Volkswagen Scandal
Just watched the first episode of Dirty Money, which is what inspired this note.
Volkswagen:
- Put defeat devices in “clean diesel” cars, so that the cars would pass all lab tests, but would produce 40-80x the legal limit of pollutants (NOx) on the road.
- Lied and cheated every step of the way about this, even when they were “fessing” up — the head of Volkswagen in America and the CEO of Volkswagen in Germany both claimed that they knew nothing about what was going on, and that it was the fault of a “couple of software engineers”. Bitch, why are you blaming your own greed and profiteering on software engineers? Not saying that the engineers weren’t complicit in all of this, but to claim that engineers just magically added this piece of code in without the corporate higher-ups knowing is laughable.
- Made a mockery of the scientific process when they duped a research group in Albuquerque to run a “study” for them showing that Volkswagen cars (newer technology) were indeed cleaner than old Ford cars (older technology). They manually overrode the engine controls for the test so that the Volkswagen cars would only produce test emissions, so the entire study was a sham anyways.
- Not only that, they wanted to test this “study” on real humans on exercise bikes, to see how they would react to the fumes from each car. They didn’t end up running the study on humans thankfully, but they did something nearly as bad — put monkeys in cages and piped in these noxious fumes, and then shoved tubes down their throat to see how affected their lungs were. What the fuck?
- The German government was completely complicit in all of this — Mercedes, BMW, VW, were all getting off the hook, because they claimed that they had to do this stuff for the “health and safety of the engine”.
- European car manufacturers in general were seeking out the European countries with the loosest regulations - Luxembourg, Malta, etc - thinking that they wouldn’t mind the factories and influx of jobs, so they would turn a blind eye to the cheating that was going on.
uid: 202006162303 tags: #knowledge #history