Both of those platforms use Urea systems, as do larger and more expensive VW/Audio vehicles. The issue is purely in the small, inexpensive vehicles.
The NOx problems were mostly resolved through the injection of urea into exhaust gases (e.g. AdBlue), dramatically reducing NOx emissions while leaving the efficiency and power unaffected. Urea systems add an extra cost and complexity to the vehicle though (not to mention that you need to top up your urea additive occasionally), and VW seemed to find a loophole that allowed them to make small, inexpensive cars without urea injection. They did this by injecting fuel into the exhaust in the absence of Urea, but to achieve the same effect. But this can gunk up the NOx trap if used endlessly (it is far less precise than urea, obviously), reduces fuel economy, etc, so they built this One Little Trick that only actually does that during identified tests.
Not sure if there are USA/Europe differences with BMW's urea system (likely), but Blue Performance (urea system) is not standard on all BMW diesels in the UK (in 2014 anyway).
I don't understand this assertion. The two VW diesel (US) automobiles I've owned have had an AdBlue system. One was a base model Jetta TDI and the other a Passat TDI (which I now want rid of).
VW claimed to have a trick that removed the need for it on their smaller, lighter cars. But that trick was a trick that only allowed them to pass EPA tests.
On top of that, even though the Passat has an AdBlue urea system, it's still affected:
On the open road, a Volkswagen Jetta TDI blew through the
U.S. nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions limit by 15 to 35
times. A VW Passat TDI (with urea aftertreatment) was 5
to 20 times the maximum.
What would happen if all the affected consumers demanded the full purchase price returned to them and returned their used cars? It seems clear that they would win, because they were fraudulent sales. But that would bankrupt VW, right?
I don't think it's clear that they would win. The cars will be reprogrammed to meet EPA rules, and then they will have less power and use more fuel. The will be worth X on the resale market. Two weeks ago they were worth Y, where X < Y. The damages owners might be entitled to are probably Y-X, not Y.
They should clearly win because they were sold a fraudulent product. If I sold you a gold watch that didn't turn out to be gold I don't just owe you the difference, I owe you back all the money and I go to jail.
The good news for VW is that the cars aren't worthless, so they can buy them back and sell them. For people who want to keep their car there will probably also be a cash offer.
Yeah, but it's going to be a mess. The person who sold you the car, at the VW dealership, unknowingly misrepresented the product to you. As a consumer under US law you are entitled to certain remedies (such as: the retailer has to take the product back). Then the dealer, who is not, under US law, a "consumer" and is also not identical to Volkswagen itself, has to seek relief from VW for providing it with the bogus merchandise in the first place. But in practice you're not going to be able to walk into the VW dealer and demand your money back, you'd have to take them to court, and there will probably be strong arguments on their side that the case is preempted by some other, much larger suit.
It will definitely be a mess. There are already class action suits in progress and I'm sure many more on the way. There is some precedent for buybacks and they typically take depreciation into account, though this is a whole other level of scandal so the rules may be different.
Fiat Chrysler recently announced a buyback as part of a consent decree with the NHTSA:
> As to how much money an owner might receive under the buy-back program, the consent order stated that FCA must "refund the purchase price paid by the first purchaser of the vehicle for purposes other than resale, less a reasonable allowance for depreciation, and not including the cost of modifications made to the vehicle after the first retail sale." To sweeten the deal, a 10 percent premium will be factored into the initial purchase price.
Not a bad deal actually and this was defect based, not fraud based. I think VW would be incredibly lucky to have such a settlement.
I'm not sure there is a way to fix the cars without a hardware retrofit if that is even a viable option. Someone on reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/3ljng2/volkswagen...) suggested the only way they were able to pass emissions was to keep the exhaust gas recirculator (EGR) operational during the test reducing NOx emissions. Keeping the EGR open has a lot of drawbacks and probably isn't a viable long term solution as it results in loss of power in the engine, reduced fuel economy, greater wear on the engine, increased particulate emissions, increased overall operating temperatures. The later drawback would probably require a hardware solution.
