What's wrong with me being a rich man?

Chapter 416 Machines Can Talk

September 3rd, 6 PM.

Qu Junliang, an employee of the Silicon Carbon Group, rode his electric scooter, humming a tune, into the testing plant not far from the company.

He joined the company at the beginning of this year as a power engineer. He has been satisfied with his work in Lingang for the past six months. What is even more surprising is that the company has also found him a side job that is easy.

The testing equipment is already installed, and the data doesn't need to be analyzed. All you need to do is start and stop the test bench, set the parameters, and handle emergencies. There's nothing else to do. And to earn two thousand yuan like this is simply wonderful.

Qu Junliang didn't know how the Singaporean testing agency had been commissioned, but he felt the testing was rather hasty. Otherwise, at least several employees would have worked together, not just him alone.

Or perhaps... it's just the debugging phase right now.

He didn't care about anything else; as long as he got paid, he was willing to do anything.

Qu Junliang entered the testing workshop and his eyes lit up when he saw the vehicle used for today's debugging. It turned out to be a Renault Clio IV station wagon.

The domestic market for station wagons is small, and the audience is not large, but Qu Junliang really likes this type of car. He is even thinking about saving up to buy an Audi A6 wagon in the future. He is also very familiar with the Clio in front of him, which is the best-selling car in France—familiar on paper.

This is the first time I've seen the actual car.

Qu Junliang clicked his tongue in amazement, but decided to finish his own side job first.

The pretreatment of the test car was completed by others first. The Renault in front of him had been sitting in the workshop for at least 2 hours. What he needed to do was to first calibrate the equipment, install the exhaust gas sampling probe, load the resistance of the chassis test machine, preheat the opacity meter for 15 minutes, and then cycle through the simulated working conditions.

Qu Junliang has been testing three vehicles this week, all of which use the domestic standard of four urban driving conditions and one highway driving condition.

This kind of test takes about 2 hours to complete.

Qu Junliang listened to music while testing the equipment. He couldn't see the real-time data transmission, but he needed to seal the exhaust gas sampling bag. Someone else would come to take the sampling bag to analyze the pollutant concentration, and finally, the equipment would need to be disassembled.

After labeling the sampling bags, Qu Junliang looked at the beautifully curved station wagon in front of him and couldn't resist sitting in the driver's seat and experiencing its driving feel for a while.

Qu Junliang drove it for a short while, carefully feeling its acceleration, deceleration and gear shifting. He pressed the accelerator hard and felt that the power was much weaker than he had imagined.

He got out of the car, shut down the machine, disassembled the equipment, and ended a mundane private job test.

……

Five days later, in the president's office of the Silicon Carbon Group.

What does it mean if the data is abnormal?

"Renault? Which Renault?"

"I don't understand."

Yu Xing really didn't understand. The neighboring test workshop had conducted a round of tests under the guise of equipment debugging. All the models were working normally, except for one Renault model that had a problem.

However, Renault was not their target, and the "Volkswagen" that was actually mixed in showed no abnormalities whatsoever.

He felt that the census was not yet complete and that a comprehensive screening should be carried out. Unexpectedly, Xiao Ying came to him first with the abnormal fluctuations of Renault.

The president's office of the Silicon Carbon Group was temporarily transformed into the secret office of Guoshanfeng.

“There’s a problem with this one piece of data. The Renault car’s real-time nitrogen oxide levels suddenly spiked tenfold. That’s not right.” Liu Wanying was holding real-time data from the testing equipment. Nitrogen oxides are detected using a chemiluminescence analyzer. The data has been modified so that it’s not displayed in the testing workshop, but instead sent directly to the back-end system.

The testing workshop handles exhaust gas sampling bags, which are then sent to a separate, unrelated testing company for inspection.

After noticing the obvious data anomaly, Liu Wanying reviewed the exhaust gas sampling analysis from the same period, but found no anomalies in the latter.

This is rather strange. Despite the small sample size, the two sets of data for the previous models are basically consistent, proving that the cross-validation mechanism of the two sets of data is working properly. "10 times, Renault, there is a conflict between the two sets of data." Yu Xing was surprised by Renault's emergence. "Then check the surveillance footage from that day and see if you can find anything."

Once the surveillance footage was reviewed, the cause seemed to become clear.

"After he took the sampling bag off, he went back in and opened it again." Yu Xing pointed to the laptop screen and laughed. "That's when the anomaly occurred. The actual situation of the two data points was different. The real-time data showed that it had been opened for a while longer."

He frowned as soon as he finished speaking.

No, no, the reason for the data conflict has been found, but the real problem is why there is a conflict.

Yu Xing and Liu Wanying exchanged glances, and the suspicions of the short sellers surfaced.

He quickly glanced at the surveillance footage ahead and then pondered the difference.

"If we consider the test on the 3rd as abnormal, then all the previous tests were normal."

"The results of normal tests are also normal, but when we encounter abnormal tests, the results also become abnormal."

"The abnormal test was just a short period of human driving added."

As Yu Xing said this, he wrote down the key points of the comparison between the two situations.

Pointing to the data, Liu Wanying provided a precise supplement: "The manual driving at this time was quite... well, it should be said that it was rather arbitrary. One moment he would suddenly accelerate to 50km/h, and the next he would suddenly brake and then accelerate again."

Yu Xing also wrote down the key point of this supplementary sentence.

Curiosity is often the first step to discovering the truth, while suspicion may be the beginning of exposing a deception.

The two stared at the information on the paper together.

“If it’s not an error, then the fact that problems arose instead of following the standard testing procedure indicates a flaw in this testing method,” Yu Xing said slowly. “It’s like when we shorted Mitsubishi last time; Mitsubishi exploited a loophole that allowed Japan to make its own declarations. And in Renault’s case…”

Does less testing lead to higher emissions data?

It's not that you made a mistake in the emissions, it's that we made a mistake in the measurements?
Liu Wanying asked suspiciously, "Could Renault possibly falsify a fixed testing procedure? How did it detect that it was being tested? Can machines talk?"

Upon hearing this, Yu Xing nodded slightly: "If it's a fixed testing process, the machine might actually be able to talk. Our prototype vehicle will have an OBD interface to collect data, but it's not necessary to insert the interface. We can detect specific commands entirely through the OBD communication protocol."

For example, if the detection equipment requests to read data from the nitrogen oxide sensor, this command may be monitored.

Liu Wanying exclaimed in surprise, "You car manufacturers can do this? President Yu, you haven't wasted your time building cars. You've already learned how to fake them before you even built the cars!"

“You short sellers are good at smearing people,” Yu Xing retorted, then added thoughtfully, “If it’s a similar method… it does make it easy to deal with rigid testing procedures, and they’ll immediately understand after a few more tries.”

The testing organizations are very professional and have long had established procedures.

Everyone uses the same equipment and processes, including the testing workshop next door to the silicon carbon group.

However, since it wasn't a professional testing organization or professional testers, the results revealed what appeared to be the problem.

With this thought in mind, Yu Xing felt that the "masses" mixed in with it could understand its normalcy all along.

They clearly know there's a problem with the public, but they just can't detect it; maybe they're just too technical.

Volkswagen and even Renault knew that machines could talk, and now, this machine has even spoken to mountain peaks.

(End of this chapter)