VOLKSWAGEN DEFLATED BY A CHIP

This was the first article of a new column for Business Standard (Saturday) Weekend

The Volkswagen (VW) factory at Volksburg near Berlin was the first car factory I saw in 1980 before I became an auto scribe. Even back then it was almost fully automated producing a car every two minutes. It was amazing to also see their flexible manufacturing system where one assembly line could be building several different cars with different body shells, engines, colors, music systems, seat covers, etc. The master computer would send out every customer’s specific choices to a huge number of sub assembly stations that would then deliver them sequentially to the main assembly line. An army of robots like giant red insects seemed to be doing all the work and the few human beings would only spring to life if an alarm indicated some malfunction. The line could not stop and the workers would rush to fix the problem or put a magnetic marker showing the difficulty that was later fixed in the rework section at the end of the line. It was interesting to learn that auto technology was not only about cars but about the production technology.

A poor man’s car had been the Holy Grail for several automotive companies. Apart from the VW Beetle there was the older Fiat 500, the British Mini and the French Citroen 2 CV. After the war Japan also promoted a few smaIl very basic cars and one of these was to evolve into the Maruti 800 that revolutionized Indian roads. I first drove a battered Volkswagen Beetle in 1957 when it was being repaired at a workshop next to where I was trying to restore an old 500 cc Jawa 4-stroke motorcycle that I had found junked in Old Delhi. It felt a bit strange driving with a rear engine car but I found the ride and handling very good and the inner space and comfort amazing, The small boot in front of the passenger compartment was also very inadequate. It was however very strongly built and the owner loved it as is the case with most Beetle owners. In 1959 I went to France to study and fell in love with another strange car that too had once sold in millions. This was the Citroen 2-CV that had a compact engine and gearbox in front. I later drove one from Mumbai to Delhi in the monsoons and so fell in love with it that I persuaded Escorts Limited in 1983 to try to make it in India. The Indian government would not approve it as they felt it might affect the Maruti project.

VW began life before the Second World War in 1937 and its first car was a very basic car designed to be cheap to make and cheap to run. It had a small air-cooled engine in the rear to make place it close to the transmission for reducing the fuel consumption and increasing space in the passenger compartment. It evolved in a number of models to ultimately become the famous `Beetle’ that became one of the most popular cars in the world. 15 million units were produced at Volksburg upto 1972 until new safety and emission norms made it necessary to shut down. I continued to however be made in Mexico till 2003 by which time it had a record production of 21.5 million units. Though VW also made many other successful cars a demand for the iconic brand resulted in a modern new Beetle but it was not however a great success. In 2014 VW was neck to neck with Toyota as the largest automaker with a global production of just over 10 million cars and commercial vehicles.

Despite a formidable pedigree VW got off to a slow and shaky start in India. For many years it dismissed India as being an unsuitable production centre until they saw that several international brands, including their own fully owned subsidiary Skoda, were doing very well. Then in 2005 one of their senior representatives got into an ugly bribery scandal in Andhra Pradesh so VW ended up as being the last major auto company to set up shop in India. In 2007 they began production and today have a big plant at Chakan near Pune and investments of Rs. 4000 Crores to make 200,000 units per year.

The Polo hatchback is their most popular model but they also make the Vento, Jetta and Passat saloons. In 2014-15 VW sold 42,827 units making them India’s ninth largest automaker. VW also market several imported models like the Taureg SUV the new Beetle and the luxury Phaeton saloon but these imports are not very popular. Despite their great reputation, competitors led by Maruti-Suzuki but including Hyundai, Toyota, Honda, Tata, Ford and GM have done much better. In a highly competitive market customers want the best cars their money can buy and the magic of the great VW name has become a bit tarnished.

In the last two decades auto technology has steadily moved from mechanical engineering to electronics. Even small cars have over a dozen microprocessors and chips to control engine management, suspension, braking steering, climate control, lighting and almost every function. These are essential for the constantly increasing demands of safety, fuel efficiency and pollution control. Modern cars now have more chips in them than a packet of wafers. The most important component is probably the electronic control unit (ECU) that calibrates the fuel supply to meet every road and load condition with sensors to measure the temperature, oxygen levels, speed and every other parameter.

