Till couple of days ago, a brand that was synonymous with quality and trust is now standing in a line of cheaters. For consumers, especially in India, this is second big blow after Maggi fiasco. For the uninformed, the Volkswagen emission scandal is about use of something called “defeat devices” in the VW brand cars to help them pass through the emission tests in US. These devices could sense when the car is under emission testing mode and then accordingly change the engine parameters so that it emitted less pollution. In actual scenario, the emission can be as high as 40 times what the emission results will show. The details of “defeat devices” are not known, but the guess is that it’s not a device at all. It’s just a part of the engine software that has the intelligence to detect emission testing and set the parameters accordingly. It is estimated that nearly 11 million vehicles have been fitted with these so called “defeat devices”.
However, the actual number can be many more and it need not be restricted to only Volkswagen cars. Automobile is such an industry where tear-down, benchmarking and reverse engineering are well accepted processes. It’s hard to believe that competitors of VW never saw these kinds of devices fitted in VW cars while tearing down innumerable number of VW cars for benchmarking. Even if we take for granted that there is no such device, only the software is present, even in that case I cannot believe that competitors did not notice the change in performance of the cards when switching from emission testing mode to actual driving mode. What I am hinting is towards the complicity of other brands also in this scandal. There is a very high probability that other companies are also using these devices or software in their cars to escape the emission tests. I might be wrong and I pray that I am proved wrong, but coming from a technology industry, I am raising a valid question. Time will answer this.
Comments from experts welcome!