A diesel engine with an EGR operating doesn't efficiently burn off all the fuel which, in addition to loss of power, produces greater particulate matter (pm) emissions which intern need to be filtered from the exhaust. The exhaust filters can become clogged with pm soot and the way it's cleansed is by injecting and igniting fuel in the exhaust to burn off the soot. If the EGR was continuously in operation then this burn off process would happen with greater regularity increasing the operating temperature of the exhaust system which would probably require more heat shielding and cooling.
Another option is a selective catalytic reduction (SCR) system. Assuming one could be retro fit on these cars, an SCR would probably have the last impact on the vehicle's operation but would introduce new maintenance concerns for the operator (DEF fluid) and Volkswagen.
It would instantly bankrupt VW, in almost any way you cut it.
I have no idea what the intricacies of German bankruptcy laws are, but I imagine they could cut a deal with car owners, and then emerge back out of bankruptcy in whatever German equivalent manner that would occur. That scenario will never happen though, there won't be enough global coordination between vehicle owners. The only way that type of outcome occurs, is if the US Government nudges it that direction (US car owners doing that would be enough to bankrupt VW).
International companies of any size aren't a single legal entity - bankrupting VW USA (which presumably sold the cars) is probably a limited liability subsidiary of VW - so it could go bankrupt without necessarily bankrupting the parent company.
Maybe. I am not sure this would be the way to go on this.
Really the car the consumer got was better (to them) than the product ordered. It had better gas mileage, and better performance than it should have had.
The net loser in the trick was the environment (/ the world). If a company does a trick to make money and hurt the environment, the government should step in and make them pay, right? Like if I run a tire shop and secretly burn all my old tires in the back yard.. my customers weren't hurt (directly), but the entire environment was.
The car may have been better than it should have been, but it was NOT better than was claimed. It is not the product itself that is the problem, it is the claims made of the product by the manufacturer. VW made claims about the power, fuel economy and emissions. In as-delivered configuration the emissions claim is false and in order to live up to the emissions claim they will need to negate the power and economy claims.
A closer analogy would be selling tires that spew asbestos as you drive. The consumer _is_ damaged by the sale because the cars are no longer legal to drive on roads. Even with good-faith doctrines that mean the consumer isn't in the wrong, there are commensurate damages in resale value, and performance _below_ what the consumer was sold. Horsepower and torque numbers will almost certainly need to go down, and urea NOx recovery systems aren't cheap, and it's one more part to maintain.
So I disagree with that interpretation (getting something better than promised; it's only in the very limited sense of average gas milage). I own a TDI and am affected, fwiw.
> the car the consumer got was better (to them) than the product ordered
Two exceptions are: people who prioritize environmental impact over solely personal short-term ones ("act local, think global"); and people who will now have to waste time to get the car fixed so it will pass local smog testing.
Could the fact that lower emission was a possible selling point and may have affected customer choice have an impact here? Some customer did feel cheated by this fraud since they bought the car in part for it's lower emission and fuel usage.
Ya I can totally see this side also. As a non-legal person, it seems harder to argue:
I expected 99x and 89y, but I got 120x and 70y
vs
You lied and spewed toxins all over the environment
as the first case requires some kind of weighting. Like if a pair of shoes advertises weighing 12 ounces, but they made a silent upgrade to only weight 11 ounces.. 99.9% of people are happy for that. The .1% of people who use shoes for boat anchors are not happy.
It's not at all clear that they would win. There is an article by a German lawyer on the topic[1]. The tl;dr of it is, that given that the car works mostly as intended and that any damage to individual customers is little (if it even exists) customers won't get back the full purchase price and probably not even any money, especially if VW were to provide a fix.
Seems to me that any 'fix' that lowers fuel economy would have a real and measurable damage on the owners in the way of increased fuel costs. Wouldn't this just be deflecting the problem from one area to another?