VW however took its technology a bit too far. Since 2009 VW began introducing an secret code into its diesel vehicle software to track the steering and pedal movements when these indicated that the car was being tested for nitrogen oxide emissions and the car would automatically turn its pollution controls on. The rest of the time, the pollution controls were off. The regulators had no way of knowing about this technical ruse. The problem was discovered by the International Council on Clean Transportation, which wanted to investigate why there was such a huge discrepancy between laboratory tests and real-road performance for several of VW's diesel cars. Investigators stuck a probe up the exhaust pipe of some VW's clean diesel cars and drove them from San Diego to Seattle and found that VW's Jetta and Passat were emitting many times as much nitrogen oxide as was found in lab tests.

In May 2014, both California's air pollution regulator and the EPA ordered Volkswagen to fix the problem but the road performance still didn't match lab tests. VW finally cracked and admitted the existence of these pollution defeat devices, which had been carefully hidden in their software codes. VW admitted that some 11 million clean diesel vehicles were affected. The models expected to be recalled and rectified include: The 2009-2015 VW Beetle 2.0L TDI; 2009-2015 VW Golf 2.0L TDI; 2009-2015 VW Jetta 2.0L TDI; 2009-2015 Audi A3 2.0L TDI; and 2014-2015 VW Passat 2.0L TDI. It has been the biggest ever scandal of the global auto industry that will cost the company a fortune in recalls and fines. It took generations to build the great VW reputation and one little chip was to completely deflate a great company.

When the scandal broke in September 23, 2015 Martin Winterkorn the CEO of Volkswagen AG said…”I am shocked by the events of the past few days. I am stunned that misconduct on such a scale was possible in the Volkswagen Group. As CEO I accept responsibility for the irregularities. I am doing this in the interests of the company even though I am not aware of any wrongdoing on my part.” Everyone loves a good disaster and there are now reports that Hollywood is planning to do a film on this corporate disaster.

THE MYSTERIOUS TEMPLE OF MASRUR

Every summer many thousand people drive on holidays to Kulu, Manali or Daharamshala but very few know that a small detour from their usual destinations will take them to one of the most amazing temples of India. It is also perhaps the oldest Hindu temple in north India. India’s earliest temples were cut inside caves of hewed out of living rock until the south Indian technology of building with prefabricated pillars, beams and panels became popular after the 9th century AD.

The Kailash temple at Ellora is the biggest and most famous temple of this type that was cut from top down out of a huge single rock face. Masrur is the only such temple in north India and is roughly dated to the 8th century. It is also built in the classic old style with fifteen shikaras and a big water tank in front of it. The shikaras like the peaks of the mythical Mount Meru look remarkably similar to the famous Hindu temples of Ankor Vat in Cambodia.

You will need about fours to reach Masrur from Mandi so it is recommended that you break your journey to spend the night at Kangra or Dharamshala and then do an easy day trip to Masrur and back. After driving on the national highway towards Mandi on the road to Kulu there is a excellent road to Pathankot that runs just south of Dharamshala. You can also go via Jullundur, Hoshiarpur and Una to connect to this road. You then drive west for just over an hour. It is 32 Kms west of Kulu on the Nagotra – Surian link road. It is a very picturesque drive through rocky Shivalik hills and small patches of cultivation with the majestic Dhauladar mountain range to the north. The drive is through some very rugged country with deep ravines and thorny trees that look as if dinosaurs are lurking in the shadows but visitors will bee struck speechless when they see the magnificent edifice.

As there is no inscription or mention in any ancient text, nobody knows who built this great structure or when. It is also a mystery as to why this gigantic symbol of devotion was built in such a remote and unfertile area. There is no record of what king was the patron to build such a large temple that must have needed millions of man hours of devoted labour to say nothing of huge funds that could not have been squeezed out of farmers in such a rugged area.

