Posts by Phil O'Sophical 7402 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
If any carmaker is integrating digital entertainment systems (especially internet-enabled ones) and car controls, I would like to know who that is so I can forever shun them.
It's exactly what Jeep did. The 'infotainment' system needs signals from the CANbus for stuff like switching to the rear camera when reverse gear is engaged, blocking video playback if the handbrake isn't on, etc. The entertainment part was supposed to be firewalled off from the main bus, and only able to receive such data, but the hackers found a bug in the phone system that allowed them to remotely rewrite the firmware in the infotainment system so that it could effectively become a bus master. Job done...
Even a CANbus-USB bridge of the sort described in the article is potentially open to such an attack, if there are bugs in the USB-side firmware.
They are mostly dumbfounded to discover that US law does not apply outside of the US, having been brought up to think that their writ runs world wide
These are the same people that try to spend dollars in Europe and are astonished that the locals prefer their own money, then outraged when they finally do get dollars accepted, but at half the official exchange rate,
I don't think that necessarily turned into VWs being cheaper than the competition, they just made more profit from it.
It wasn't so much price as image. VW wanted to convince the US market that diesel was cleaner than petrol/gasoline, and no more trouble to use. They didn't want the engines to seem more complex, with extra servicing needs, like urea tanks to refill.
BMW...consequently the turbo vanes are not set right
From what I've heard, they ultimately get so not-right that they come loose and the engine ingests them. That must make a very expensive noise.
There's a third option, buy the cars back at top market value and scrap/recycle them. If, as is suggested, they could be fined $20+k per car sold they may be able to do a deal with the authorities to buy back the cars instead, which could be cheaper and would be an actual solution to the pollution issue. No car, no NOx.
I was going to post something similar. We built our industrial revolution on child labour, and our prosperity by exporting the fruits of that revolution. Isn't it a bit hypocritical, not to say self-serving, to try and prevent other countries from doing the same thing on the grounds that we now think that it's morally wrong?
In fact the reverse is happening, in effect if not in actual numbers born. Quite justifiably "western medicine" is doing its best to eradicate the high mortality diseases that plague the developing world / third world (call it what you will) such as malaria and as a direct result the global population is growing much faster than it otherwise would.
It's not, actually. When families know that 80% of their children will die before they're 5, they tend to have 10 or 12. Once they know that most children will live, the numbers rapidly drop to 2-4 per family. The UK is today at below replacement rate, 2 children per couple. France is 2.1, just about at replacement. World population is heading for a plateau, as levels of extreme poverty drop, and health improves.
Look for some of Hans Rosling's presentations on these subjects.
I've not seen any evidence (yet) that this applies to (e.g.) diesels smaller than 2.0 L. In much of Europe a 2.0L turbodiesel is something that powers a *big* car.
I don't see why NOx emissions would miraculously and non-linearly stop being a problem for a (say) 1.4L diesel.
Thoughts, anyone?
It's all related to politicians' inability to do joined-up thinking. They've been convinced that CO2 is the devil's brew, so they set big tax penalties for high levels of CO2, oblivious to the fact that to get low CO2 with a diesel inevitably means high NO2.
Small engines consume less fuel, and so hitting CO2 targets such as "under 120g/km" where tax starts to increase is relatively easy with a 1.4, but getting a 2.0 diesel to meet those limits without excess NO2 is much harder. Basically, small engines don't need to try so hard, and so have less incentive to cheat.
If politicians accepted that high CO2 maps to high fuel consumption, which already has tax consequences, and looked at the big picture instead, this situation would never have happened.
My guess is that some lone shark team lead may have promised his boss & marketing "yes, we can meet the numbers", and then as the deadline to ship the cars got closer and the team couldn't quite meet the numbers, panic set in. In the end the team lead & a select few pulled an all-nighter after which their 'heroic' tuning actions allowed the car to scrape through. They've probably been shitting themselves every time they saw an EPA report.
sacrificing performance to an extent that, we are told, is not sustainable in everyday driving.
