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Some were also rigged to fail after a certain date or beyond a certain mileage.
Some were also rigged to fail after a certain date or beyond a certain mileage.
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The repair stuff could make sense if they are liable for something like catastrophic failures, you really wouldn't want a someone else cheaping our on a repair in that case.
Then they either genuinely forget about this when the maintainance contract goes to someone else or they "forget" about it.
The shutdown after X hours could also make sense as a security measure. IE. It should be impossible to drive the train for that long without mandatory maintenance.
As far as I understand it this is fairly common practice with heavy machinery these days and it isn't secret.
These kinds of things could explain why polish authorities have been so anemic in their response.
It could very well be that all this is nefarious and illegal but it could also be at least partially a mistake or ineptitude on the part of Newag. One shouldn't underestimate the extreme incompetence in IT of the management team in these kinds of companies. There was a major it security scandal in 2019 in Sweden where ~200k recorded calls to the state Health advicory service had been publicly available and the CEO of the company providing the product clearly had no idea how computers worked, never mind his own product. He made some famous statements claiming that someone had connected an "internet cable to the harddrive" (not possible, and it's not called an internet cable), he also said you needed a special "command movement to slip in the back door" (I can not emphasize enough how ridiculous this sounds in Swedish), which you of course didn't.
Some coder at some point might have done this due to some vague instructions from techicnally incompetent managers, it got documented poorly or the management forgot this even existed even if documentation did.
This can be rectified by entering a clause in the contract that if the train ever gets repaired by someone else they then become liable for all future failures etc., it's not even a big issue as the tender for repairs can include a term that the repairer takes upon themselves liability if any of the parts they repair later malfunctions and they bidders can price in the cost of this liability into their bids.
That assumes the repair is logged or discovered. Perhaps shoddy black market repairs is or has been an issue in Poland?
Obviously this doesn't apply when there the maintainance contract gets transferred like here.
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