The elaborate carvings despite huge damage from the 1905 earthquake show that it was originally a Shiva temple that had been completely abandoned because wandering priests quite recently made it into a Ram Lakshman temple with three black stones representing Ram, Lakshman and Sita inside the inner sanctum. The drive is a little off the beaten track but it is a most picturesque and rewarding experience with lovely spots for a picnic on the way.

ANCIENT PEOPLE COULD NOT CALCULATE TIME

UPDATE

The dates of ancient events and legendary personages like Buddha, Jesus, Muhanmmad, Ram, or Krishna greatly agitate people concerned with religion and history. All such dates are however very dubious because till fairly recently people had no way to accurately measure the passage of the years. Thus the dates of the Mahabharat, Ramayana, Iliad, yugas or kalpas were impossible to calculate.

Calculating the passage of time had always been very difficult as one orbit of the earth around the sun takes precisely 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds while one orbit of the moon needs exactly 27 days, 7 hours, 17 minutes and 28 seconds. 

People in every land had been very conscious of the moon and had marked their changing seasons according to moon cycles. They had roughly noted the orbit of the sun to make a year but found it absolutely impossible to divide this by the lunar months because they had no means to divide or multiply until the discovery of the `Zero’, a concept that is attributed to an Indian mathematician named Aryabhatta dated to about 500 AD. In 628 AD another Indian mathematician named Brahmagupta is believed to have developed the symbol for Zero that had been first recorded as a dot under other numbers. This concept of Zero only reached Europe in the 11^th century through the Muslim scholar Ibn Sina, known in Europe as Avisenna. He is reported to have learned his mathematics from an Indian grocer in Baghdad.

Till the Zero people could only count with the fingers of their hands and all ancient cultures like those of Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Rome as well as ancient India had therefore been unable to of conceive of time beyond ten thousand years. There was also a slow shifting of the historic dates with leap years or extra months every four years in many ancient cultures. The methods of measuring time kept changing over the ages.

The seven day week was probably first defined in the old Babylonian calendar where the roughly 28 day lunar month was divided into four. It later became part of the Jewish, Julian, Gregorian and Islamic calendars but had been completely alien to ancient India. 

With the advent of the Zero, Indian legends suddenly become astonishingly old as more and more zeros were added during each retelling of legendary stories. The dates of the Yugas, Mahabharata, Ramayana and other legends therefore have very little historic basis. Even the religious sanctity attached to the days of the seven day week is alien to ancient Indian texts. If there were no week days there could not have been any auspicious or inauspicious week days in ancient times. Thus the sacredness of fasting on Tuesdays or of not buying metals on a Saturday cannot have any scriptural sanctity.

The old Babylonian calendar used to also have a 60 hour day because the number 60 had been considered to be a sacred number that could be divided by 2, 3 and 5 (the largest number of prime numbers). Ancient Sanskrit texts in India used to also follow this system and measure the day in 60 ghatas (hours) of 24 minutes each. These used to be measured by water clocks where a small earthen pot (ghara) with a small hole that was designed to take exactly 24 minutes to fill up and sink after which a bell (ghanti) would then be struck to announce the `ghanta’ or hour. The apparatus was called a `ghari’. Today, except for Indian astrologers, nobody remembers this old Indian system but it was very precisely detailed in the Persian traveler al - Baruni’s chronicle that is dated to 1020 AD at about the time when Mahmud Ghazni was looting Indian temples.

Indian astrology however went beyond the 12 planets of the zodiac and measured the year with 27 (sometimes 28) Nakshatras of 13.5 days each. They were linked not only to constellations but to many other stars that each had beneficial of malefic influences. This astrological system is not mentioned in the Rig-Veda or early Vedas but only in the Artha-veda that seems to have included a large number of pre Vedic traditions. All these created a very complicated system of astrology. Though this system has mesmerized the gullible in India over the years it is clear that none of it had any intrinsic scriptural sanctity. All people are entitled to their beliefs but they should know that many popular beliefs cannot stand the scrutiny of empirical science or unbiased historical research