If I was VW I'd calculate the fuel economy difference between with fix and without fix, factor oil prices and inflation over life of the car and just offer drivers the difference.
It's be cheaper than a refund (which is unlikely) and would allow them to bring the cars back into compliance.
Note that this is what Hyundai did in the US a few years ago when they were found to have overstated their efficiency numbers. They simply reimburse you the difference in fuel costs, plus a little extra as their way of saying "sorry" or something like that.
It would only lower the fuel economy (as advertised), if they didn't apply the cheat during those tests. If they did, the cars fuel economy right now is higher than advertised.
Besides fuel economy heavily depends on load, driving style, trip length, conditions, where you are driving (city, autobahn, ...), how fast you are driving, which tires you're using and so on.
Even if there is a measurable change I think it would still be difficult to convince a court that this is a damage, a customer deserves to be compensated for.
Even if it were flirting with bankruptcy, I don't think VW is integral to the economy. Specifically, I don't imagine anything beyond normal bankruptcy protections would be offered to VW, especially something to the extent of a bail-out. There are plenty of alternatives for VW customers.
That said, the US has bailed out the auto industry before to preserve American presence in the market. Germany may opt to do the same, but they are home to other successful automakers.
I wonder if this will have an effect on Europe's appetite for diesel cars in general going forward. I know they're much more popular over there than here in the US.
Move away from old diesels (e.g. non turbo/pre common rail/smoking) or new diesels? New diesels are still very much seen as "green" in Europe (well, before the VW scandal).
The economist has an interesting article out right now, about how the discussion over diesel cars is almost moot with the rapid rise of the electric car globally over the next few years:
Electric cars will never reach that much consumers in Asia as it has in US.
Very few people in Shanghai/Seoul/Tokyo own private garage to charge cars in over night.
And this is why Toyota/Hyundai are stubbornly pushing Hydrogen cars.
Maybe not cars, but perhaps busses will be the preferred electric vehicle in Asia. China's BYD has been building electric busses for a while, and even Los Angeles is buying.
To me electric busses seem a no-brainier for municipalities: they have predictable routes so you can schedule around charging times, fuel costs can be beneath what you'd pay for gasoline, and cities looking to reduce their carbon footprint can point to the busses and a demonstrable difference.
The idea that people need private garages to charge their cars seems silly. You can have plugs in public garages or even regular parking spaces, with cables you securely attach to both ends (to prevent energy theft) and a payment system. It's not that much more complex than a parking meter.
That's as much a technology problem as anything else. If you line the streets with chargers, then have the car and charger interface with each other to report which car is actually charging, you can bill the owner.
Whether or not the areas cars are parked have the appropriate wiring to facilitate chargers is another problem entirely. And quite frankly, I'm still skeptical our electric grid can handle everyone plugging in a car - solar panels or not. It's been overcast here for 4 days straight, if I had to plug my car in, it'd be drawing from an already strained grid. If everyone in my neighborhood did the same thing, I can see a lot of rolling brownouts.
The effect of a significantly higher, controllable and predictable load will be nothing but positive for a strained grid. Electric cars are a great load because, unlike lighting and AC and most other household use, the energy doesn't need to be delivered at a specific time.
> Researchers ... have calculated that the grid has enough excess capacity to support over 150 million battery-powered cars, or about 75 percent of the cars, pickups, and SUVs on the road in the United States.
The idea is not to charge the e-cars overnight at home, but during the day at the company parkhouse or parking lots, so that the energy companies can unload energy during the peak hours from those batteries. That's the most expensive energy, and car batteries are perfect for that. Win-win.
What about the owners of VW cars that aren't affected by the consumption fraud. I would imagine the value of their cars will, regardless of the diesel engine, decrease with the saturation of people selling their cars or trying to return them. Is it possible for non-affected owners to be compensated as well for loss in market value as a result of the company's actions? Concerned Jetta owner here asking smarter people.
I hear a lot that a car loses 10-50% of its value the moment it leaves the dealership, but I am somehow skeptical. If it is true I would love to buy a new used car right outside of, hell, even 50 miles after the dealership at half the price.