I've seen that allegation in El Reg comments, but nowhere else. By whom "are we told" ?
a quick admission of guilt immediately makes me suspicious
Rightly so, except that I wouldn't call a year especially quick. This issue was flagged to VW in 2014, they have been investigating it since then, and only now that they have discovered (or are unable to hide) the cheat mode have they admitted it.
of some lone shark at VW
That I just don't believe. I'd guess it was a stressed out design team with a deadline, and I'm quite sure all the other big manufacturers do it too. Are we really to believe that Asian manufacturers are less open to cheating than German ones? I doubt if your PC testing showed that to be true.
( Never read the books but I presume that they are even better, usually they are).
I read the books long before HBO did the TV version, and although I tried to watch the series, I just couldn't do it. I was constantly remembering what happens next, or realising what they'd left out. Even the superb Peter Dinklage as Tyrion couldn't hold me. I wanted to like it, but...
That said, it would be good to have the next book before I retire.
So the film begins and the wasteland comes on screen. The doom and apocalypse brought on the world and ended it leaving the few to scavenge and scrounge to survive in a world of chaos. ... The barren wasteland you see is caused by the hippies.
Hey, I saw that on TV, I think it was called "Woodstock".
Japanese manufacturers held all the cards in hybrids
I do hope these new real-world-driving emissions tests that everyone is rushing to do will also include hybrids, we'll see if they merit their vast tax subsidies.
Even if government organizations won't test such vehicles, I sincerely hope every motoring magazine in Europe is getting together with their local specialists and universities to run their own test campaigns. We're in for some interesting reading, but sadly I doubt we'll see many politicians' heads rolling as a result.
"just bury it in the ground so it poisons our children"
Of course, it wouldn't be necessary to put it back in the ground (where we dug it up from in the first place) if it could be properly recycled in fast-breeder reactors, but the hippies don't like them either. Instead we all have to live by hippyrules, no matter how much damage they do, because they don't do the sort of damage the ill-informed, non-scientific hippies care about.
It’s almost as though the Commission doesn’t really know what it wants to do without being told.
Now that is unfair. It knows exactly what it wants. It has a budget that it wants to spend, it has reports that it wants to write, and it has MEPs that it wants to guide. It also has staff that want to get more power, salary and promotions.
and I really hope it inspires another generation of kids to be engineers, but I do think that using a jet engine to get a land speed record is cheating a teensy bit. Not to detract from this amazing supersonic ground-effect aircraft, but shouldn't we require that such record contenders get most of their speed through driven wheels?
The other problem here is that too much credence is applied to the test results.
If you have one car that tests at, say, 120g/kmCO₂ and another that tests ar 150g/km, you could reasonably assume that the second car will be worse in real-world conditions.
If the two figures are 120g/km and 121g/km it's a different situation, the test is likely to be too unrepresentative of the real world for these results to be considered as meaningfully different.
That doesn't stop a government putting the second car into a tax band that will add hundreds of pounds to its purchase price, and possibly hundreds of pounds per year for vehicle tax. As a consequence there is huge pressure on manufacturers to stay within a band, which inevitably encourages this sort of shady behaviour.
Much the same problem is seen with things like stamp duty on houses. A true sliding scale, instead of 'bands' could help reduce this effect
The test is extremely precise, along the lines of "With a 75kg driver in the front seat, drive 200.00m at 20.00km/h in 2nd gear, accelerate over 10.4 seconds to 35.5 km/h, change into 3rd, etc. etc,." When the ECU sees that exact set of circumstances, combined with no movement of the steering, no radio or aircon, etc., it can be 99.99% certain the car is undergoing a test and not being driven on a real road by a real person, so it switches to "test mode". All manufacturers do it, the issue here seems to be whether VW sinply selected some special tuning parameters, or went the whole hog to a special 'cheat" device.
