[amalji]

Originally Posted by Ace F355

So at last someone dares to come to defence of VW, and he is none other than our beloved Jeremy Clarkson!

According to Jezza, the trick is no different to everyday deceptions like lying on a CV or parking on double yellow lines!!

A few excerpts from his side...

1. The company's senior management should "stop wringing their hands and sweating in press conferences and go on the attack."

This is fanboyism more than anything else. You do a crime. You make other competitors look like fool. And the best thing that VW did ( even though it was very late ) was to apologize. That poured in some sanity after 6 years of unethical and stupid practice that VW induldged in. And here is a person who wants them to take an aggressive stand. Taking an aggressive stand would not only be unethical, it will also lead to their complete closure. They will now have to lie down low and co-operate with the governments or prepare for a close down in developed countries.

Originally Posted by Ace F355

2. The whole issue has come about due to "eco-mentalists" telling people first that diesel engines were less polluting than other engines before changing their minds and drawing attention to the damaging properties of the blend of nitrogen and oxygen – or NOX – the engines produced.

Various "soft-in-the-head governments" listened to those critiques and introduced new regulations on how much NOX a car could produce, Clarkson notes.

All humans make mistakes. And that includes the people who fight for environmental regulations. Nox was something that was missed out initially. But, when the find out that it's harmful, should they just keep dump ? Two wrongs doesn't make a right.

Originally Posted by Ace F355

3. The new rules left VW with no choice but to redesign its engines, but the company went further and "fitted its engines with a clever bit of software that exaggerated their economy and cleanliness when they were being tested."

Clever ? Oh, really ? In addition to it being unethical, it's just plain stupidity. It was just a matter of time before someone would have unearthed this blunt cheating. And writing an if loop to detect whether the car is being tested is not rocket science. It just needs a "cheating" mentality.

Originally Posted by Ace F355

4. "Put simply, then, Volkswagen looked at a set of arbitrary figures that had been dreamt up by a bunch of ill-informed, woolly-headed government officials and chose to ignore them. We are not talking about thalidomide here. Or Bhopal. It’s just a bit of good-natured rule-bending, and we all do that."

4000 % deviance from the accepted limits, and how easily he termed it as "a bit of good natured rule-bending" ?
If it was in the case of Mercedez or BMW ( who deviated just 40-50% from the limits ), the statement would have stayed true. But, not with the VW group. They just bluntly turned off emission control.

Originally Posted by Ace F355

5. The whole issue is "rubbish" because "about 60 per cent of man-made NOX emissions do not come from road transport, and of the 40 per cent that do, the vast majority are from lorries and buses. So in the big scheme of things, your neighbour's Golf diesel makes no discernible difference."

It's like Toyota telling Maruti in India that "Hey, I hold just 5% market share in Indian market compared to your 50%. So, I don't need to think about emission control because my contribution overall is minuscule"

Originally Posted by Ace F355

6. The risks to car makers and indeed Europe as a whole are huge if VW is "driven into the wilderness" by lawsuits, fines and damage to the company's reputation and sales. Because if VW goes out of business "the fallout would be immense because it owns Audi, Bugatti, Bentley, Lamborghini, Porsche, Seat and Skoda as well. So they'd also go to the wall.

The punishment has to be exemplary so that no one ever even think about doing such stupidity. VW shouldn't be given an easy away out ( even though I don't believe that they should be crushed to such an extent that they will have to stop business )

Originally Posted by Ace F355

7. "And without the profits from these engineering powerhouses Germany would no longer be in a position to bail out the Greeks or house half of Syria. Which would cause global economic collapse, a humanitarian catastrophe and many plagues."

Wow! Linking this to Syria. Only Jezze can do this. This is like the other side claiming that US will use the money earned from the VW fines to fight IS.

Originally Posted by Ace F355

I can already see Jezza being trolled for his opinions here... lol.

Source: http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/...cle1611750.ece

[johannskaria]

BBC article link

[Thad E Ginathom]

Originally Posted by amalji

This is fanboyism more than anything else. You do a crime. You make other competitors look like fool. And the best thing that VW did ( even though it was very late ) was to apologize. That poured in some sanity after 6 years of unethical and stupid practice that VW induldged in.

