Have Volkswagen Got Away With It ????

[wgt40w]

Chatting with a few mates last night and we all agreed that everything has gone rather quiet with reference to Volkswagen's cheating diesel software.

No articles in the papers recently - nothing more on TV - no discussion re compensation to cheated owners or mention of any plans to repair / replace affected vehicles.

Is Volkswagen spending a public relations fortune to keep the subject quiet ?????

[electrotor]

Chatting with a few mates last night and we all agreed that everything has gone rather quiet with reference to Volkswagen's cheating diesel software.

No articles in the papers recently - nothing more on TV - no discussion re compensation to cheated owners or mention of any plans to repair / replace affected vehicles.

Is Volkswagen spending a public relations fortune to keep the subject quiet ?????

Volkswagen just posted a 20% drop in profits. Not the sort of thing you want to bring attention to.

[FPVSteve]

Was anyone actually surprised they lied? lol.

The price of being a Plc in any market .. you have to keep increasing profit to keep the shareholders happy. With a finite ability to keep doing so, you'll always eventually reach a point where you either have to lie or cheat to do so (or don't make as much profit). You can't keep getting infinitely better at something.

See also: every financial market.

[dogzilla]

What is surprising is how long motorists were lied to in regards to fuel economy and how long people accepted it.

It's so normal that people will say things like "obviously you never get anywhere near the listed fuel efficiency" as if it's totally normal and accepted that the figures can be wrong.

If you bought 20L of fuel but only got 15L, people would be banging on doors asking for peoples heads.

Yet if you buy a car that states 80 mpg and you only got 60, it's the exact same thing as getting 25% less petrol each fill up. But that went on for years.

Honestly it's criminal. Billions have been spent on this industry to poke holes in the testing cycle because it's cheaper than hard grafting on R&D trying to find actual savings.

Things like start-stop engines sound good but in practise they put massive additional strain on the engine components, are more likely to fail and require costly repairs and in reality have bare minimal in fuel savings but because it makes cars look much better in test cycles it gets promoted as an amazing new green technology. On a test cycle it might so 15% improvement, (all electrics off, no a/c, no heating, no lights etc...) but in reality with heating/cooling, lights , music etc... the improvement is more like 1-3%. And that's pretty quickly off-set when you realise that a lot of these engines are coming in at 80k miles and needing a lot of work.

[FPVSteve]

I always thought that starting an engine used a lot of fuel - perhaps it doesn't apply to newer cars with precise fuel timing.

[wgt40w]

Volkswagen just posted a 20% drop in profits. Not the sort of thing you want to bring attention to.

Only a 20% drop ?  They deserve at least a 100% drop - each year for 5 years.

[Jameskibler]

More like 'Have all the other car manufacturers gotten away with the same?!'

[Ynot6]

i would have thaught that there would have been a lot of scrutiny of other makes at the time. we didn't hear anything, so i will assume that others hadn't been tinkering, at least not the same way.

[iPeel]

I believe BMW and Volvo were implicated at the start but found not to have the same deliberate defeat devices that VAG had. Bear in mind that this was about emissions, not efficiency and lying to the government is not the same as lying to the consumer.

There's efficiency, emissions and performance; you can have any two but can't have all three, and that's what VAG were trying to convince was achievable.

[wgt40w]

  ......... lying to the government is not the same as lying to the consumer.

?????? Yeah right - and murdering a man is not the same as murdering a woman, I suppose ?????

[iPeel]

?????? Yeah right - and murdering a man is not the same as murdering a woman, I suppose ?????

I didn't mention anyone murdering anyone.

Historically a crime against the government always seems to carry a higher penalty than a crime against another citizen.

[wgt40w]

Lying is lying, regardless of who is lied to - or it should be.

VW have lied to their customers, for whom some may have been partly persuaded to buy the VW product due to its' 'low' emissions.

VW have also lied to the British government denying them probably millions in lost taxation revenue from what should have been higher emissions (Road Fund Tax)

[Doctor3]

Saw this thread and felt the need to jump in.
I don't think VW have done anything criminal. The software used just checks if the rear wheels are spinning, if not then it knows its in a dyno test. The fuel mixture is just made more lean then. So the numbers they produce actually are real. But the fuel mixture changed back for general use as richer is safer.

Its not just VW who did this - hence the major hush hush about it. 

Yes its number manipulation a bit but when has that not been the case in everything.


(if you really wanted you could use macdonalds trays, put them under your rear wheel with hand brake, achieve the same results and now have a drift car)

[Coyote]

(if you really wanted you could use macdonalds trays, put them under your rear wheel with hand brake, achieve the same results and now have a drift car)

Ahhhh memories :)

[FPVSteve]

Saw this thread and felt the need to jump in.
I don't think VW have done anything criminal. The software used just checks if the rear wheels are spinning, if not then it knows its in a dyno test. The fuel mixture is just made more lean then. So the numbers they produce actually are real. But the fuel mixture changed back for general use as richer is safer.

Not quite accurate since the Touareg is 4WD - I think the software was slightly more advanced than checking the motion of the rear wheels...

Its not just VW who did this - hence the major hush hush about it. 

Yes its number manipulation a bit but when has that not been the case in everything.

Given that we've established they were lying, explain to me how:

Lying to consumers about economy and emissions isn't a trading standards issue?
Lying to government agencies regarding emissions isn't a criminal issue when there are laws in place specifically for this purpose?

If you say a car is getting 35.5mpg (rather specific for a lie!) when in fact it is getting 27.9mpg, and it's outputting 317g of carbon instead of 220g, this is a problem - multiply it by X millions of vehicles and it becomes a criminal offence specifically to stop manufacturers from being able to do this type of stuff because it is a Bad Thing for the environment.

There is a reason why it exploded into the media when it was uncovered - it's because it was a big deal.