Former VW Executive Is Arrested in Croatia in Emissions Case

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/business/VW-dieselgate-arrest-croatia.html

by tosh • 6 years ago

73 42 6 years ago

rightbyte• 6 years ago

As I understood the cheating, it was just skipping exhaust warmup during tests since the car was to be turned off at the start after driving it warm. Did it acctually have any effect overall?

Shivetya• 6 years ago

It is explained in the article, they developed software that knew when it was being tested and then changed its tuning to meet the testing requirements, tuning that would never have provided the performance and characteristics owners expected when driving the vehicle. Those in charge knew it was being done and approved it. Hence the broke the law and off to jail.

I lost my TDI because of this fraud as VW wasn't going to have an acceptable correction available and while I could have kept it outside of others who just enjoyed TDI my ability to sell it later would have resulted in vastly reduced value.

smichel17• 6 years ago

skipping exhaust warmup during tests

Total aside, this is something that bothers me about my dishwasher. It has all the certifications for energy and water efficiency, but "for best results" the manual also recommends getting the water hot beforehand, by running the hot water in the sink. I wonder if the energy and water rating would still be as good if the dishwasher did that itself.

zhte415• 6 years ago

I have a dishwasher. My hands. Quite effective. Running water, sponge and soap. Takes less than 5 minutes.

For hot water have a 180L solar water heater on the roof. Never paid for hot water since. It even works in freezing winters, -20C.

I also have an awesome dryer that's lasted over 10 years. It's a thin rope across my balcony accompanied by some wooden pegs. Does the job every time. When it rains, have a rack.

lazyjones• 6 years ago

What's so interesting about this 2 months old article today?

tosh• 6 years ago

I was wondering what happened to the engineer because he is mentioned in the fast.ai book chapter on ethics in data science and stumbled upon this article.

It's not just a moral burden, either. Sometimes technologists pay very directly for their actions. For instance, the first person who was jailed as a result of the Volkswagen scandal, where the car company was revealed to have cheated on its diesel emissions tests, was not the manager that oversaw the project, or an executive at the helm of the company. It was one of the engineers, James Liang, who just did what he was told.

https://github.com/fastai/fastbook/blob/master/03_ethics.ipy...

lowdose2• 6 years ago

It was one of the engineers, James Liang, who just did what he was told.

Everyone is an independent agent and would like to avoid the most obvious Godwin here.

xiphias23• 6 years ago

I wish these people were treated as mass murderers. The man years taken away from many peoples lives should be estimated, and his case should be taken as seriously as a serial killer who took away the same amout of lives as him and other people in the conspiracy.

I'm suffering from the effects of air pollution in my young age for the last 10 years (I'm 39 now), and I can't do anything to reverse my sickness.

borkt• 6 years ago

I drew a poignant yet very off color political cartoon the moment the scandal dropped showing German Sociopath 1940s with a gas chamber, side by side with German Sociopath 2010s with VW TDI’s tailpipe connected to a hose going into the same building, the new version with a sign above saying earth.

I know the comparison is dark and compares a targeted ethnic genocide with indiscriminate killing, but the truth is that the damage diesel exhaust does to the human body is truly hard to overstate. To be pushing out 40x the legal limit for years while smugly marketing yourself as so much better than all other diesel vehicles is just a level of evil that immediately drew the comparison for me

nexuist3• 6 years ago

Do you have a link to the comic?

I think it would do well in today's climate, but you definitely need to get rid of the "German" and replace it with something less general, maybe "Nazi"? (It works because VW actually did work with Nazis in the 40s). Not every German worked for the specific team at VW that propagated this crisis, just like not every German even knew about the camps, so they don't deserve to be targeted by a broad brush like that.

perl4ever2• 6 years ago

I'm not sure if you're aware that mobile gas vans with their exhaust piped in were used extensively by the Nazis, or whether you'd only heard of Zyklon-B and concentration camp gas chambers.

