Lesson of the VW software scandal: just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
The Volkswagen software cheat was apparently born out of a weakness in testing equipment that isn’t made for modern cars and demonstrates how a lack of accountability in the software development chain is crucial for the health and future of a company.
As most US motorists have experienced, a smog check shop will put the drive wheels on a dynamometer with the remaining axel static, but that configuration will mess with the traction control features available on most modern cars, hence the need to put the car into “dyno” mode. That reality began a conversation among the software engineers to swap in the clean and dirty modes for the car during and after testing.
The ISO 26262 documentation will have registered that cheat and it was apparently caught by the wonks at the EPA. This also could not have been done on an individual basis and multiple engineers had to be working on it together. While that was bad enough, and even if they just missed it in the final approvals, the management has the biggest responsibility int his mess. Can’t help but think if there was a third-party engineering team in the project that someone might have blown a whistle on the enterprise. As it is it demonstrates a massive failure of corporate ethics.
There is some good news in all of this, however. It’s going to get some very dirty cars off the roads all over the world. The bad news is that the fines and fixes to the current cars my bankrupts one of the biggest automakers in the world.