VW engineer sentenced to 40-month prison term in diesel case

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-emissions-sentencing/vw-engineer-sentenced-to-40-month-prison-term-in-diesel-case-idUSKCN1B51YP?utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_content=59a05e9b04d301050bce8161&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter

by doener • 9 years ago

162 125 9 years ago

reuters.com

neya• 9 years ago

While the article does mention one more guy (Oliver Schmidt), it's a shame they just put the whole thing on this Engineer, when in reality there is no way this could have been pulled off by two people without the rest of management's knowledge/approval.

Are you seriously telling me that only this single guy was responsible for all the emissions that were found in the TDI range of diesels, all the way from A3 to A8? Sorry, I'm not buying it.

chrischen• 9 years ago

The article implies other executives to be sentenced. Liang happens to be the lowest ranking executive. Also from the looks of Schmidt’s sentencing it seems the orher executives probably had longer sentences.

tinco• 9 years ago

Nope, the articles says there are 7 more higher ranking executives due to be judged. And from the looks of it their sentences might be significantly higher as well.

Tomte3• 9 years ago

This is a common sentiment here on HN, and it is entirely devoid of factual grounding.

This is one guy who happened to travel to the USA (stupid move: asking US authorities before travelling "hey, are you going to arrest me?" and taking their word that no, they don't plan to…). Another American VW guy has already been sentenced.

The "real culprits" are all living in Germany. And the investigation in Germany is ongoing. It may not make a splash in the US press, but there have been raids at VW offices and in managers' private homes.

Former CEO Martin Winterkorn is amongst the now thirty-seven people investigated (so it is certainly not the case that German prosecutors focus on a few lowly engineers as "fall guys", as HN commenteers love to claim).

The investigation is ongoing, and it is generally expected that there will be criminal charges. But this takes time.

Press release by the public prosecutor: http://www.staatsanwaltschaften.niedersachsen.de/startseite/...

kome2• 9 years ago

VW and the German government are basically "cooperating" on everything [1] [2] [3]. It's extremely naive to think that VW will get a fair trail in Germany.

[1] https://qz.com/1045619/germanys-diesel-scandal-shines-a-ligh...

[2] http://www.climatechangenews.com/2017/09/05/lobbying-data-re...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/02/world/europe/germany-volk...

_pmf_• 9 years ago

But this takes time

If processes against German bank managers serve as example, it will take exactly long enough to satisfy the statute of limitation.

chiefalchemist2• 9 years ago

So, in short, these guys are being charged because they can. They're a victim of circumstances. Scape goats. Political/power pawns if you will.

Understand the reasons why, but it does feel like justice.

Hamuko• 9 years ago

The guy lead the emission compliance unit in the US. He was most likely in charge of taking the software designed in Germany and adapting it so that it works with the emission tests performed in the US. As far as I can remember, the software was pretty closely monitoring the driving style and comparing it to the test suite that was performed in the EU in order to activate the cheats. They probably had to perform the same kind of thing in the US, as I assume that the tests differ.

wslh2• 9 years ago

And QA engineers or security reviewers never detected this in the source code? I would love to see how many people participated in those source code repositories.

baddox3• 9 years ago

I don’t see any claim or implication that this is intended to represent the entire punishment for the incident.

skrebbel3• 9 years ago

Fantastic precedent. When your boss tells you to do something unethical and possibly illegal, you now have a great reason to say no.

baddox3• 9 years ago

Is it a good enough reason though? That would depend on the likelihood of losing your job by refusing, the ease of finding a different job, the seriousness of the unethical request, and the likelihood of getting caught.

mseebach• 9 years ago

What's good enough is always going to be an individual decision, but it's better to be able to reference a concrete expectation of jail time.

w_t_payne5• 9 years ago

Extracting the maximum value from their employees is a core competence of most automotive companies. With no union to protect them, naive low ranking software engineers are exceedingly vulnerable to aggression and abuse from their line manager, It is hardly surprising that the resulting culture is one which rewards dishonesty and fraud above all else.

wffurr• 9 years ago

When asked why you were fired, being able to say "I was asked to do something illegal or unethical" is a strong response. That certainly helps with the "find a new job" part.