VW's response was surprisingly straight. Maybe somebody left out the marketing department this time (or VW's marketing men are a lot more clever than most).

Modern marketing/management dogma has, for quite a while, been never admit to being wrong; never apologise; always claim you were acting in your customers' interests; always say you were only making the user experience better --- and all that crap that we hear so often.

I look at some of these MNC screwups, and think how much better the company would look if they were upfront, rather than making noises like a 9-yr-old schoolboy crying that it was his fault. Sadly, marketing guys, who's job is to manipulate how the company looks, have no actual clue how bad their own cow excrement makes it look.

It may be, actually, a marketing double-think, and they may have been clever enough to realise that the best positive spin they could do here was the negative spin, but still, up-front, it looks more like an honest reaction than something born in the sales departments.

[StarrySky]

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

VW's response was surprisingly straight. Maybe somebody left out the marketing department this time (or VW's marketing men are a lot more clever than most).

Modern marketing/management dogma has, for quite a while, been never admit to being wrong; never apologise; always claim you were acting in your customers' interests; always say you were only making the user experience better --- and all that crap that we hear so often.

AFAIK, the issue hit the media only after VW had already admitted wrong doing to the EPA. Looking at the timeline of this issue in the US, VW already used up their "It's not our fault", "Your tests are wrong" excuses much before the scandal hit the media. So I guess for VW, there wasn't much left to do once the issue was made public than apologize.

[msprabhakar]

Originally Posted by $t@llion kh@n

WOW!! Thanks for sharing msprabhakar....

What an awesome experience to write in the resume for Mr Arvind Thiruvengadam.

Unearthed one of the biggest scandals in the Automotive history.

The diligence of Indians' work pays off and gets recognized only outside of India. The last time an Indian toppled a company's ill-gotten fortune was in 2013 of Ranbaxy. The Indian who made the unimaginable exposé was Dinesh Thakur.

[batterylow]

Originally Posted by msprabhakar

The diligence of Indians' work pays off and gets recognized only outside of India. The last time an Indian toppled a company's ill-gotten fortune was in 2013 of Ranbaxy. The Indian who made the unimaginable exposé was Dinesh Thakur.

From the article quoted, the person at the helm(the CEO even now) for most of the time during the controversy was also an Indian. Let us not get too romantic about Indians toppling companies.

But I digress.

In principle I agree that its easier for a person to have better visibility in the developed world than in India.

[Thad E Ginathom]

Originally Posted by msprabhakar

The diligence of Indians' work pays off and gets recognized only outside of India. The last time an Indian toppled a company's ill-gotten fortune was in 2013 of Ranbaxy. The Indian who made the unimaginable exposé was Dinesh Thakur.

Offtopic, but thanks, because that article made fro gripping reading. It is a story that, before now, of which I knew shadows of echoes.

[babu.sundaram]

The refit plan raises interesting questions.

If Volkswagon had a way to do get both (better emissions & power), without compromising on anything, they would have done it earlier.
Now, if Volkswagon would recall vehicles & remove the cheat device, the intent with which the device, to get more power would not be met. Would the owners be happy with reduced power and emissions? Would Volkswagon be sued for making the vehicles less powerful?

[VW2010]

I feel VW can save millions by just creating a buy back program. This recall and service cost including labour and time just doesnt make economic sense.

Simply buy back all the cars or provide an alternate swap and make it easier on impact. As a VW owner that creates a better impact on me as a customer than simply recalling and trying to retrofit something that may or may not actually help.

The buy back keeps the base and potentially helps them continue to instill customer support.


VW cannot run this company based on Ardent TDI fans. That base is very minimal.

i may be wrong but to me the time and energy wasted in fixing the issue is far higher than simple buy back and alternate option.

[Turbanator]

Simply buy back all the cars or provide an alternate swap and make it easier on impact.

Buy Back and Sell to whom ? Export to third world countries or just recycle ? I am not sure if Governments can actually continue to run such cars which do not pass legal tests any longer . They will have to find some fix.

[pgsagar]

So there goes Jeremy Clasrkson shooting his big mouth again. Kicked out of Top Gear, he doesn't seem to have learnt his lessons well. Since he is a VW fan-boy, let us all forgive VW. Wow! And that Syria example? This guy seems to have lost his mental balance. He thinks it is chic to take an opposite stand to that of general populace and world in general.

