Volkswagen CEO say Dieselgate was the fault of a few Lynndie England "rogue engineers," insists execs not to blame

Yeah, great move throwing software engineers under the bus. Who do they think is their customer base in the US?

It’s not just engineers being thrown under the bus (they’re cheap and plentiful, after all) but the idea of total quality control, ISO 9000 and all that stuff. Many giant multinational businesses will doubtless be thrilled with VW for their demonstration of its worthlessness. I’m sure they’ll be lining up to shake Michael Horn by the something.

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Did it ever work as intended? I was involved in a few audits and certifications and QM was done more often than not as an end in itself.

I really hope any software engineer finding himself unexpectedly under the bus will have thought to save any relevant internal emails offsite, before he’s locked out of the company server. Ideally lodged with a friendly lawyer.

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It was never going to be anything as rigorous as actual science, but applied sensibly/thoughtfully it can do some real good and provide an internationally recognisable imprimatur which fellow emperors - especially unclothed ones - can agree to honour. It’s the loss of this last aspect which will so endear Mr Horn to his peers.

Let’s see if I got this straight (which is sort of the rhetorical equivalent of “hold my beer”…)

  • One Totally Ethical manager wrote the requirements “Minimize Emissions, Maximize Power, Maximize Efficiency, Minimize Costs, Minimize Development Time, Pass All Tests”
  • All of the engineers said things about fast, cheap, good, somebody else’s department, vessels of fertilizer providing rapid growth for the company.
  • One rogue senior requirements engineer refined the requirement to
    IF (DetectWhetherItsATest) THEN CHEAT();
  • Another rogue engineer wrote a “DetectWhetherItsATest” module for the engine control software, with options for “NOx Test” and “Fuel Efficiency Test” and “Engine Power Test”.
  • One engineer wrote a “Run as cleanly as possible” routine, while another wrote a “Ludicrous Mode Speed” routine, and both of them had teams of hardware, software, and integration engineers test that their routines worked.
  • Another rogue engineer implemented the function
    Defun CHEAT(): IF (NOxTest) THEN Mode=Clean ELSEIF (EfficiencyTest) THEN Mode=Lean ELSEIF (PowerTest) THEN Mode=Ludicrous
  • That engineer ran unit mode tests and had the QA department do integration testing.
  • Another rogue engineer brought his dog to work on BringYourDogToWork Day, and his rogue dog ATE EVERYBODY’S HOMEWORK, err, requirements, development, unit testing, integration testing and process documentation.
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This is why, if you are an engineer, you document the hell out of everything you’ve been told to do. A past manager of mine once wanted to do something I felt was wrong. It wasn’t anywhere near this magnitude (i.e. it wasn’t illegal, just really stupid). I made my case for doing it the right way. He said he understood what I was saying, but we were going to do it this other way anyway. I insisted he put down in writing that this was being done over my objection, and he did. Luckily, the project stalled and died for other reasons, but my ass was covered.

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So some software engineer knew that the engine wouldn’t pass emissions so they decided on their own to surreptitiously reprogram the ECU code to fix the problem. I don’t buy this for a millisecond.

Software development - especially embedded systems software development just doesn’t work this way, especially at big companies in highly regulated industries with huge R&D divisions like VW.

I bet someone at the highest levels in the company said, “we need these cars to pass emissions testing, make it happen” and “spare the details about how” for some plausible deniability.

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By knowing that it will work and no harm will come to them.

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Just a few bad apples, eh?

The sure do get around…

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