ImSkeptical• 9 years ago

Don't say "No" then, but agree and report to the authorities.

Dolores12• 9 years ago

Keep evidence to cover your back just in case

greymeister4• 9 years ago

If losing your job over something unethical is wrong, I don't want to be right. I would never be able to trust my employer again either way.

Ardren• 9 years ago

... and go find a new job

DennisP• 9 years ago

Which is fine, if you have decent skills and some money put aside.

thriftwy• 9 years ago

In Germany? I bet they will eat their hat before actually firing you in this case.

hanbura• 9 years ago

That depends highly on the local employment laws. In Germany being fired for refusing illegal or unethical tasks screams for unlawful termination. That means a court case, which means the unethical request will become public knowledge. That's a huge thread even if the employer wins in court.

Here your job would be safe, though you could be put in some dead-end position where you eventually leave on your own. Or you are offered a good deal for leaving quietly.

briandear2• 9 years ago

And one would think the Germans would have learned that lesson.

eitland• 9 years ago

For anyone wondering I guess briandear is referring to "The Nuremberg defence" aka "only following orders": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders

madez• 9 years ago

This has nothing to do with nationality. Everywhere and up to this day people excuse themselves that they are just doing what they were told/forced to. Snowden is sadly the rare exception, rather than the rule.

jacquesm3• 9 years ago

Germans in general, this example notwithstanding, have learned that lesson, it's the rest of the world that still needs to learn it as well as they did.

webreac• 9 years ago

It is likely he will earn a good amount of money for having accepted to be the scape goat instead of VW.

DonHopkins3• 9 years ago

And free smokes in jail!

skrebbel3• 9 years ago

Sure, but that doesn't change anything about the argument you now have to say "no".

conanbatt• 9 years ago

We should increase the punishment on all people surrounding criminals to achieve the same purpose.

yhbgffvv• 9 years ago

Fantastic precedent.

That engineers will be thrown in jail while CEOs will walk away scot-free?

Yeah. Fantastic.

Animats• 9 years ago

Right. This is after he cooperated with authorities. It's the ones who didn't cooperate who should be going to jail.

skrebbel3• 9 years ago

Fantastic indeed. For decades us engineers have been blaming the bosses for the unethical shit we pull. Fuck that shit. Be civilized for a change. Don't make evil tech.

MisterBastahrd• 9 years ago

Sure, but you'll get fired anyway with no legal recourse. At least in most of the US.

coldtea2• 9 years ago

Yeah, fantastic /s

So every boss now knows that as long as they can find somebody in lower place to agree to do something unethical, they will face no repercussions themselves!

zamber• 9 years ago

Seriously I doubt they didn't knew that already.

dreen3• 9 years ago

Good.

For context, air pollution kills 200,000 in the US and 40,000 in UK every year.

You have to consider ethics in your work as an Engineer. Refusing an unethical task is your moral duty.

w_t_payne5• 9 years ago

Yes ... but as engineers we need to support the professional organisations that in turn will support us when we need to make these difficult and politically courageous decisions.

drdeadringer• 9 years ago

Who are such organisations?

briandear2• 9 years ago

40,000 people are dying from air pollution in the U.K.? Citation really needed.

ako• 9 years ago

A quick Google search shows these as the fist two results:

* http://www.bbc.com/news/health-35629034

* https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2017/03/06/air-pollution-ca...

shubhamjain• 9 years ago

Is it even possible to attribute a death to single, specific cause like pollution? What is the median age of these deaths? How did they happen? Do certain occupations make people more vulnerable to pollution exposure?

avar• 9 years ago

Nobody's attributing deaths to single causes. When we say e.g. that coal plants kill N number of people per year it's not the case that someone breathed in some coal particulates and keeled over night there at the age of 20.

