Posted on 09/25/2015 8:08:56 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Volkswagen is confronted with a monumental challenge.
The company has admitted that 11 million of its cars used illegal software to cheat emissions standards.
Now, many owners are demanding that the offending cars be fixed.
That's easier said than done, and Volkswagen has already tried — and failed — twice.
Here's the issue, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency: Cars with Volkswagen's 2-liter TDI turbo-diesel four-cylinder engines include software that detects when the car is undergoing emissions testing and turns on a suite of pollution-control systems.
But as soon as the test ends, the controls switch off, leaving the engine free to emit up to 40 times the legal limit of nitrogen oxide, a highly polluting gas. According to the California Air Resources Board, Volkswagen admitted to using a defeat device during a September 3 meeting with the agency and the EPA.
The problem for Volkswagen is that getting the engine's emissions in line with pollution standards probably means sacrificing something else.
"Building an engine involves balancing four factors — performance, emissions, durability, and fuel economy," explained Jake Fisher, Consumer Reports' director of automotive testing.
Right now, VW has sacrificed emissions to create a TDI engine that offers great performance, incredible fuel economy, and solid reliability.
"Whatever the fix is, it will likely sacrifice fuel economy and probably durability as well," Fisher said.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
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.
On the money.
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! :)
sure it can.
Just connect simulated tester hardware and make it think it is always ‘under test’
geez do I have to solve everything?
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.
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.
Das UH-OH.
Sorry for all of the ‘my’ statements in that last post - I sound like friggin’ 0bama, LOL!
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.
Who is the villain here? As always, it’s the Federal government that created these idiotic standards.
You dont want it “fixed”
"Just like we conquered Poland, and Czechoslovakia, and France......DEUTSCHLAND!!!! DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLES!"
VW welcomed the union after employees rejected it.
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.
With stickers on them that say, "For off-road/private road use only."
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.
Yeah, GM put truck diesels into Olds 98s. Not the same as a Eurodiesel, 1.5-2 liter.
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