There are nearly 600,000 VW workers worldwide, as well has many thousands of dealerships. I hope for their sakes that the company does not go out of business. I imagine very few of them even suspected this was going on, and probably no one is more disappointed in the company than they are.
It may be just a software update to have the car run in “low emissions mode” all the time (instead of just on a dyno). But then they will have to deal with lawsuits and stuff from dissatisfied owners who find that fuel economy and performance is worse afterward (indeed, on some other forums, there are people who said that there has already been a software update for emissions purposes, and that they noticed worse fuel economy after that software update was applied).
http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-vw-diesel-20150923-story.html
15% of these VW diesels were sold in California. The state has said the vehicles will have to have the recall fix done before they can be smog checked. The problem is that after the cheating software has been removed the cars have 15 to 30 TIMES higher emissions. They may not pass the smog check, so they won’t get a renewed registration at which point they are an expensive piece of junk sitting in the garage. I suppose the owners could try to sell them in another state.
Perhaps your fuel economy would go down to the EPA estimate of 30 city, 42 highway after the software update (the EPA fuel economy estimates are derived from the same testing as done for emissions compliance)?
Actually, with ABS and ESC, it is theoretically easy for a car to detect that it is on a dyno by noticing that the non-driven wheels are moving at 0mph while the driven wheels are moving. Indeed, the car probably has to be able to detect that in order to avoid the ABS and ESC systems thinking that something dangerous is happening (e.g. non-driven wheels locked up and skidding) and taking action even though the car is safely on a dyno.
It was intentionally defraud vs Other car companies, they didn’t catch all defects. Big difference I think. I also learned to Porsche owns VW.
Entitled American that I am, I expect, correction, I DEMAND what I bargained for: a high mileage, high performance, environmentally friendly car. If that means they need to install a urea injection system and provide lifetime maintenance of said system, so be it.
It should go without saying that they must also compensate me for the decreased cargo space that results from the urea tank, not to mention the shame and loss of social prestige I’ve suffered.
Conservatively, I estimate my personal damages to be in excess of $100,000.
People in other countries, not so much.
I think it’s the other way around. According to Wikipedia:
Volkswagen Group sells passenger cars under the Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, SEAT, Škoda and Volkswagen marques; motorcycles under the Ducati brand; and commercial vehicles under the MAN, Scania, Neoplan and Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles marques.
Cheating on pollution stuff has been going on since they started checking tailpipe emissions, in the dark ages before there were all the computer systems people would retune a car to pass emissions (change the timing and the carb settings, take out the air filter), then afterword would tune it for performance (another trick was putting in additives to the gasoline that caused it to run cleaner, things like dry gas/methanol). These days, it is possible to buy ‘performance chips’ for your cars ecu that technically are for off road use only, that you can put in, and then if you have to go through inspection, change them (you can also reprogram the on board computer, then switch it back) and the OBDII diagnostics won’t report you have done these things. I also will add that often the cars the EPA were sent for testing were different than the cars actually sold, this was especially prevalent in the early 70’s when they were trying to find a way to meet pollution requirements with these crazy air pumps and such…
I don’t think VW will go under, they are too big a company, and I doubt that the regulators and such will want to bankrupt them…and if worse comes to worse, VW would file for bankruptcy if they had a ton of court judgements, and would likely end up paying pennies on the dollar in the resulting settlement. Not to mention that class action lawsuits like this are going to be tough, you can’t sue for physical damages from the extra pollution, so what are you going to sue over? That the value of your car is damaged? (if VW has to buy the cars back if they are found to work poorly without the hack in place, then that option goes). It wasn’t a safety issue, no one died from it, and arguing the loss of value is problematic, especially if the car is older, depreciation already took a lot of the value away, and diesels also tend to do poorly with resale value, because at least in the US, few people want them.
BTW, someone mentioned the Audi unintented acceleration issue, after all the hoopla, it later on was shown that there was no problem with the Audi’s in question, unlike the toyota (which was a sticking throttle linkage and poorly designed floor mats), there was no mechanical issues found, it was basically human error. Toyota’s was quite real, though, and there have been other ones, including Jeep that I am aware of.
What I have never understood with the unintended acceleration cases was how come the drivers never thought to put the car in neutral and apply the brakes? I drive a stick, and the first thing I would do is press down the clutch and put it in neutral.
Cnbc said VW is owned by Porsche, perhaps they are wrong.
They are wrong.
Bad reputation sticks around for a long time. I still know people who refuse to buy Ford because of it’s reputation back in the 70s.