Rather, we know from epidemiological data that certain pollution, foods etc. shorten your life by a given amount. Let's say life expectancy is 100 years, living near a coal plant subtracts 5 years from that, and living near a nuclear plant 0. That would mean that out of 20 people living there there was 1 death equivalent a year.

draugadrotten• 9 years ago

You have to consider ethics in your work as an Engineer. Refusing an unethical task is your moral duty.

It's easy to say, but ethics isn´t always so black and white. What about yourself. Do you drive a car? Then you are guilty of contributing to the air pollution that kills 200,000 in the US ever year, and you also endanger others' life by participating in traffic and making it more dangerous. You are also contributing to sponsoring the salaries of the car industry overall, which means you are indirectly sponsoring the development of more lethal machines, which also by the way enables murderers to transport themselves more rapidly to their victims.

Did you post a helpful comment on HN or stackoverflow, and this comment helped a programmer in North Korea to develop their nuclear weapons just a little bit further, is that ethical?

You have to consider ethics, but an "unethical task" depends so much on context.

dreen3• 9 years ago

The context was pretty clear here. This particular engineer got asked to do something he knew was unethical and he did it anyway. That is pretty black on white to me.

Consumer behaviour is an entirely different thing.

csydas• 9 years ago

I think there is a major difference in butterfly effect scenarios and intentionally misleading and commiting fraud. It's why mens rea is part of the equation for judgement. Intent means a lot; if it weren't, we wouldn't differentiate between manslaughter and murder.

The VW engineers intentionally designed a system meant to defraud tests and avoid regulations, misleading consumers and regulators about the product. This was an order from on high, I dont doubt, but it's still an intentiknal decision. I do this knowing the direct result is fraud and pollution. My intent is to commit fraud, and I do not care about the side effect of pollution. And it's not really possible to not know what the intent of such a system is.

I think we do need to be aware of the impact of our decisions and our choices, and we cannot just dismiss unethical choices on the basis of "everything could be bad.". That's just eschewing responsibility.

worldsayshi• 9 years ago

I find that the rule "you are always responsible for bad outcomes in proportion to your ability to prevent them" to be a fairly straightforward principle.

And from that rule we are of course all guilty but some are more guilty than others. I assume I'm kind of stating obvious stuff though?

donatj• 9 years ago

The numbers really vary by source, and the vast majority who do die from air pollution were already on deaths door and it can be blamed for taking a few days to months at most.

dsfyu404ed3• 9 years ago

Don't put away the torches and pitchforks, we're going to go after the alcohol industry when this is done.

tryingagainbro• 9 years ago

Not enough, and I have a feeling that he should've been one of the dozens, if not hundreds.

Fraud in the case is commuted upon the buyers and everyone that breathes that air (cancers, asthma...etc). You're talking tens of billions. Go rob a store and you get a lot more jail time. Yeah the store owner and 3 customer were traumatized but so were the thousands or millions of people that suffered (directly or indirectly) from your fraud.

dsfyu404ed3• 9 years ago

I think the re-calibrated software that hurt performance and fuel economy caused customers to suffer a lot more than the pollution did.

jpdus• 9 years ago

And all this, while the VW share just reached new record highs...

lifty• 9 years ago

Everybody is riding the high winds of quantitative easing to growth and prosperity!

marenkay2• 9 years ago

... which is kind of weird, considering they promised low emission cars since the 1980s and have not been able to deliver on that.

And now all of a sudden the invest marginal sums (lower than what gets invested for new car models usually) to make electric cars work, and suddenly bankers think they'll make it work?

I seriously doubt it.

Dowwie• 9 years ago

Let this be a lesson to all that refusing unethical Management decisions might get you fired but at least you won't go to prison.

saas_co_de• 9 years ago

Unfortunately I think most people will conclude that this kind of enforcement only applies to non-US companies. I guess people from the US might start worrying about travel to the EU though.

jacquesm3• 9 years ago

I'd love for that to happen but it probably won't. US companies routinely break EU laws and get away with it.

