Cheating…

Or…How to make yourself look better than you are.

In the news today, VW is taking a beating. I mean… a serious wallop. They are being accused of cheating on emissions tests they have to go through in the USA on their 4 cylinder turbo-diesel powered cars. Basically, they would ‘detect’ when a car was going to pass an emission test and reduce dramatically their emissions for that period, resuming as normal after the test. This means that you pass the tests with flying colors but you may not really be passing.

The little clever software in the computer inside the car would trigger the less polluting curves and allow VW to shine. According to the EPA, a total of 482000 cars sold in the US would be tainted. Now, VW is under the gun in every other country (especially in Europe) where they are being scrutinized.

All this because VW wanted to be the #1 car seller in the world and it gave itself the means to do it….. cheating.

I know of another company that does the same thing although the environmental results are not the issue. Samsung.

Samsung has been doping their test results during ‘performance benchmarking’ tests on their phones. They trigger a much more responsive but power hungry mode on the phone during the tests (again by detecting when a benchmark software is being run) and then go back to more reasonnable values after the test is done. This makes the phone look very fast when it isn’t really the case.

It called..cheating.

Instead of putting efforts into making a product better… they make it OK and invest in cheating… When (not if..but when) they get caught…all hell breaks loose.

Like poor VW this morning… losing about 20 billion in capital investment.

Guess who’s head is on the chopping block?