Just been watching the US VW CEO being grilled by a senate committee over the software cheat that fooled emissions testing on their models.

Whilst I can understand the US CEO may not have been privy to the technical changes that were made to the systems, in Germany in VW at high level, someone or many must have known. Any engineering section work to a brief and technical specs, they are not allowed to exercise total creative licence without oversight or without keeping records of mass produced components or systems. Each component must be validated and verified in the overall design envelope. Many people must have known.

It opens up an interesting set of possibilities, in safety controls, the transition from electro-mechanical and relay based systems to Programmable systems opened up the overt and covert failure mode studies, the difference between computer based and non-computer based controls rest in the analysis of the program and its exhaustive testing against all failure mode possibilities. Covert failure modes are entirely the hidden failure mode contained within a written program.

This is not a failure mode issue but a covert cheat issue using a computer program to conduct the cheating, where illegal intent and deception are the motivation.A whole industry of testing against these covert modes may spring up as a result of this to prevent recurrence in anything controlled by a computer.

I wonder how high up the investigation will find that the knowledge went?

It could be interesting.

Peter

We may never find out, Peter.

This scandal may end VW's existence, just in the cost of re-certifying the changes to their injection systems and retrofitting all the cars that contained the cheater software. The diesel Golf, Jetta and Passat are very popular cars in the US. There are a dozen of them just on our relatively short residential street. In some neighborhoods they outnumber the Toyotas and Hondas.

Frank

From what I read a fluid system called Adblue can be fitted to diesels to make them conform to regulations. It's injected into the exhaust pipe. No other mods required although I'm sure it isn't cheap. Funnily enough the process is controlled by Germany, and yet VW didn't know about it.
John

Ultimately, the people at the top are responsible for the actions of the company................

The top man's resigned hasn't he? I can't see VW going out of business over this. I didn't by the way realise Saab had 3 years ago?

I heard all the Saab Computer programmers got an offer they couldn't refuse from VW - Oooh mischief