I almost always meet and regularly beat the official MPG rating (53) on my mk4 golf TDi, and that's with a remap to go from 100 -> ~130 bhp
Well of course, that remap will have trashed the special test settings, and given you a map that works in the real world. I'll bet that if run on the official test you won't get the official figures, just close to them, but that just shows the test is unrealistic.
And there is no currently deployable technological quick fix way out of that.
This is exactly what Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) does. In low power operation it replaces some of that air with already-burnt exhaust gases, which cools the combustion and reduces NO formation.
Older cars had a very simple vacuum-based EGR valve which bled exhaust gases in when it detected high manifold vacuum, which was a very clumsy level of control and affected performance. Modern ones use an ECU-controlled valve, and this is probably where VW were playing games.
EGR causes other problems, such as soot build-up in the inlet manifold, and it was commonplace for people to blank off the valve by putting a small metal plate across the bleed pipe. That's harder now with the ECU-controlled valves, since the ECU can detect that opening the valve didn't cause any changes, and it's likely to flag this as an engine management problem (EML light comes on)
was CO2 (as required by UK tax banding)
Not just UK, France has swingeing tax "malus" (opposite of bonus) values for cars above certain CO2 thresholds, which is why diesel cars are so popular despite their known other pollution problems.
More to the point, the whole scheme is a con. CO2 production is directly related to fuel consumption, and the more fuel a car uses the more tax the driver pays, so there is already a progressive tax scheme in place that corresponds exactly to real-world driving conditions. The whole CO2 banding crap is just politicians' greenwash, to raise taxes while seeming to be concerned about "the environment".
It may even make matters worse, since all manufacturers game the system to score the best results in the test even if the real-world figures are worse. That can be seen by the resuts from tuners who can remap a car to give better performance and better overall economy when they aren't constrained by meeting artificial and unrealistic targets. VW seem to have gone over the top here, but all the moral outrage being expressed seems somewhat misplaced, they are far from alone in these activities. It will be interesting to see the results of tests on other manufacturer's vehicles.
There's the cost of the recall,
I can't help but wonder how many people will decline VWs kind offer to recall their car and load new performance-limiting ECU firmware to comply with this? I forecast much interesting online discussion and comparisons in the months to come.
We used to always have a dumb terminal on a trolley stuffed in a corner for emergencies. Few PCs, and even fewer laptops, come with serial ports these days, so at least make sure you have something. If not an old VT100 then at least a USB serial device for your laptop. And a few 9/25 gender changers. My racks also have a tray with folding screen & keyboard, and flying leads at the back. It only takes up 1U and is very handy to plug into any misbehaving system.
Surely the very nature of SEO means that it can only work when most people aren't doing it? Once most web sites are using some form of SEO, it goes back to a level playing field where no-one has an advantage. It's a long term zero-sum game.
If Google is working to block these botton feeders, more power to it.
In America we have bible-reading applications: every single one of those applications asks permission to turn on your microphone, your camera, it wants permission to read your e-mails and the right to send e-mails wherever it chooses. That scares me.
This is talking about a book that primarily appeals to people who believe in a deity that sees everything, knows all their secrets, and judges their suitability for a future afterlife, and he's worried that the app might be spying on him?
This could have massive repercussions for VW.
It may depend on how the rules are framed. Are the cars required to meet the emissions targets at all times (which is probably impossible) or are they simply required to pass the test?
If the latter, VW could argue that they're doing nothing criminal, even if they won't exactly have the moral high ground.
Then again, considering how many people get their cars remapped to improve real world performance and MPG, bypassing all the pass-the-mandated-test trickery, I'd say there will be a great market in "resetting" cars back to the 2015 firmware load, even if new cars have some crippled new default setup.
very clever designers from Infocom.
Colossal Cave/Adventure predated Infocom, IIRC it was Will(?) Crowther in the mid-70s. I have Fortran sources somewhere, I remember spending weeks trimming it to run in the 25Kwords available on an ICL box at Uni. These days you can get it as an Android app :)
