Was it really too difficult?

[TheOstrich]

Guy next door to us has just taken delivery of a 65 reg Audi 2.0 tdi .....

Next time I see him, I think I might offer him a tenner for it .....

[Suff]

Better be quick, I guess it will lose it's "fun" quota after about the first 200 times....

[Workingman]

Doesn't this whole VAG fiasco show up the faults in the testing procedures?

Modern cars off the forecourt can be remapped within seconds. What do you want, sir or madam: top speed; MPG; acceleration?

Cars for testing need to be picked at random, post production, and isolated till the tests are completed. The cars chosen should be down to the testing agency; and those agencies need to be watched carefully.

VAG did wrong and broke the law and needs punishing. What I do not want to see is one of the world's premier car makers ruined by the stock market spivs out to make a few quid.

[Suff]

11 million cars? I can't see how VW can survive this unchanged. Just to remediate the software, pay the fines, sweeten the deal with the dealerships and the customers? VW doesn't have that much money to toss around and this is going to reverberate for decades.

Add to that the revenue effect and it's going to be 3 times as hard. People are going to stop buying their vehicles. At the same time as they are having to pay fines, fix the mess and recompense the customers. So their revenues are going to drop at exactly the time when they need them most, when money will be flowing out of the company like water.

Then, also, they are either going to have to invest heavily in engine technology to come up to standard And perform well in the class (a.k.a the PSA diesel engines in this class), or they are going to have to do a deal to buy someone else's engine in. If they have also sold on their engine to other manufacturers, then it is also going to be a Huge problem for them.

I can't see the US having much sympathy with VW, as the largest vehicle manufacturer in the world. They should have used their position in the market to lead, not cheat. I know how the US respond to that as I've worked in Pharma a lot. The US doesn't actually care if the company lives or dies when handing out the fines. They've destroyed dozens of Pharma companies and the only emotion is "that's one less problem".

This breach falls into the latter category. VW lied to the US in order to build a foothold there against US car manufacturers and in so doing emitted poisonous gasses which kill people. It is really that simple. Is it really any different than shipping a drug which you know may have a side effect with a few hundred people that "might" degrade their lives? Except there is no upside to the whole VW debacle. At least the pharma companies were trying to help those they could at the cost of those they damaged. In the case of VW it will be seen as trying to make money and the untimely deaths of thousands of people was deemed an acceptable price.

The lawyers are going to have a field day with this and the Spivs are going to get massively burned. They are carrying all this VW debt. Deemed so good that the ECB used it as collateral for their QE programme. There is no way on the planet that the spivs are going to unload it at anything other than a loss in the next 2 decades.

If you want to take a benchmark for this, GSK was fined $3bn by the US for breeching certain laws. There was no element of causing death or harm, but of breaking laws and bribing doctors. That was the start. Over 2012 to 2014, GSK, around the world, wound up paying in excess of $7bn in fines including a 3bn Yuan fine in China.

VW is going to face similar issues world wide. Except the US max fine for this is set in stone. $18bn to start with.... That could come out as $30 - $40bn or significantly more world wide and that's just the fines. If they had to pay just €1,000 per car to redo the software, compensate the dealers and the customers, that's another €11bn right there.

Already US pundits are saying "Buy back all the cars, scrap them and sell them one which complies at a discount". Never mind the fact that VW couldn't churn that many cars out in the next 2 years alongside the existing orders, it would add at least another $7.5bn onto the price tag of remediation. And that's just for the half a million US cars. What about the other 10.5 million cars floating out there with automated emissions lying software built in for free....

I can't see any way this will end up with VW being the same company it started out as in 2015.

[Workingman]

The BBC has just run an item on the news.

Diesel cars were fitted with exhaust analysers and sent out on the road. The results showed that the cars were four times (scream smiley) over their lab figures. This, it was claimed, showed that diesels were deadly. A lot of air time and discussion was given to those wanting the limits lowered.......

Not so much time was given to the lab man explaining that lab tests were a comparison under controlled conditions.

Lab tests are carried out on all sorts of things from drugs to appliances to clothes. They are not, and never have been, intended to replicate the real world because there are so many variables involved.

It is nice of the BBC not to miss an opportunity to jump on a bandwagon, though.

[cromwell]

I never understood how people could regard diesels as being clean. You have only to see them accelerate hard and watch the puff of black smoke out of the exhaust to know that that is rubbish.

Speaking as someone who has paid his whack in road tax I am not happy that these polluting things are going to be let off being put into a higher tax band.

Everyone knew that the European tests re MPG were a farce. Manufacturers were allowed to tape all panel gaps in the car to aid mileage, and that's only one of the fiddles that the tests allow.