JohnGB• 9 years ago

Okay, so it's okay to go after an engineer at VW for gaming the system, and causing higher emissions than everyone thought, but not okay to go after bankers for fraud which screwed the world economy?

I'm not saying that the engineer shouldn't be responsible - he should - but it's an extreme double standard.

ju-st• 9 years ago

Banks are too big to fail in the US. German car companies are not too big to fail in the US.

taneq• 9 years ago

I'm starting to think that the measure of "too big to fail" is campaign donations, not percentage of GDP or something.

b4lancesh33t• 9 years ago

Non-flippant answer, in case this question is genuine: there are no laws against what any individual banker did, or else there is insufficient evidence to prosecute the bankers under any law they hypothetically broke. Not so with this engineer.

ewoodrich• 9 years ago

Setting aside the environmental impact of the false emissions claims -- deceiving millions of customers about a big ticket product should have a commensurate punishment.

I hope this isn't the last VW conviction.

eeZah7Ux• 9 years ago

Punish one engineer and leave manager and other companies alone?

hutzlibu2• 9 years ago

The astonishing thing for me is, that this is not at all new:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defeat_device

Yet everybody involved acts totally surprised.

So good, that they do strong punishments, but maybe don't stop with VW, as others apparently do the same now (or working on it to put it silently under the carpet). Which makes me wonder if there is some backdoor agreement, that VW gets the public shame now, but recieves funding/legal aid, etc. from other companies as they are all involved in this and they don't want VW do the aggressive defense, of "everybody else is doing it as well" ...

zardo• 9 years ago

This is a baseless conspiracy theory. Cheating is not par for the course, it was shocking to the emissions compliance community that VW had blatently lied and cheated.

The history of defeat devices is... complicated. Keep in mind the EPA chief is a political appointment. Their own interpretations of their own regulations can vary significantly from one administration to the next.

hutzlibu2• 9 years ago

Erm, do you count the wikipedia article as a conspiracy theory as well?

edit: which is the base of my "baseless" theory which I clearly stated as a possible theory, not a fact

edit2: and maybe mark your edits, as edits? Otherwise it looks like manipulative arguing.

And to me defeat devices seem not so complicated. Simply cheating. VW just took it to a new level.

mankash6662• 9 years ago

Executives need to be punished - not just lowly engineers who followed orders under the duress of losing employment

stonogo• 9 years ago

He moved to the US specifically to lie to federal authorities.

Lowly?

mankash6662• 9 years ago

Who was the boss who suggested this be done?

peckrob• 9 years ago

I don't disagree that some of the executives should be face similar, perhaps even harsher, sentences, but just "following orders," even under "duress" does not relieve a person of responsibility for their actions. Someone telling you to do something illegal does not suddenly make it legal.

Ethics is a big deal in many engineering disciplines, and breaking those ethical codes can cost your your license in addition to facing legal consequences.

gxh8N• 9 years ago

"U.S. prosecutors have charged eight current and former Volkswagen executives in connection with the diesel emissions cheating probe. Liang is one of the lowest-ranking executives charged so far."

Other executives are charged too.

akira2501• 9 years ago

just lowly engineers

He was an engineering _manager_. His official job title was "Leader of Diesel Competence." Let's not pretend he was all that "lowly."

basicsbeauty• 9 years ago

Domestic companies get a free pass even if their cars literally kill people. But rules are different for foreign companies.

coldtea2• 9 years ago

Of course, who else would be responsible but an engineer?

SZJX• 9 years ago

The problem I find with the whole episode is that it would be incredibly naive to think that only VW cheats the emission tests (as apparently also evidenced by the recent news that Fiat Chrysler also did it, with likely many other carmakers doing it as well. There was also news about Samsung cheating the emission tests on their electronic products, but that made no splash whatsoever). Though all the provisions for fining VW and sentencing those guys are theoretically sound in legal terms, I can't help but feel it highly political, just like the EU's crackdown and fines on Google, Microsoft etc. There's basically an implicit trade war and accompanying trade protectionism going on.

VW engineer sentenced to 40-month prison term in diesel case

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