I think the truth is that it is so rare for a car to be sold at 0 miles that we don't really have a price point on it. It is effectively an illiquid good, so the pricing is just a meaningless number, because no one would sell their car at this fictitious price. Like how no one will bought 37 Signals for 100 billion dollars. [1]
It's rare but it's not completely nonexistent. Sometimes the dealership will take possession of a recently sold car, perhaps because they offered some sort of guarantee on it. Once the car has been sold it can't be sold again as "new" even in a case like this, so it will be sold as used with almost no miles on it. Almost nobody is going to buy a car and then immediately turn around and sell it at a huge discount, but that's not the only way cars get sold.
Here are a few listings to check out, as proof they exist:
I can't be arsed to do the comparison to see how much value they've actually lost compared to new, but the data is there to prove or disprove the claim.
It'll be some firmware upgrade, the emissions will be fine but fuel economy will suffer by some minor amount. Then everyone will move on to the next tragedy.
I don't really see a massive run on people trying to sell or return their car. I'm sure a few will to try to make a point, or perhaps to try to get a new car out of the deal.
Most people seem to be saying that it will be a simple software update to fix this issue, and everything will be fine other than some loss of power and fuel economy.
Isn't it possible that running these engines at the EPA recommended levels just isn't possible? That if they were to run like this 100% of the time, reliability, mpg, or power would be greatly reduced for various reasons?
There is a reason they took this huge risk to put in the cheat (but maybe management didn't think it was a big deal). It seems like there is too much risk involved in cheating for just minor fuel economy and power gains.
I suppose none of us in the peanut gallery know for sure. Knowing that they battle for 1 mile per gallon on their fuel economy ratings, my guess is that it's a minor effect for a car owner, but a major effect on VW's marketing.
I read elsewhere that their technique for cleaning the exhaust can gunk up the filter more quickly too, so it might also change the maintenance schedule. Which, again, may not really be a huge issue for a car owner, but could impact VW.
You could sell it now, and couch the sale in terms of having an unaffected, EPA compliant, car. If depreciation is your primary concern, then you can sell now and buy something with lower potential depreciation.
I feel it's worth making the point that everyone talking about penalties is avoiding: Penalties are pointless.
Financial penalties applied to a company this size basically just get socialised. Either employees (generally innocent of this) lose their jobs as the company closes factories, or the price of future cars goes up, or even the company goes entirely bust in which case that doesn't actually help anyone at all. The only non-socialised effect of a penalty is to punish shareholders - who are also innocent of this (and arguably even that is socialised, since pension funds probably own large chunks of most car companies!).
The people who are guilty are the people who decided to install this software, who installed it, who kept it installed - and the people who were supposed to put in place checks to prevent this sort of fraud from happening, from the CEO on down.
The correct response for society, in my opinion, is not to try and apply a punishment to "the company", which is mindless and is only the product of people's decisions, but to make those people accountable. They were guilty of fraud, either directly (very serious) or by lack of diligence (somewhat less serious but still criminal). We have laws about fraud. Apply those laws, put those people in jail, and the next bunch of smartasses who think they can put fraudulent software in cars with this will think twice about it - and probably not do it.
In other words, this is a state, criminal matter. Approach this much like any other form of organised crime - investigate, offer reduced penalties for information, and put people who were guilty of this high-level organised crime in jail.
There will be a criminal case for fraud and a civil case for customer damages, at least that is how it works in the US. How many countries were defrauded and all their different laws will take quite a while to sort.
Alternatively, nationalise the company with no redress to the shareholders. They lose all their money, the company keeps on running so the jobs are kept (until the business shuts down or is sold at least), and customers aren't left without support. If the penalty for failing to ensure the company you invested in is losing your investment then perhaps shareholders would police their investments better.
I don't know, but you could ask that about anything a company does. The whole point of owning shares is that you share in both the successes and failures of the company. If the company has a significant downside potential that you can't control for, then you need to account for that when buying shares.
