The case of Volkswagen in the age of software liars – International

Over the past six years, Volkswagen has used a false slogan, writes the New York Times. The German company promised a diesel car clean and powerful, in accordance with the rules on exhaust gases. But the cars were not as clean. During the test, they provided false data thanks to a software that limited the emissions of pollutants only for the duration of the analysis in the laboratory. The program could probably figure by the movements of the steering wheel and by the use of the accelerator if the car was subjected to a test and in this case limited the emissions of the exhaust gas at the expense of performance. On the way, in real conditions, the vehicles improved their performance but emitted levels of oxides of nitrogen up to 40 times higher.

As calculated the Guardian, if 482mila car retrieved from the Volkswagen group have traveled the average kilometers driven in a year by a vehicle in the United States, they have poured into the atmosphere between 10,392 and 41,571 tons Toxic gas, instead of the planned 1,039 tons annually. The company continues the Guardian, he admitted that the software may be active in eleven million vehicles sold in countries around the world, for an additional output between 237,161 and 948,691 tons of nitrogen oxides a year.

“In a world where more and more objects are controlled by computer programs, we must have better ways to detect cheaters,” writes the New York Times. According to the newspaper, people are rightly worried by hackers and data theft, but neglect the power ceded to the software that manage the vehicles, equipment and the kingdom called “the Internet of things.”

The commercial fraud is not new, so there are controls. Frame rate the US daily, if not extend the controls to objects enhanced by computers, especially when the software is proprietary and therefore completely controlled by the company that has strong interests to exaggerate the performance and hide flaws, “Volkswagen will be neither the first or the latest scandal of the internet of things who cheat. ”