German regulator says it discovered new illegal software on Daimler diesels

https://www.wsj.com/articles/daimler-slashes-outlook-on-fresh-diesel-allegations-11561367960?mod=rsswn

by Tomte • 7 years ago

182 126 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

Damn it's Christopher Walken!

deogeo• 7 years ago

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.

thepangolino• 7 years ago

Absolutely this.

I’m still one of those who think that what Volkswagen did wasn’t cheating anything. They basically “studied for the test” in order to pas it.

Ihfhcub• 7 years ago

Yea that's why 6 executives are being charged with criminal fraud because all they were doing was studying for a test

toss1• 7 years ago

That is just the sort of thing could come down to the details of how the law was written.

Example A: "Each model of this type of car must pass Test X with numbers lower than listed in Table Y"

Example B: "The cars must have emissions lower than listed in Table Y. The standard test may be Test X"

If it is written like Example A, then sure, the entire specification is the test, they merely designed to the rule.

But if it's more like Example B, then they are toast. The cars clearly don't ordinarily have emissions lower than Table Y, they are merely engineered to appear to do so during the specific conditions of Test X.

If there is one thing I've learned about the law from the excellent attny who will soon also be my wife, it is that you cannot reason about the law without reading it. Logic and assumptions will not help you -- you have to look at the law itself.

It is actually a lot like software. Our guesses about the behavior might be OK for very limited purposes, but we really don't know jack until we trace it in a debugger or read the source.

(tracing & reading source might be considered analogous to reading the cases and reading the law & regs)

JaRail• 7 years ago

That's like only installing airbags in the cars you send to accident testing.

hef198982• 7 years ago

There is a difference so. Other car makers used temperature based exceptions in their motor control software. All of them also optimize for fuel consumption tests using different tires, barebone cars, tire pressure etc... Thing is all this test optimization is actually legal and covered by the rules. Since everyone is doing it test results are comparable as well.

VW did something different. They installed defeat devices that are explicitly illegal. And they knew it as shown in documents and mails. VW also pled guilty in the US already.

So, while both things are on the surface similar they are yet fundamentally different.

londons_explore2• 7 years ago

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.

adrianN4• 7 years ago

That's a good idea, but as far as I know many (most?) emissions are a bit tricky to measure. You need fairly bulky equipment.

thefounder2• 7 years ago

Well we know how self regulation worked for Boeing. Now I could see software that registers less emissions than they actually produce and we are back to square one.

legulere• 7 years ago

The problem simply is that most things are very hard to measure directly if not impossible.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

mikeash2• 7 years ago

“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.

the8472• 7 years ago

Either the spirit of the rules already does matter or the regulations were written in a resilient way. Otherwise the companies would have gotten away without any fines or recalls for their defeat devices.

Even game-theoretically perfect regulation does not work if they're violating the rules.

arendtio2• 7 years ago

Actually, I would not limit it to cars and trucks. In my opinion, every consumer device that contains software should come with the source code for the software that is installed by default (aka required to use it).

But I doubt that any popular politician will have the guts to push such a bill against all the industry lobbies :-/

thfuran2• 7 years ago

Should all consumer devices also be required to ship with complete schematics and manufacturing and assembly instructions?

Glawen4• 7 years ago

What will be the differentiation between cars then ? The car industry is highly competitive. The first cars introduced by a company are bought by competitors who tear them down to see how it is made. However, with SW, they are not sure how it works, and usually the attempts to copy a functionality are bad compared to the original.

MuffinFlavored2• 7 years ago

they are not sure how it works

Some (maybe most?) Mercedes units use a Bosch ECU. I'm pretty sure you can dump the firmware from them and figure out how they work fairly easily?

theredbox• 7 years ago

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

alexandernst3• 7 years ago

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).

adrianN4• 7 years ago

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

heftig• 7 years ago

How about requiring all implementations of a patent to be open source?