[Workingman]

I probably should not say this, but in hardened aircraft shelters we had to use mobile generators to see off the aircraft - they were diesel. They had to work at safe levels in an enclosed space so were analysed.

If a diesel throws out clouds of smoke it is either pump timing out or its injectors need recalibrating/cleaning.

Over the lifetime of a vehicle there is not much to choose between petrol/diesel regarding emissions and particulate matter... providing they are serviced well.

[Aggers]

I can see that factory testing would most likely give more favourable emission readings than those that occur under normal driving conditions. However, to my way of thinking, the most serious aspect is the fact that, apparently, electronic devices were installed in cars to deliberately produce false readings. That is surely a criminal offence, and the person/s responsible should immediately be charged accordingly.

[Suff]

WM, the tests for those diesel generators would have mainly been for CO rather than Nitrogen Oxides. That is a relatively new thing. Also even if the RAF were aware of the NOx problem, they would also have been aware that it mainly attacks older people with respiratory issues and is unlikely to have a major impact on younger people, of which the RAF is full.

The black carbon is an issue, but that, as you say, is better controlled with pump and injector settings.

For VW this was a very different thing. They had a second string engine with second string performance and high emissions. They were competing in a world where PSA have the best diesel in the world with the lowest emissions and best performance in the size/class.

VW had a choice. They could have thrown billions into R&D, taken the hit on Diesel car sales in the short term and, eventually, come out the other end with a leader in engine class and performance which PSA would not have had either the R&D ability or the simple money resources to compete with. Instead they chose to lie. It may have been a short term lie (as they saw it), but it was still a pretty big porkie lying out there.

Notably all the other cars tested have larger engines with better power performance and worse fuel economy than the 2.0 turbodiesel range. That includes VW. In fact VW can only reach the emissions requirements of the EU and the US via their most highly tuned and highest performing engine.

Of course this state of affairs as it was back in 2008, was not one VW wanted to continue. So what did they do? They "Ging nach vorne durch Lügen". Which is the literal translation of walked forward through lies....

It's not the first time this has happened in Germany. Hitler is quite famous for painting lead with liquid gold and saying to everyone "hey we have reserves". Granted this is the confidence trick of a fiat currency but it is along the same lines. If you can't tell the truth, tell a convincing lie until it doesn't matter any more. why nobody called VW's bluff and said "Ok so how does this wonderful new technology work which makes your engines simultaneously perform better than the old one and also emit less harmful emissions?". VW traded on it's reputation and the authorities let them. That's going to hurt everyone.

So down to brass tacks and why it's so bad. This was a concerted attempt to not only to circumvent the regulators in an attempt to avoid R&D costs so they could sell more cars; it was a direct and malicious attempt to steal market share from car manufacturers, damage their revenues and profits and, if possible, drive them to the point where they might need a merger with another car manufacturer to survive.

So the simple one. Every car manufacturer in the world has the right to sue VW for loss of income.

In the US, not only did they say that they had vehicles which outperformed everyone else for a reasonable price, but they had massive marketing campaigns to try and convince the people that only by buying VAG vehicles would they get the modern and advanced technology of Germany that would allow them to pollute less and cut costs on their car ownership.

So, now, not only does the US government have them for systematically and deliberately using "technology" to lie to the regulators in order to pass off older and dirtier technology as more modern and better than US technology; not only do they have them for running a massive marketing campaign to present these lies as the truth; not only do they have them for damaging the US car industry to the tune of half a million cars; BUT. Every citizen in the US who bought one of these cars, every dealership stuck with them and every citizen who did not buy an American car, which might have been cheaper and on offer, has a right to bring a class action suit against them. Over and above the federal government fines and legal action from just about every state in the US.

Then we get into the even murkier parts. More than 20% of the VW group is owned by German government. Which means that what VW did was also state sponsored anti competitive marketing against the markets of another country, in direct contravention of god knows how many WTO treaties signed.

Then we have Spain who sponsored every new "clean" VW, on the basis of their so called "emissions profile" to the tune of €1,000 per vehicle. All 1 million of them. So now they are demanding that VW return €1bn in subsidy costs and that is before VW fixes the mess, compensates the owners and tries to polish the tarnish out of their reputation.

The top search I found on google UK today when trying to find the correct terminology for the emissions was....

VW Emission Class Action - CarEmissionsLawyers.co.uk‎
Adwww.caremissionslawyers.co.uk/‎
We Are Bringing Claims Now For VW, Skoda And Audi Owners

If VW emerges from this as a company which is anything like the one which went into it I will be highly surprised....