I dislike the Challenger disaster being used as an example of ‘deviance’ within engineering teams, as the engineering teams repeatedly raised the problems and were overruled by management, not by other engineers. We studied this in engineering at university - the conclusion was that essentially as an engineering whistleblower, past a certain point you just have to walk out and go to the press or to regulators, as management will go ahead no matter what you say.
The “deviance” explanation is a more plausible since I’d have a hard time believing that there was a conspiracy within the company to specifically thwart emissions tests that a lot of people knew about.
That said, it’s not a satisfying explanation. How, over time, did the deviance get so specific? The article even raises this point before kind of ignoring it: “And when, at Volkswagen, its diesel engine produced forty times more nitrogen oxide when it wasn’t being tested than when it was, many people inside would have known why.”
The conditions over this “tuning”, based on what I keep hearing, are targeted for a distinct case. Assuming you have decent testing internally, it seems reasonable that someone is going to notice. Testing teams, quality assurance teams, the list could go on.
There’s certainly something fishy here. Numbers were being cooked by some series of departments, and I suspect some engineers are culpable. I don’t buy the “deviance” argument all that much, but I buy the rogue engineers one even less.
The “deviance” example quoted is quite different from what happened. The Challenger failure I can see happening as a result of a creep in culture. There were some original ratings for everything, but as real world data came in the culture changed to allow for launches in more and more trying circumstances. It got harder for someone to oppose a launch decision because the past evidence countered them. “Yes, the machine is rated for X, but we’ve been doing X+dx for a long time now. It can take it.”
This was a very specific piece of software designed deliberately to foil the emissions test. This was a project within VW. It’s possible they destroyed the paperwork and the emails but it will come out regardless of how few people were involved. It may have had an innocuous name like “Emission compatibility test project” or “Emissions test mode” or something, but there were specs, there were meetings and there was testing. It will come out.
How did the engineers agree to this? That’s an interesting sociological question. Not everyone is a big picture kind of person. There are many people who identify strongly with companies, especially flagship companies like VW. The team could have been a mixture of details people and company people. The details people are sucked into the challenge. They mat have even forgotten that they worked on this until now. The company people, well, the probably thought the emissions standards were a bunch of bunk and they were married to the idea that diesel was superior and this was the way to get America to adopt diesel.
No I don’t :) Sorry, this post is entirely my opinion. Did I state it too strongly? However, from all I have read, the software checks for a very specific set of parameter values that only happen during a test, and no one has written what else the code could be checking for instead. Who ever deposed for VW at congress also did not offer an alternate explanation for the code.
Volkswagen is promising to release a fix for its software soon;
I wonder what this fix will be, and if it will be different depending on where you are? Will people in the US get permanently worse performance to satisfy the emissions test, and people elsewhere get worse emissions stats?
I dislike the Challenger disaster being used as an example of ‘deviance’ within engineering teams, as the engineering teams repeatedly raised the problems and were overruled by management, not by other engineers. We studied this in engineering at university - the conclusion was that essentially as an engineering whistleblower, past a certain point you just have to walk out and go to the press or to regulators, as management will go ahead no matter what you say.
The “deviance” explanation is a more plausible since I’d have a hard time believing that there was a conspiracy within the company to specifically thwart emissions tests that a lot of people knew about.
That said, it’s not a satisfying explanation. How, over time, did the deviance get so specific? The article even raises this point before kind of ignoring it: “And when, at Volkswagen, its diesel engine produced forty times more nitrogen oxide when it wasn’t being tested than when it was, many people inside would have known why.”
The conditions over this “tuning”, based on what I keep hearing, are targeted for a distinct case. Assuming you have decent testing internally, it seems reasonable that someone is going to notice. Testing teams, quality assurance teams, the list could go on.
There’s certainly something fishy here. Numbers were being cooked by some series of departments, and I suspect some engineers are culpable. I don’t buy the “deviance” argument all that much, but I buy the rogue engineers one even less.
The “deviance” example quoted is quite different from what happened. The Challenger failure I can see happening as a result of a creep in culture. There were some original ratings for everything, but as real world data came in the culture changed to allow for launches in more and more trying circumstances. It got harder for someone to oppose a launch decision because the past evidence countered them. “Yes, the machine is rated for X, but we’ve been doing X+dx for a long time now. It can take it.”
This was a very specific piece of software designed deliberately to foil the emissions test. This was a project within VW. It’s possible they destroyed the paperwork and the emails but it will come out regardless of how few people were involved. It may have had an innocuous name like “Emission compatibility test project” or “Emissions test mode” or something, but there were specs, there were meetings and there was testing. It will come out.
How did the engineers agree to this? That’s an interesting sociological question. Not everyone is a big picture kind of person. There are many people who identify strongly with companies, especially flagship companies like VW. The team could have been a mixture of details people and company people. The details people are sucked into the challenge. They mat have even forgotten that they worked on this until now. The company people, well, the probably thought the emissions standards were a bunch of bunk and they were married to the idea that diesel was superior and this was the way to get America to adopt diesel.
Do you have a source for that? Genuinely curious.
No I don’t :) Sorry, this post is entirely my opinion. Did I state it too strongly? However, from all I have read, the software checks for a very specific set of parameter values that only happen during a test, and no one has written what else the code could be checking for instead. Who ever deposed for VW at congress also did not offer an alternate explanation for the code.
I wonder what this fix will be, and if it will be different depending on where you are? Will people in the US get permanently worse performance to satisfy the emissions test, and people elsewhere get worse emissions stats?