In terms of losses to shareholders, this is no different than if VW had decided to burn all their factories to the ground and go into the sausage-making business, which then failed spectacularly. The shareholders get "punished" for that, and we would expect nothing different. Why should a legal failure be treated more leniently than a financial failure?
Wonder how long it takes before we find BMW, Mercedes et al. are doing the same as VW and this is car industry "standard practice"? That in turn could lead to German economic collapse... this is gonna get really "interesting"
Large organizations do take on a mind of its own. This is because individual people will adjust their behaviors once they become exposed to the established pressure from culture, policies, and rules in the organization.
Take the U.S. President for example. They almost always change their policies when actually taking office due to new internal information from government. The government faces unique challenges from that of an individual person, and so the individual must act differently when making decisions for the large organization.
Does anybody know the specific purpose of defeating the pollution control? I never see this addressed. What positive user experience is produced? The car has faster pickup or better gas mileage or something else?
This can't really be called a bug because they did it on purpose, but what are the most costly software 'issues' in history? As VW set aside 6 billion for damages I assume this is the worst.
Why does everyone seem to assume this is specific to VW in particular. They nay have been the most egregious but I would be surprised if this was isolated.
Just look a those EPA mpg estimates, everybody seems to game the system and "tune" their cars to get highest ratings. Does anybody still hope to get anywhere near the estimate when buying a new car, especially city mpg?
I would argue this sort of manipulation is done widely and was pretty well known and accepted but VW must have overdone it. Of course Diesel cars have potential for worse emssisons than gas but I bet this happens across the board, except the Germans are screwed because they are pushing Diesels.
I see a lot of people posting things to the effect of "It's probably not a huge deal, just a firmware patch." That strikes me as unlikely. If that were the case, then why would VW take this risk in the first place? Clearly, there was some benefit to the car that made engaging in what was clearly illegal behavior seem like a financially sound option to who knows how many people within the company. If applying a firmware patch to fix this doesn't change the value of the car that much, why wouldn't they ship it was that firmware in the first place?
81 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadThe NOx problems were mostly resolved through the injection of urea into exhaust gases (e.g. AdBlue), dramatically reducing NOx emissions while leaving the efficiency and power unaffected. Urea systems add an extra cost and complexity to the vehicle though (not to mention that you need to top up your urea additive occasionally), and VW seemed to find a loophole that allowed them to make small, inexpensive cars without urea injection. They did this by injecting fuel into the exhaust in the absence of Urea, but to achieve the same effect. But this can gunk up the NOx trap if used endlessly (it is far less precise than urea, obviously), reduces fuel economy, etc, so they built this One Little Trick that only actually does that during identified tests.
http://ask.cars.com/2012/11/why-do-some-volkswagen-diesels-u...
VW claimed to have a trick that removed the need for it on their smaller, lighter cars. But that trick was a trick that only allowed them to pass EPA tests.
However, VW added the AdBlue system to the 2015 Jetta TDI -- perhaps because they knew that this was a problem:
http://www.bimmerfest.com/forums/showthread.php?t=765593
On top of that, even though the Passat has an AdBlue urea system, it's still affected:
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1100125_vw-diesel-emissi...So yeah, I'm not a happy owner right now.
The good news for VW is that the cars aren't worthless, so they can buy them back and sell them. For people who want to keep their car there will probably also be a cash offer.
Fiat Chrysler recently announced a buyback as part of a consent decree with the NHTSA:
http://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/fiat-chrysler-buy-back...
> As to how much money an owner might receive under the buy-back program, the consent order stated that FCA must "refund the purchase price paid by the first purchaser of the vehicle for purposes other than resale, less a reasonable allowance for depreciation, and not including the cost of modifications made to the vehicle after the first retail sale." To sweeten the deal, a 10 percent premium will be factored into the initial purchase price.
Not a bad deal actually and this was defect based, not fraud based. I think VW would be incredibly lucky to have such a settlement.
