TOW #6 – Article: “An Engineering Theory of the Volkswagen Scandal”

The New Yorker
"An Engineering Theory of the Volkswagen Scandal"

By Paul Kedrosky

October 16, 2015

In response to the September 2015 Volkswagen emissions scandal (aka Dieselgate), Paul Kedrosky, a venture investor and former equity analyst, analyzes how Volkswagen could have kept this a secret and who may have been behind this scandal.  He uses rhetorical questions and the strategies of comparison/contrast and cause/effect, in order to refute the widely held belief that Dieselgate is another corporate scandal driven by greed.

Kedrosky criticizes Michael Horn’s accusation that Volkswagen’s software engineers were to blame using rhetorical questions, thus causing his audience to ponder the accuracy of Horn’s accusation.  The author asks, “A couple of rogue engineers…? Sure, rogue financiers get caught up in scandals, but rogue engineers? And rogue German engineers…?” (para. 3).  His rhetorical questions effectively draw in readers with humor and sarcasm by stereotyping engineers and Germans, while also establishing the controversy about to be debated in his essay.  Although stereotypes are not objective evidence, these rhetorical questions create doubt in readers’ minds through the logical reasoning that engineers, especially punctilious German engineers, would not intentionally break the rules, especially in secret from their superiors.

Kedrosky builds onto his argument with more objective evidence when he reasons that since an automobile’s software consists of a hundred million lines of code, engineers would have trouble spotting the “defeat” device’s code.  To put such a statistic in a more understandable fashion for the general public, the author compares this to a form of travel that would seem even more technologically demanding: a space shuttle.  However, Kedrosky states the programming for a car requires “about two hundred and fifty hundred times the number of lines in the Space Shuttle” (para. 4).  With this comparison, the author helps readers understand the extent of how complex a car’s coding is to convince the general public that it is highly plausible that engineers missed new lines of code with each software update; as a result, over time, these mistakes may have evolved into the “defeat device” that subverted the rules.

The author also anticipates the counter-argument that some people would have noticed and should have spoken up, coming up with two causes explaining why Volkswagen employees would not.  Kedrosky states, “software changes the nature of our relationship to things, making rules feel malleable and more arbitrary” (para. 9), which is one reason why employees may not have felt they were committing illegal activities.  He gives an example that many people could relate to: stealing music.  Stealing CDs is obviously theft, but downloading MP3s does not (para. 9).  The second reason was a matter of Volkswagen pride, as the company had been failing to pass American emission tests, so writing such a code as the “defeat device” was justified in their minds. 

By drawing in readers and creating doubt in their minds using rhetorical questions, Kedrosky is then able to logically reason that software engineers could easily have missed the coding of the “defeat device,” as well as anticipate counter-arguments by analyzing the causes of why Volkswagen employees may not have spoken up if they did discover corrupt software, successfully making the argument that Dieselgate was most likely done with good intentions, but unfortunately resulted in catastrophic events that has ruined Volkswagen’s reputation.