This really should have been a requirement for software patents from the start, given how difficult software is to reverse-engineer.

adrianN4• 7 years ago

What about

There should be no room for secret functionality

module0000• 7 years ago

I'm happy to help you see some reasons! For starters:

- More humans available to identity bugs and undefined behavior

- Innovation in the form of programmers improving software on their automobiles and sharing their modifications

- Regulators are no longer the only group (other than the maker) with access to source code. This allows new entries into the automotive space without (badly) re-inventing the wheel. This breeds competition, and is a win for consumers.

atoav• 7 years ago

I think you don’t wan’t to see the reason. There are plenty reasons listed here with which you can disagree, but saying there is none is bad.

dang3• 7 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20265612 and marked it off-topic.

intopieces• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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)

dmurray2• 7 years ago

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

sschueller• 7 years ago

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.

thefounder2• 7 years ago

It takes time for regulators to catch-up with the technology but there are solutions.

this_user• 7 years ago

You could require some kind of audit trail for software updates. That kind of thing is not a new problem, and there are definitely technical and regulatory solutions for that.

vkou• 7 years ago

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.

rurban3• 7 years ago

That's trivial to check because we know exactly which Bosch ECUs contain this Audi cheating software (= all), and we can also trivially determine which car actually uses it. (= most)

The SW is flashed, not OTA. You'll have to do that in service. And the flash update just sets the low temp. limit trigger to 0, disabling the cheat controller.

We know that for years already. The list is public, but no newspaper is printing it. The scandal is only how protected these criminals are. From the affected ~10 carmakers only 3 were punished so far.

pedrocr5• 7 years ago

This seems simple enough. If you are doing updates (OTA or not) to software that is part of the car certification then each update needs to be certified as well and regulators need to be on the lookout for cars running uncertified updates. I'd be surprised if this wasn't the case already. OTA introduces nothing new to the problem. Car dealers do software updates during service regularly already.

legitster5• 7 years ago

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.

ip26• 7 years ago

Nobody specified what innovation must occur. Nobody even said you had to make diesel engines. They just said if you want to sell diesel engines they must be this good.

Anyway, remember VW themselves had engines that met the spec just fine. They only cheated so they could omit the AdBlue system.

legitster5• 7 years ago

The push to diesel was actually launched by various European governments starting in the 90s: https://www.vox.com/2015/10/15/9541789/volkswagen-europe-die...

They specifically set goals and policies to make diesels a larger presence (hence why so many power diesel sedans and small cars were made for the EU market but not the US).

usrusr2• 7 years ago

Regulations, at least the European ones, were created with industry input. I believe that they were designed as much as advertisement for replacing perfectly fine existing cars with new ones from the factory as they were designed for actual air quality improvement. Test stand trickery was factored in from the beginning, because basic trickery had already started (for mileage) before emissions regulations entered the picture. Politicians can claim that they have wrestled major concessions from an unwilling industry, the industry feigns a struggle while happily agreeing (as long as nobody looks too hard at the trickery) so that their customers get a free clean conscience with their shiny new car. Repeat a few iterations and the gap between regulatory fiction and reality will be too large to remain unnoticed.

perfunctory• 7 years ago

never depend on innovation. Especially specific innovation.

This is a little bit exaggerated. How about the Internet? Or GPS?

bschne• 7 years ago

I think what they mean is not that we should not rely on innovation once it has been achieved and is actually working, but that we shouldn't bet our future on forcing very specific innovation in a certain area/metric as that will just incentivize people to cheat.

Similar to Goodhart's Law - "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

pedrocr5• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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.

DoctorOetker3• 7 years ago

I seem to remember that after the VW scandal, at some point the emissions tests were made less stringent "to keep things realistic", so it wouldn't surprise me at all if you are right that

after all the scrutiny diesel cars are still being sold and as far as we know pass emissions.

netsharc2• 7 years ago

If the diagram on this page is to be trusted, yes everyone was doing it: https://www.transportenvironment.org/press/dieselgate-1st-an...

nullwasamistake2• 7 years ago

The EPA keeps lowering emissions requirements for future years based on speculation rather than existing tehcnology. IMO it was inevitable for this to happen. You simply can't create a deisel clean enough to meet regulations.