^There was a debate on CC if people would buy a Toyota after the sticky accelerator incident. If my recollection is correct, people seemed to think it was no big deal. IMO that was bigger than this.
Yes they did. Stop saying this!
When a company increases the amounts of deadly pollutants they put in the air, people die. We can’t put names on those people, but that is no defense for VW. We can’t identify which tiny babies would have survived if there had been just that little bit less nitrous oxide in the air, which asthmatics couldn’t pull through because there was just that little bit more smog, which elderly people with pneumonia died of it because of VW’s actions, but we know they existed.
Cardinal Fang, fair enough. What I should have said is that we have no solid proof anyone died – they way we do with, for example GM cars. My larger point is that it’s waaaay premature to be predicting the end of VW in view of the fact that consumers have very short memories. In the end, this too will be forgotten and people will buy VWs the same way they’re patronizing GM, Toyota, Fords, etc.
Do you people seriously believe people are dying from this? Seriously?
There are over 1.2 billion vehicles on the road in the world right now. A large percentage of them are diesels, and many many many of them are 10+ years old and are belching NOx at a rate far in excess of what these dirty VWs are putting out.
There are over 15 million class 8 diesel trucks just in the U.S. Another hundred million at least worldwide. And many are 15-20 years old with little to no emission technology.
China is building 2 new coal fired power plants every week and has been doing so for decades. Do you really believe that even one poor tiny baby couldn’t breathe because VW was cheating.
This was a dirty slimy thing for VW to do, no question. And a bunch of people are going to find their vehicle performance seriously downgraded once the engines are retuned, but nobody died and nobody is going to die.
Re #68
Decades ago, car failures like stuck accelerator were common enough that driver education taught how to deal with them. Indeed, a previous user of the loaner Lexus that the police officer crashed also had the floor mat jam the accelerator, but safely stopped and pulled the floor mat out (the mats were also for a different model car).
Perhaps also the prevalence of automatic transmissions means that there is less awareness of the neutral position on the transmission selector.
Nobody died in this crisis. Nobody died in this crisis. Nobody died in this crisis.
Stop with the hyperbole. Even if every car on the road was working the same way, it would not cause enough pollution to kill anyone. Even in ‘power’ mode the TDI gets considerably better mileage than a typical vehicle and produces less pollutants. But why let facts get in the way of a political agenda.
No one died due to Toyota, either. The problem was user error. People were putting non-factory floor mats on top of the factory ones and they were not secured. The mats got stuck on the accelerator. Toyota shaved more off of the pedal to solve the problem. The fact is, there was never a problem with their equipment, it was with a short between the seat and the steering wheel. I paid close attention because I owned a Prius at the time. I have since upgraded to the Camry Hybrid to more comfortably fit my oversized frame. Not fat, just big boned…LOL.
I am inclined to go out and buy a VW just because. If they were clever enough to fool the moronic EPA for that long, they probably have some other awesome engineering.
Full disclosure, DW recently bought a used Audi (not diesel). Well engineered, but expensive to drive due to premium fuel requirements.
VW CEO did?
Torveaux:
I suggest you go back and read about the Toyota problem, they had multiple problems, and both problems were theirs. The first one was that the accelerator peddle could get stuck under the floor mats, and these weren’t third party mats, Toyota in the recall swapped out their own floor mats, plus shaved the pedal (I know, I owned a toyota in that model year, but my model, though Camry based, didn’t need it). However, that wasn’t the major one, the major issue with Toyota was a linkage in the throttle (ie gas pedal), that had been improperly designed, they had to retrofit millions of cars because it was a real problem. Worse, Toyota ignored the problem, they knew they had issues but because they were focusing on being the number one car producer, they allowed it to fester. Sometimes problems are human error, the Audi 5000 was a classic example of that, or when people think they are in drive, when in reverse or vice versa.
One note about unintended acceleration and the idea of shifting into neutral, with automatic transmissions it is possible if the car isn’t working right that you can’t put the car into neutral, most automatics require you to step on the brake pedal to shift it to go from drive to neutral, and in certain circumstances even if you hit the brake, the lockout may not recognize the brake pedal is on, or you may not be able to shift into neutral because the engine is racing too fast (again, this is an automatic, a manual is a different beast, if I had unintended acceleration with a manual, depressing the clutch would answer that, though the engine might rev itself to pieces if it is really stuck…and prob popping the clutch would stall the engine in that scenario.