Volkswagen's cheating engines can't be easily fixed

Business Insider ^ | 09/25/2015 | Benjamin Zhang

[Buckeye McFrog]

You got that right. VW’s real sin here is that they proved that they are smarter than the people who regulate them by several orders of magnitude.

And for THAT they shall pay....and pay....and pay....and pay....AND PAY!

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

[Read Write Repeat]

On the money.

[Diana in Wisconsin]

My Dad is a VW Guy all the way. He’s owned 17 of them! My first car was a 1971 Baby Blue VW Bug. How I LOVED that car!

My City Car is a VW Golf, which I inherited from my StepMom when she passed. That thing is 15 years old, SIPS gasoline and has under 40K miles on it!

My Farm Car is my Ford Escape.

That’s too bad VW has to go through this. The engineering is good; Government Regulation will smother us ALL in the end...

Enjoy driving while you still can! :)

[Mr. K]

sure it can.

Just connect simulated tester hardware and make it think it is always ‘under test’

geez do I have to solve everything?

[SaveFerris]

I predicted that same thing yesterday, elsewhere.

I don’t see how they have any other option. The cars are not going to perform the same and the owners will be quite unhappy.

[pepsionice]

Here’s my prediction.

1. An EPA leveraged deal where Volkswagen must fix the problem and pay a fine (three or four billion is my humble guess), OR perform a buy-back/swap...with a gas engine car instead.

2. Oddly, over ninety-percent of the owners will refuse the fix....refuse the swap....and say they won’t participate with the EPA deal.

3. EPA then gets upset over people confronting them....so they order them to accept the swap or pay a yearly fine of $500. More than half of the owners will accept the $500 a year fine and just say OK, but take the EPA to court.

4. When the smoke finally clears....half of the cars are bought back and put on ships...sent to Mexico and sold there to the general public...sending the fumes over the border into the US.

5. VW has billions to pay which infuriates the Germans. So the Germans decide by 2017...an election year in Germany...to sue the US for privacy violations by NSA for 10-billion dollars. As much money as the state attorney generals and EPA think they will get off VW....the Germans will get twice that much in return.

[Travis T. OJustice]

VW is sooooooo screwed.

Das UH-OH.

[dfwgator]

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

[Diana in Wisconsin]

Sorry for all of the ‘my’ statements in that last post - I sound like friggin’ 0bama, LOL!

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

Without predicting the exact nature, this is going to turn into something or other of monumental size.

I kind of thought it was odd/remarkable how the Germans had fully conquered the diesel emission standards over the years. I don’t claim to have a full understanding of the physics.

Here in CA, for just an example of a thought exercise, these cars may become illegal to operate. How that would happen, I have no idea, because I don’t own a diesel and I am not familiar with the arcana. If they can’t pass smog tests, though, they don’t get a registration, period, end of subject. So somehow, even emitting 10 and 12 times standards, they have been coming in under limits.

Seems odd.

[grumpygresh]

Who is the villain here? As always, it’s the Federal government that created these idiotic standards.

[BRL]

You dont want it “fixed”

[dfwgator]

I kind of thought it was odd/remarkable how the Germans had fully conquered the diesel emission standards over the years.

"Just like we conquered Poland, and Czechoslovakia, and France......DEUTSCHLAND!!!! DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLES!"

[masadaman]

Yes, a buyback. But if VW management takes a deep breath and realizes that 11 million cars at let's say FMV of $10k/car is roughly $100 billion, they might get away with discounts on a new car or a releases for less than half that. The real problem is the governmental fines. After all, BP was victimized by agreeing to a $22 billion+ shakedown even though the incident was not intentional and caused relatively minimal damage...crude oil being organic and natural. My guess is this ends in VW’s bankruptcy.

[oh8eleven]

Diesel has been here for a long time, but was really only "introduced" to most people during the 1970s gas shortages.
It was as successful as converting America to the metric system.

[steve8714]

VW welcomed the union after employees rejected it.

[MrB]

The standards were arbitrary and not based in any sense of reality.

VW complied with the law -
“when the test equipment is hooked up, the engine shall emit no more than X of substance Y”.

They complied.

[Drew68]

i predict in 6 months you’ll see a lot of vw diesels on buy here pay here lots

With stickers on them that say, "For off-road/private road use only."

[Redbob]

"The problem for Volkswagen is that getting the engine's emissions in line with pollution standards probably means sacrificing something else."

No sh!t, Sherlock - that's the challenge faced by all the other automakers, and they applied engineering solutions and solved the problem. VW just cheated.

They can simply fall back on the emissions strategy intended to be used on the test cycle only; that will let them pass, but performance and driveability are likely to suffer.

Not as much as others here are direly predicting, but enough that VW owners are likely to opt for a better solution... after first suing VW for fraud.

[steve8714]

Yeah, GM put truck diesels into Olds 98s. Not the same as a Eurodiesel, 1.5-2 liter.