Supplier Bosch Under Investigation for Role in VW Cheating Scandal
Auto supply giant Bosch is being investigated for its part in the widespread emissions cheating scandal that has engulfed Volkswagen, Bloomberg reported ( via Automotive News).
Prosecutors in Stuttgart say that they’ve contacted the company, which supplied Volkswagen with engine control modules that helped the cars illegally pass emissions tests, about their role in engineering the illegal devices.
A spokeswoman for Bosch said it would comply with requests from authorities.
In September, German newspaper Bild am Sonntag reported that Bosch may have warned Volkswagen in 2007 that the software it supplied would be illegal to use on the road. A company spokesman said that it supplied parts to Volkswagen, but was not responsible for how engineers at the automaker used those parts.
“In the wake of what was reported about the emissions case at Volkswagen, we concluded that someone must have produced the software,” Claudia Krauth, a spokeswoman for prosecutors in Stuttgart, told Bloomberg. “It was obvious which company came into question.”
Bosch is a worldwide auto parts supplier with components in millions of cars.
(Photo courtesy Flickr)
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Well it really depends on how Bosch supplied this stuff. If they gave them a bunch of firmware files including a "test file" for "offroad use" or some nonsense and then VW flashed the cheating firmware onto all the ECUs themselves then I suppose Bosch might come out clean by saying that they had no control over what VW did with the firmware. But I'm pretty sure that Bosch is also the producer of the ECUs, so if they produced and shipped several million ECUs with the cheater firmware already on there it'd be pretty hard for them to claim that they didn't know that VW used this illegal firmware in production vehicles. You don't ship over millions of ECUs for protoype testing.
I wonder how many secrets Bosch is "withholding" related to other manufacturers. Bosch is a huge supplier to the auto industry.
As a former cog in the great machine. I assure you SW, calibrations, features, configurations, etc... don't make it to "serial production" unknowingly to Bosch.
Bigger news is that the European Parliament voted against the proposal, that countries like Germany and the UK insisted on, to allow a 110% (!) deviation over the legal limit. And... there's likely to come a sort of parliamentary investigation how emission testing and approvals take place.