for their own. So all of these companies will have known that other
companies were doing the same and no-one said anything. That's thousands of
people.

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ZoeZoeBee
Those Germans, always meticulous in their record keeping. It amazes me what
people will upload to a server and communicate through email. If whistle-
blowing hadn't been as under attack as it is I'm certain a lot of other
companies would be found to have been knowingly violating laws in order to
squeeze additional profit.

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edejong
When a company willingly and knowingly foils rules put in place to increase
lifespan and reduce the death toll of cancer due to air pollution, shouldn't
these top-executives be charged with mass murder? Why can't we compare this
with a war crime? Millions of healthy life-span-years could have been lost due
to these acts.

~~~
pkulak
Because most people make decisions with a bit of perspective. Trucks (I'm not
talking semis, really anything over 6000 pounds, I think) are still allowed
far more emissions than any VW diesel car, and anything built before the new
law went into place is still on the road doing it's carcinogenic thing.

Any car company is in the business of polluting the hell out of the
environment (save Tesla, unless you watch a lot of Fox News). VW polluted a
little bit more than they were allowed to for a few years and the executives
are "mass murderers"? That's a hell of a president.

~~~
Zigurd
The excess deaths can be calculated. So can the ill gotten gains. Why
shouldn't the management be made accountable for both?

~~~
nickff
It is very uncommon for people to be held criminally responsible for so-called
'statistical murder', which is actually quite common. The case has been made
that airbags have killed more people than they have saved; should the people
who wrote the airbag laws and regulations be put to death?

~~~
usaphp
While I disagree with the original comment - your airbags analogy does not
work here, airbags were not created to work around a law, there is a law on
emissions and vw deliberately built a workaround to "comply" with a law on
tests, but they knew that outside the test facility their cars would violate
that law.

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w_t_payne
I feel that this is only the first of a series of scandals in which
respectable companies and institutions will be found to have done nefarious
and harmful things: attempting to secrete their misdeeds in the seemingly
impenetrable and arcane minutiae of everyday software.

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yeureka
I bought a new car in March and I really wanted to get a VW.

But the behaviour of VW's executives in this matter completely put me off the
brand.

I feel sorry for the factory workers and the people who have nothing to do
with this, but it will take a while until I will trust VW again.

------
abhi3
It increasingly seems that the cheating at Volkswagon was systematic and not
the fault of rouge engineers as they claim.

~~~
dang
Please don't rewrite titles when the original is neither misleading nor
linkbait. This is a rule here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

The submitted title was "Volkswagen seriously made a PowerPoint deck on how to
cheat emissions tests". That's _more_ linkbait, which is driving the wrong way
down a one-way street.

~~~
stevesearer
It might be a good idea to link to or explain submission title rules on the
submit page as most new submitters probably won't go looking for the
Guidelines page. Many new users could be coming from forums or sites where
editorializing headlines it the norm and/or expected.

