Wtf vw?

You could just interpret it as “German car sales and diesel car sales will both take a hit due entirely to VW wrongdoing so we’ll be affected too”. But yeah, we’ll see :)

ETA: Urea injection is no guarantee of cleanliness here either.

Yeah, I guess that’s the proper context. It just felt a little too much like a guy looking nervously over his shoulder saying “We don’t use defeat devices, right guys? RIGHT?!?!”

And the Chief Corporate Counsel answers “So far as you know we don’t.”

I guess everyone is very cautious about their statements right now; you never know what can backfire. Also, beyond the initial schadenfreude about a competitor really fucking up, it’s possible that the reputation/image damage will also extend to other German car manufacturers. (Daimler and BMW stock price went down as well today, though far from being hammered as VW.)

So every hippy in a VW diesel that their parents bought them for college is…

Oh this is too good.

Here’s a chart showing the extent of the cheat:

Vehicle A is a 2012 Jetta TDI wagon, Vehicle B is a 2013 Passat TDI, and Vehicle C is a BMW x5 diesel, for some reason.

Source is a VW forum where they’re discussing what’s going to happen…

Only if they bought a 2009 or later model. Earlier models have a much more lenient set of standards to be compliant with.

I guess the BMW is included because it uses the urea injection method licensed from Mercedes.

As an engineer I can imagine how this got through. We often have these situations where “it might be possible to hit a level of x, but not recommended”. Senior management goes away for a few days, then comes back and says “you said it may be possible to reach a level of x. We’re carrying that forward as a baseline. Can you get it to y?”.

So here’s how VW got busted. Some researchers doing a clean fuel study for West Virginia University got a portable emissions device and took some VW clean diesels for a test drive and discovered that, hey, the numbers don’t match up.

That was published on May 30, 2014. VW has known that they were caught red-handed since then.

15 months.

If you are a VW shareholder, you may feel free to ask some uncomfortable questions of VW’s board of executives and the auditors who approved their most recent financial statements.

Also, in addition to my surprise that the US has tighter emissions standards for NOx than Europe, you may now add this one. A team of sophisticated German engineers with an elaborate and complicated computer system to cheat emissions tests got busted by some folks from WVU. We live in remarkable times. (I’M KIDDING, random Mountaineers alum reading this!)

NYT: Volkswagen denied they were cheating tests for nearly a year.

Apparently they finally only admitted it after the US regulators threatened to deny approval to VW to sell their 2016 models in the US.

The thing is that it ‘busting’ this wasn’t really rocket science. It simply says a lot about how emission levels are checked. It’s often done in lab conditions and with cars specifically provided by the manufacturers.

It’s worse/ more lax in Europe. I hope this will lead to some rethinking about how emission tests are done in the future. As for emission standards in Europe: the car lobby in Germany is rather powerful. Which gives it a lot leverage in Europe due to Germany’s status in the EU. Everytime someone proposes stricter emission standards or general speed limits, you can count the minutes until some lobbyist points out that this would put tens of thousands of jobs at risk. I’m not kidding.

I hope someone writes a book, or at least a long essay on the decisionmaking process inside Audi that led to all this. That said, I hope the company survives. I’ve been driving (non-diesel) Audis for a long time.

The best democracy money can buy.

To be fair, the US auto industry is also pretty powerful, and it’s been extremely difficult to push emissions standards here in the US. Didn’t it take like 20 years to update the standards here? I suspect part of how Obama was able to push that stuff through was that the govt. basically owned 2 of the big 3 at the time.

But every time we’ve pushed tighter emissions or fuel economy standards on the auto industry, despite their howls of outrage and dire predictions, they somehow, miraculously, manage to meet those standards and turn out amazing cars at the same time. I’m sure there are non-trivial engineering issues involved, but the auto industry makes a habit of indignant outrage as its first line of defense before eventually just buckling down and doing some pretty amazing things. Those things I guess are expensive, but in the long run, we’ve done pretty well. I remember in the seventies how Detroit swore on stacks of Bibles that increased environmental restrictions would both kill their business and make their cars unsellable. Neither happened. Ok, the cars kind of sucked for a while but that was not due (solely) to environmental regulations. Detroit simply had its head in its ass for a lot of the decade.

And let’s also be clear that the current scandal has nothing to do with any emissions standards being considered for the 2030 timeframe that the Obama Administration is pushing for.

These are the result of the 1990 Clean Air Act. As part of its implementation Tier I went into effect in 1994, and Tier II began phasing in between 2005 and 2009.

Kevin Drum says what I’ve been thinking:

Kill nine people? Did I miss something?