While emissions regulations have a noble goal we would be far better off regulating farm equipment, stationary generators, and boats at this point.

A single farm tractor or lawn mower pollutes as much as hundreds of cars. A container or cruise ship, many thousands of cars.

It reminds me of California approach to water regulations. Squeeze the populace when industry is using 90% of the water.

carlmr• 7 years ago

It's kind of like optimizing software without measuring a performance profile. We're optimizing cars for very little gain. While a lot of low hanging fruit isn't measured and could give us much larger gains. We're not looking at the hot-path.

Arbalest3• 7 years ago

Worth keeping in mind that "emissions" targeted are actually somewhat localised. The initiatives are about reducing NOx emissions within the bounds of suburban areas, where it tends to become photochemical smog[0]. Yes CO2 is an issue, but a different issue, and frustratingly, thermal efficiency is correlated with NOx emissions[1], which is why we have these scandals coming up in the first place.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smog#Photochemical_smog [1]https://www.alentecinc.com/papers/NOx/The%20formation%20of%2...

Edit: Worth clarifying that thermal efficiency and combustion temperature are also correlated, which is not plainly stated in [1]

emiliobumachar• 7 years ago

I'll pile on with the others saying this is a bad conclusion.

Storing large amounts of cash in bank vaults also creates strong perverse incentives, but we do it and create strong disincentives to practically nullify them.

dang3• 7 years ago

Url changed from https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/06/german-regulator-says-i..., which points to this.

JorgeGT2• 7 years ago

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?

ewhanley• 7 years ago

A thermostat in the context of an internal combustion engine is a coolant flow control device. It typically diverts coolant to the radiator when the engine initially reaches operating temperature and then directs flow to manage ideal operating temps.

JorgeGT2• 7 years ago

I know this, it's a pretty standard function that almost all cars have, and does not constitute a defeat device per se. It's also active all the time, that's how your car displays the coolant temp. in your dashboard. They should really explain how Daimler used this to cheat.

Rychard• 7 years ago

In an automotive context, a thermostat controls the flow of coolant through the engine block to maintain a specific temperature. This allows the engine to run more efficiently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermostat#Automotive

calvinmorrison• 7 years ago

It keeps the engine temperature in target ranges. It opens when the engine is at the temperature and the water pump moves coolant through the thermostat housing and to the radiator. when it is below the temperature it closes, and it doesn't flow in the same path (usually it just flows back through the head.

Old cars had fans that always ran, often times off the crankshaft. If cold coolant ran through the radiator it wouldn't maintain proper temperature with the fan running! Same situation with highway driving. There's so much airflow to cool the engine - being able to block off coolant is very important. Newer cars with electric fans use this in combination with the thermostat to provide more efficient cooling (by not running fans all the time).

Cars with electric fans use a coolant temp sensor (sometimes on the radiator, or the block, or elsewhere) that kicks over a switch to turn fans on and off.

Then you have a temperature gauge which sends a signal to your dashboard/ecu. The computer uses this in combination with a bunch of other data pieces to make the engine run smoothly.

Anyway, that was all just random info

Glawen4• 7 years ago

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...

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• 7 years ago

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.

jacquesm2• 7 years ago

A thermostat in a car is more than just a sensor, it is usually also directly opening or closing a conduit through which coolant can flow into the engine.

pkaye• 7 years ago

Rogue engineer strikes again!

olivermarks2• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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

olivermarks2• 7 years ago

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

hristov• 7 years ago

I don't think car manufacturers have cause to complain. If they were feeding the government incorrect data, then they do not really have moral grounds to complain when the government officials made incorrect decisions based on that data.

techrich• 7 years ago

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

eisa01• 7 years ago

Why isn’t there an EU wide recall?

I though the type approval was EU wide

kall1sto• 7 years ago

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

German regulator says it discovered new illegal software on Daimler diesels

Related Stories