Vocal Voices

So they tell us....

The BBC beg to differ...

There seems to be a new translation for VolksWagen. No longer the people's car. More Lies Comprehensively.

VW is trying to convince the authorities that it was not a culture based decision to lie comprehensively to the regulators and fit devices to hide that lying. At the same time, the company is lying about the scope of the problem.

I do hope the governments deal with them the way they should. VW should actually face bankruptcy from the fines they should have to pay. Many, many, other companies from other countries have been swallowed up by the "supposedly" better and more organised Germany company. To the detriment of the economies of those other countries.

Now we find that they were not better or more organised. They just lied more.....

Always assuming that other firms have played fair and not fiddled, the following thought has occurred to me.

In the UK company cars fall into various bands, don't they? Some of which is based on emissions?

So if VW have been fiddling their emissions they have been achieving an unfair commercial advantage over their competitors. VW cars have been in a lower tax band than their rivals and are more likely to be chosen as a company car because of that.

So they deserve to get sued. Whether or not they will be, we'll have to see.

Sued, fined, forced to repay government initiatives to encourage clean diesel. The whole shebang. Spain already want's €1bn in clean tech grants back from VW and they're not putting it on dealers or anyone else. Plenty of other EU countries have done the same including the UK in emissions brackets and lower tax.

It was less than half a million cars in the US. It was 8.5m in the EU. Which was why they denied that the software was designed to defeat the Euro tests. That was plain stupid, the software/hardware in cars today is capable of defeating every test on the planet. All it needs is a few months software development time.

The proof is in the actions taken by VW. Whilst the 2.0 engines appear to be compliant in the highest performing engines (set by software), the 1.6 engines actually need hardware changes. Which means VW did two things.

1. They cheated the emissions regulations to make more money from lower performing, higher emission engines which did not meet the standards, by charging more for the higher and higher performing engines. Simply they crippled the lower cost engines with software, hid the emissions and then pocketed the money on the higher spec engines.

2. They cheated the emissions regulations to save costs on providing much higher specifications on the 1.6 engine hardware. Hiding the fact that the engines simply could never meet the regulations with the software. This is even worse than the 2.0 engines where the software was the key factor, with the 1.6 engines the software had only one function, to hide the fact that the physical construction of the engine was unable to meet the regulations purely on a parts cost basis.

They deserve to have the book thrown at them. In the Pharma world, the government regulator FDA (Food and Drug Administration in the US), levy fines which nearly break the company or do actually break the company and force it into administration. In the FDA world the cost is in lives so they don't care if the company goes bust or not, they care about saving lives.

However what we hear about Diesel engines is that the massive rise in these engines are ushering in the early exit from life for people with respiratory ailments. Way, way more people than most Pharma companies will impact.

So I believe they should do the same. Fine the company into the ground. If it survives, it will never do it again. If it does not survive? No big loss.....

I will quietly disagree, shall I?

I do not see how bankrupting VW helps. I do not see how putting hundreds of thousands of innocent workers out of work solves anything; and I do not see why tens of millions of innocent VW customers should be left owning cars with junk status.

I say it with drugs barons so I will say it about VW. Start at the top of the pyramid and work down, sweeping up any person who was complicit. Keep going level by level until clear levels are reached. Arrest and charge all those involved. Seize all their assets, wherever they may be kept. Remove their pension rights. Claw back any bonuses, in other words bankrupt them, then throw them in jail for a long time.

Works for me too.

But I'd divest the VAG of all it's external companies. Seat, Skoda, Scania etc.... Just to drive the message through. Not too big to fail, not to big to be above the law.

I don't want VAG to end up the same as it is today with some nod to the countries who's laws the broke.

We do not need the biggest car manufacturer in the world, we need several large manufacturers who are more nimble and more competitive. In short manufacturers who live by advancing and competing, not lying to the authorities...

Whilst I do not disagree that VAG, and possibly others, need to be punished, I also think that the testing procedures now need to be looked at.

If cars can now 'sense' that they are being tested and tell the ECU to remap pump and valve timings and injector pressures and cut-offs, as they can, then some sort of 'real world' tests need to be introduced. One method would be a climate controlled chamber where the car is simply left to run a rolling road as if it was on the roads. A volume of analysed air in would be compared to to the same volume of air extracted from the chamber. The changes in composition of the two could then be quantified.

Another thing that bothers me is rather ironic. An engine produced to pass the tests v one dynamically remapped would almost certainly be down on BHP and torque at some points over the whole range. Under normal driving conditions it would have to be flogged hard to get the same performance in many conditions. We see this in motor-sport all the time. There is the possibility that over the life of an engine the 'cheats' are actually better.

That is not an excuse for VAG, just an observation.

Workingman wrote:I do not see how bankrupting VW helps.

VW are either the biggest or second biggest car maker in the world. They are a significant part of the Germany economy and therefore a big part of the EU economy.

Let's be honest - is the EU going to come down on VW and therefore damage the German economy?

A few well placed scientists, technologists and managers, including those at the very top, allowed software to detect when an engine was being analysed and remap it to optimum levels for emissions.

Did VAG produce crap cars with crap engines? Far from it. Has the media made a meal out of all of this? Hell, yes.

VAG broke the laws of many states, no doubt about that, but what punishment fits the crime?

Oh, hang on, it's German, it's in the EU. The EU has to take action to destroy itself, just as other places have always done in the past, nothing less is acceptable.

Workingman wrote:what punishment fits the crime?

Oh, hang on, it's German, it's in the EU. The EU has to take action to destroy itself, just as other places have always done in the past, nothing less is acceptable.

I'm not anti-German WM. I wish we had managed to keep our manufacturing going as they have done.

But the facts are that (imo) the EU will have to look the other way, or just give VW a slap on the wrist because Germany is such a big contributor to the EU budget.

And the facts aren't all in about the other manufacturers - have they all been at it? Because there is a widespread silence from them.

This is not about being anti German. This is about being anti EU where they have aggressively use the "competition commission" to funnel heavy industry to Germany by blocking all consolidation in other EU countries which might have competed with Germany.

The EU has created the situation where German companies may feel they are "too big to fail". I want that thought destroyed and I want the practise of centralising heavy industry in one country to stop. France has the best diesel engines in the world but their car manufacturing is going under because it can't make money. Why? Because the biggest car manufacturer in the world has been telling everyone it sells modern "clean tech" diesel cars which are "German technology" and therefore somehow better than everyone else. Then creating software which hides the fact that they are running second rate polluting technology which is also illegal.

If that does not come under anti competitive business, illegal marketing, Criminal activity let alone negligence, then I don't know what does.

I would never have bought a VAG diesel. I've driven them over the years. Given my background I can get in a diesel vehicle and tell how advanced it is within 10 minutes of driving it.

Personally I don't care about the UK car industry, I believe that it destroyed itself in a fit of unionisation and I'm not fussed that it is gone. However there is a precedent here and it has to stop before it can get better. These are just the initial warning signs. If we ignore them then we will find worse to come later.

The roots of this fiasco were born in the financial crisis of 2008/9. They started putting the software in around 2009, a clear decision to cheat rather than invest in R&D so they could comply. Once that happened it became endemic.

We can talk about crucifying the bankers, crippling the banking businesses by splitting them up and making them non competitive on the international scene. Everyone is salivating for their blood.

I ask you this. How many people did the bankers kill, directly, by their action????