A diesel engine with an EGR operating doesn't efficiently burn off all the fuel which, in addition to loss of power, produces greater particulate matter (pm) emissions which intern need to be filtered from the exhaust. The exhaust filters can become clogged with pm soot and the way it's cleansed is by injecting and igniting fuel in the exhaust to burn off the soot. If the EGR was continuously in operation then this burn off process would happen with greater regularity increasing the operating temperature of the exhaust system which would probably require more heat shielding and cooling.
Another option is a selective catalytic reduction (SCR) system. Assuming one could be retro fit on these cars, an SCR would probably have the last impact on the vehicle's operation but would introduce new maintenance concerns for the operator (DEF fluid) and Volkswagen.
I have no idea what the intricacies of German bankruptcy laws are, but I imagine they could cut a deal with car owners, and then emerge back out of bankruptcy in whatever German equivalent manner that would occur. That scenario will never happen though, there won't be enough global coordination between vehicle owners. The only way that type of outcome occurs, is if the US Government nudges it that direction (US car owners doing that would be enough to bankrupt VW).
Really the car the consumer got was better (to them) than the product ordered. It had better gas mileage, and better performance than it should have had.
The net loser in the trick was the environment (/ the world). If a company does a trick to make money and hurt the environment, the government should step in and make them pay, right? Like if I run a tire shop and secretly burn all my old tires in the back yard.. my customers weren't hurt (directly), but the entire environment was.
So I disagree with that interpretation (getting something better than promised; it's only in the very limited sense of average gas milage). I own a TDI and am affected, fwiw.
If the tires spewed asbestos and no law was against you driving them, then I think my argument still stands.
Two exceptions are: people who prioritize environmental impact over solely personal short-term ones ("act local, think global"); and people who will now have to waste time to get the car fixed so it will pass local smog testing.
I expected 99x and 89y, but I got 120x and 70y
vs
You lied and spewed toxins all over the environment
as the first case requires some kind of weighting. Like if a pair of shoes advertises weighing 12 ounces, but they made a silent upgrade to only weight 11 ounces.. 99.9% of people are happy for that. The .1% of people who use shoes for boat anchors are not happy.
[1]: http://www.ferner-alsdorf.de/rechtsanwalt/zivilrecht/vertrag...
It's be cheaper than a refund (which is unlikely) and would allow them to bring the cars back into compliance.
https://hyundaimpginfo.com/customerinfo/compensation-informa...
Besides fuel economy heavily depends on load, driving style, trip length, conditions, where you are driving (city, autobahn, ...), how fast you are driving, which tires you're using and so on.
Even if there is a measurable change I think it would still be difficult to convince a court that this is a damage, a customer deserves to be compensated for.
Not to mention that they are probably "too big to fail" [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Group
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_big_to_fail
That said, the US has bailed out the auto industry before to preserve American presence in the market. Germany may opt to do the same, but they are home to other successful automakers.
The high pollution in some city centres (eg London) and the associated death rates are driving change.
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21666226-volkswagens-f...
Electric cars will never reach that much consumers in Asia as it has in US. Very few people in Shanghai/Seoul/Tokyo own private garage to charge cars in over night.
And this is why Toyota/Hyundai are stubbornly pushing Hydrogen cars.
To me electric busses seem a no-brainier for municipalities: they have predictable routes so you can schedule around charging times, fuel costs can be beneath what you'd pay for gasoline, and cities looking to reduce their carbon footprint can point to the busses and a demonstrable difference.
I would like to be proven wrong, but in markets with low level of private garage ownership, pure EV won't succeed.
Whether or not the areas cars are parked have the appropriate wiring to facilitate chargers is another problem entirely. And quite frankly, I'm still skeptical our electric grid can handle everyone plugging in a car - solar panels or not. It's been overcast here for 4 days straight, if I had to plug my car in, it'd be drawing from an already strained grid. If everyone in my neighborhood did the same thing, I can see a lot of rolling brownouts.