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

"The gas vans were specifically designed to direct deadly exhaust fumes via metal pipes into the airtight cargo compartments, where the intended victims had been forcibly stuffed to capacity"

They were used to kill "Jews, Poles, Romani people, mentally ill people, and prisoners".

nexuist3• 6 years ago

This could be solved by a carbon tax. If the company lied about their emissions and got caught, you could retroactively charge them to make up for the difference, and then any profit they would have gained from skirting the regulations would be nullified. Other businesses would see this new environment and adapt or die.

American businesses don't avoid (domestic) child labor because it's illegal, they avoid it because the potential charges for getting caught make the whole endeavor unprofitable.

the_gipsy• 6 years ago

But ze Arbeitplätze! (Jobs). German government is extremely entrenched with the automobile industry. Only slaps on the wrist, but it's probably profitable to risk breaking the law.

Maybe these executives should be prosecuted hard for their decisions.

amelius• 6 years ago

This could be solved by a carbon tax. If the company lied about their emissions and got caught, you could retroactively charge them to make up for the difference, and then any profit they would have gained from skirting the regulations would be nullified.

Yeah, but what if the CEOs moved on? Or secured their profits?

I think carbon tax is the way to go, but on top of that we need criminal justice.

xiphias23• 6 years ago

Only criminal cases are usually prosecuted on the personal level.

Imagine if somebody proposed taxing terrorist organizations for killing people. When they get caught, the CEO would get his bonus and retire, the organization would either go bankrupt or bailed out by the government because of its importance, and a VP could register the next company, hiring all his ex-colleagues who were just executing company orders.

yadco• 6 years ago

Such a tax would affect the poor the most.

toast0• 6 years ago

This could be solved by a carbon tax. If the company lied about their emissions and got caught, you could retroactively charge them to make up for the difference

In this case, they were emitting less carbon than advertised. Should we pay them a refund?

Details: outside of test scenarios, the engine control system ran the engine hotter and with less diesel emissions fluid which resulted in better fuel efficiency (less carbon) and more conversion of atmospheric nitrogen and oxygen to Nitrogen Oxides (bad for people).

fus2• 6 years ago

They missed a single emission standard, for a quite short time. It's a crime, but every punishment should be proportional to the negative result. In this case, fine seems sufficient, as money from it could be used to put more filters on e.g. coal plants.

I think we have much bigger issues with coal plants, iron extraction from the ore, making concrete, commercial trucks with worse emission equipment requirements, or even airplanes still using leaded gasoline, etc.

pastrami_panda2• 6 years ago

You do realize they literally bought monkeys, put them in cages, piped the exhaust from their "clean" diesel cars right into the cages to desperately try to justify their lies. This was a reactionary response and a last ditch effort to try to spin the story after they were caught cheating on the emission tests. These people are straight up psychopaths and deserve punishment.

Edit: Now I'm being downvoted, we live a society where companies do so devious acts that people sound crazy when they point them out. Yes, this sounds too heinous to be true, but the sad fact is that it is true, watch the documentary for full story: https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN1FI0VR

bredren• 6 years ago

Among other things, equipment needed to reduce emissions of poisonous nitrogen oxides would have taken away space needed for a high-end sound system.

What component of this sound system took up so much space? Modern amps are so small.

thepangolino• 6 years ago

I still don't really get what they did wrong? What their cars did was essentially equivalent to studying the test instead of studying for the test.

apta• 6 years ago

Because what matters is the intent of the law, not the letter of the law. Otherwise, you end up with many spurious lawsuits like we see in the US.

kohtatsu• 6 years ago

The test is a measure of impact. They intentionally lied about the impact of their cars.

thefounder• 6 years ago

Now let's see how many from GS go to jail for the 1 MDB fraud. I may be wrong but I felt the VW fines/jail terms were politically motivated(i.e Trump doesn't like the Germans/EU at this time)

gregopet• 6 years ago

It is unclear why Mr. Eiser went to Croatia, where he was no longer protected by German law.

Carelessness? Germans migrate to the beautiful Croatian coast en masse during the holiday season, most of them passing through Slovenia. He may have thought he was safe in Croatia or simply didn't give it a second thought.

Former VW Executive Is Arrested in Croatia in Emissions Case

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