Billions wiped off value of industry heavyweights amid concerns that manipulation of air pollution data could be ‘very widespread’.
This also comes on the heels of DoJ's memo saying that they were going to criminally prosecute individuals within the next corporate rule breaker. I don't know if this was an open investigation prior to that memo, but it seems like a really good test case, because unlike Toyota's and GM's recent suits, which were bad but still sins of omission, this is definitely 100% a sin of commission, and really fuckin' depraved on at that. I can't imagine that this doesn't go all to the way to a c-suite of some sort. You can't, nor would you even try to, pull something like this if your bonus doesn't depend on it directly. It also is a really good reminder of Occam's razor. No one else in the industry could ever figure out how VW got those power numbers with those emission numbers at that price. It looked like magic. It's too obvious to think fraud and has too much hubris. But in the end, it always remained the most likely explanation and seems obvious now in retrospect.
It'll be really interesting to see how this whole thing is handled. On the one hand, VW is a foreign company. A huge hit to them won't be a huge hit to American jobs like it would if this were GM. They're big, but they're not too big and local to punish, if that makes sense. On the other hand though, Germany is strong diplomatic ally to the US Government and probably a pretty strong trading partner to boot. It wouldn't be hard to imagine the German government encouraging The US to go easy on them, if not openly then at least behind closed doors.
Euro concerns led to the Fed not pushing interest rates last week. Meanwhile, as I mentioned earlier, the Euro is rippin' weak right now giving Europe a potent trade advantage. Remind me - how old were you when Toshiba sold electronics to the Soviet Navy? There were congressmen smashing boom boxes with sledge hammers. Expect some epic pageantry.
I think we are gonna be in for a hell of a ride. Seeing as how Autoblog and The Truth About Cars are two of my mainstay blogs, I think I'll get a pretty good view of the action too. I'll try to refrain from inundating Hubski with posts on the subject. ;)Expect some epic pageantry.
I haven't been able to stop grinning since reading about this. I am handy with gasoline powered cars, but I've never owned or even really worked on a diesel. I feel a little sheepish admitting that I didn't know anything about Adblue. I feel like a little kid laughing about piss being refilled at a 10k service interval. It sounds almost as silly as blinker fluid. giggle.A warning light signals when the AdBlue tank is running low, and when the tank is empty, the car won’t start to comply with emissions regulations.
at least most 2-stroke stuff is automixing... at least the stuff I'm aware of. It always sucked having two gas cans. In fact, my kid screwed up and put the oil/gas mix (stale at that) into the mower last week. That was a fun morning. wife - "why is the mower smoking so much?" me - "probably just some bad ga.... WAIT... CRAP! cut it! cut it!" meh - he didn't know any better and my mower seems ok after the drain and fill.
kleinbl00, WanderingEng I'd love to chat with you about this tonight when I get home.
Watch me demonstrate my piss-poor grasp on diesel emissions controls, but I think The Guardian isn't fully understanding the problem. So check it out. The heart of the problem is Adblue. Urea is a mixture of urea and water, which pretty much makes it mouse piss. And mouse piss, when injected into diesel exhaust, reduces NOx by breaking it down into nitrogen and oxygen. But not all diesels use mouse piss. THIS is the root of the problem: the diesels that VW got busted for are mouse-piss free. The bigger Volkswagens, as well as Mercedes and BMW, use mouse piss. VW's argument was that they were able to get performance and emissions up to snuff on their littler engines without resorting to mouse piss, because mouse piss is a pain in the ass (gotta top it up at $11/gallon every 10k miles or so) and a mouse-piss-free engine is more efficient. But dirtier. Combine that with the fact that VW had to make their pissless motors pass an American test only, the fact that the mouse piss system adds (according to some comment I read somewhere) $3k in expense to the powertrain and the fact that the VW Group is fucking nefarious, I can see this being limited to VW. I mean, it takes some balls to pull something like this. GM? Timid "maybe if we don't recall, we won't get blamed for not fixing this ignition switch." Nissan? "turns out one of our airbag vendors was scamming us." Volkswagen? "Yeah, fuck your regulations." They haven't been having the best year anyway. I will say this, though - it's worth checking out that stock at 5-day. Bitchez got PUNISHED. Now you know why this came out after the markets closed on a Friday afternoon. The brokers have been sharpening their knives all weekend but at least they weren't able to pile on in real time. I'll bet there were some amazing insider short plays nonetheless.
So, I'll just throw some random thoughts here and there and see what you and WanderingEng think. I know about the whole urea addition thing, thanks to the all of the chatter this has caused over in r/cars on Reddit. BMW and others are willing to use them, Mazda and VW would rather not. Mazda, despite their best efforts, seems to have trouble getting things off the ground. Since VW is cheating, it's no wonder they seemed able to pull something off that Mazda couldn't. One of the things that has been picking at my noodle since this whole thing was announced, and was talked about a few times over on r/cars, is that car manufacturers allegedly find little ways to cheat on emissions tests all the time. This just happened to be something beyond "fudging with the drive train a bit" and went into a whole new territory. VW knew that this was trouble. Outright. No doubt. No company that big could be that dumb. Here's the thing though, which is crazy, every single diesel car with this system that they bring to the States increases their chances of getting caught. Every single year that goes by that these cars are on the road and being worked on, increases their chances of getting caught. Given enough time and enough cars, it'd probably be inevitable that they'd get caught. So why do it in the first place? Why take such a big risk? It's stupid. It's crazy. It never should have been an option in the first place. Let's even pretend, for a moment, that the EPA and all the other regulatory agencies would be willing to turn a blind eye to this whole bit, it's still stupid. I mean, look at The Ford C-Max or Hyundai and Kia. Those class action lawsuits were just because the manufacturers decided to fudge the numbers a bit when it comes to MPG ratings. VW? They outright lied. They literally invited the barbarians to their gates with this whole thing and the barbarians happened to have passed the bar exam.
Here's my two cents: VW knew they were cheating, but had they convinced themselves they were close enough to the letter of the law to get away with it? In my industry (totally unrelated to cars), there were two lawsuits a few years ago. The first was Company A had a project that touched a bit of one of Company B's assets. Company B sued, saying the agreement signed by everyone said they had to share the project. Company B won. Maybe a year later, Company 1 had a project that touched a bit of one of Company 2's assets. Company 2 sued, saying the agreement signed by everyone said they had to share the project. Company 1 fought the lawsuit. They hired the best lawyers, the same lawyers Company A used. Guess who won? I think it's easy at the corporate level to get some groupthink. Everyone might be sitting around thinking "wait a minute, we could get burned on this," but nobody is saying anything. Everyone assumes someone would say something, and when nobody says anything, they all assume everyone agrees it's ok when someone on the outside might be screaming "what is wrong with you idiots?"
I suspect there's some truth to this. It's like, "hey, John Yoo wrote us a memo about how waterboarding isn't torture. So now we can torture- I mean, waterboard people." And then you discover that the public doesn't give a fuck about John Yoo's memos.