> Researchers ... have calculated that the grid has enough excess capacity to support over 150 million battery-powered cars, or about 75 percent of the cars, pickups, and SUVs on the road in the United States.
China is pretty excited about electric cars.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-23/china-won-...
> China [is] the only market where Toyota sells EVs.
I think the truth is that it is so rare for a car to be sold at 0 miles that we don't really have a price point on it. It is effectively an illiquid good, so the pricing is just a meaningless number, because no one would sell their car at this fictitious price. Like how no one will bought 37 Signals for 100 billion dollars. [1]
[1] https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1941-press-release-37signals-...
Here are a few listings to check out, as proof they exist:
http://www.cars.com/vehicledetail/detail/648714782/overview/
http://www.cars.com/vehicledetail/detail/647726128/overview/
http://www.cars.com/vehicledetail/detail/645336026/overview/
I can't be arsed to do the comparison to see how much value they've actually lost compared to new, but the data is there to prove or disprove the claim.
VW screwed up so badly.
The estimate of worth, and estimate of fuzziness, assumes that VW wasn't deliberately hiding crucial information from the market.
I don't really see a massive run on people trying to sell or return their car. I'm sure a few will to try to make a point, or perhaps to try to get a new car out of the deal.
That's my prediction for the record!
Isn't it possible that running these engines at the EPA recommended levels just isn't possible? That if they were to run like this 100% of the time, reliability, mpg, or power would be greatly reduced for various reasons?
There is a reason they took this huge risk to put in the cheat (but maybe management didn't think it was a big deal). It seems like there is too much risk involved in cheating for just minor fuel economy and power gains.
I read elsewhere that their technique for cleaning the exhaust can gunk up the filter more quickly too, so it might also change the maintenance schedule. Which, again, may not really be a huge issue for a car owner, but could impact VW.
Financial penalties applied to a company this size basically just get socialised. Either employees (generally innocent of this) lose their jobs as the company closes factories, or the price of future cars goes up, or even the company goes entirely bust in which case that doesn't actually help anyone at all. The only non-socialised effect of a penalty is to punish shareholders - who are also innocent of this (and arguably even that is socialised, since pension funds probably own large chunks of most car companies!).
The people who are guilty are the people who decided to install this software, who installed it, who kept it installed - and the people who were supposed to put in place checks to prevent this sort of fraud from happening, from the CEO on down.
The correct response for society, in my opinion, is not to try and apply a punishment to "the company", which is mindless and is only the product of people's decisions, but to make those people accountable. They were guilty of fraud, either directly (very serious) or by lack of diligence (somewhat less serious but still criminal). We have laws about fraud. Apply those laws, put those people in jail, and the next bunch of smartasses who think they can put fraudulent software in cars with this will think twice about it - and probably not do it.
In other words, this is a state, criminal matter. Approach this much like any other form of organised crime - investigate, offer reduced penalties for information, and put people who were guilty of this high-level organised crime in jail.
In terms of losses to shareholders, this is no different than if VW had decided to burn all their factories to the ground and go into the sausage-making business, which then failed spectacularly. The shareholders get "punished" for that, and we would expect nothing different. Why should a legal failure be treated more leniently than a financial failure?
Take the U.S. President for example. They almost always change their policies when actually taking office due to new internal information from government. The government faces unique challenges from that of an individual person, and so the individual must act differently when making decisions for the large organization.
Second: taxes. The buyer pays less taxes (at least in Europe) if the pollution is less than a certain value.
And more, I am sure.
Just look a those EPA mpg estimates, everybody seems to game the system and "tune" their cars to get highest ratings. Does anybody still hope to get anywhere near the estimate when buying a new car, especially city mpg?
I would argue this sort of manipulation is done widely and was pretty well known and accepted but VW must have overdone it. Of course Diesel cars have potential for worse emssisons than gas but I bet this happens across the board, except the Germans are screwed because they are pushing Diesels.
Yeah if it were just a firmware patch VW would not have set aside billions to deal with the fallout and had the CEO resign.