[msprabhakar]

Chemistry at heart of VW emissions cheating

Now that VW is beginning to fade from prime time crime media slots, technical and technological issues are beginning to get intensely discussed and debated. Royal Society of Chemistry has published a scholarly article which goes right to the heart of the issue.

Excerpts:

...NOx are an inevitable consequence of high temperature combustion; once temperatures exceed 2000°C, nitrogen and oxygen will react to form these oxides. Diesel ignites when compressed in an engine, so it runs ‘lean’, meaning there’s a high air to fuel ratio. This allows the diesel to burn more completely, but makes it more difficult to deal with NOx. Petrol engines run stoichiometrically, matching oxygen to fuel, and deal well with emissions using catalytic converters...

...There are two main technology options to cut lean NOx tailpipe emissions. The ‘lean NOx trap’ was an early technology applied to diesel cars. ‘It's a technology that uses alkaline earth or rare earth oxides such as barium oxide or cerium oxide [along with noble metals] to grab nitrogen oxides and form nitrates, like barium nitrate,’ explains Timothy Johnson, director of emerging technologies and regulations at Corning in the US, which makes emissions control technology. ‘They need to be regenerated by running rich – that is in an oxygen starved environment – for short periods of time.’ ‘The penalty you pay for the NOx trap is you inject more fuel every few minutes to clear it,’ says Wolfgang Grünert, industrial chemist at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. It’s often used on smaller cars such as the VW Jetta, which failed the emissions tests in California...

...The second technology is selective catalytic reduction (SCR), used on the BMW X5 – which passed the tests – and the VW Passat – which didn’t. Here, urea is injected into the exhaust stream, evaporates and breaks down into carbon dioxide and ammonia. Typically, the ammonia and NOx then enter an iron or copper zeolite, and react preferentially to form water and nitrogen...

...‘SCR technology is much better at removing NOx with high efficiency without nearly as high a fuel penalty,’ says Johnson. ‘But because there are fixed costs associated with delivering the urea, NOx traps are often a lower cost approach used for small vehicles.’ In addition, an engine has to be calibrated as to when to spray urea and how much, and the exhaust temperature should be around 150° to 200°C for SCR to work...

...‘Rush hour traffic is a killer for SCRs. You spent a lot of time idling and creeping and the engine exhaust never gets up to sufficient temperatures. This is what we were looking at,’ he explains. ‘None of the lab cycles represent a car idling for an hour in rush hour traffic outside LA.’...

...What the VW car computer did once it detected test conditions remains a mystery. ‘It could be that they went into an aggressive urea injection in the lab, to get very low NOx levels; on the road the manufacturer cannot do that. It would use up a consumable and the customer is not going to be happy about refilling a urea tank after 2000 miles, instead of 10,000,’ says Thiruvengadam...

...But he remains unclear whether there was a fuel advantage. ‘That might not be the reasoning,’ he says, before raising worries for VW and VW owners. ‘It could be related to component failure. To meet low emissions, you are putting more wear and tear on other emissions components. As a manufacturer, if you saw repeated failure in some components, you could do a work around and say let’s pass the emissions test and then be more conservative on emissions compliance on the road, which will extend the life of the parts.’...

[johannskaria]

Green Car Journal has announced it will rescind the two Green Car Of The Year awards that the Volkswagen Group won with diesel vehicles (2009 VW Jetta TDI, which won in 2008, and the 2010 Audi A3 TDI, which won in 2010) that have been since been proven to not meet the stated emissions levels.




Autoblog article link

[achyu]

Originally Posted by johannskaria

Mexico too?
ET article link

I believe Mexico imports a lot many VW cars from India. If that is the case and if the engines are found faulty then doesn't it mean that the problem is sure to be found in the cars that ply on Indian roads? Any idea if VW fits different engines for the cars exported to Mexico even if they are manufactured in the same plant?

[Thad E Ginathom]

Originally Posted by babu.sundaram

The refit plan raises interesting questions.

If Volkswagon had a way to do get both (better emissions & power), without compromising on anything, they would have done it earlier.
Now, if Volkswagon would recall vehicles & remove the cheat device, the intent with which the device, to get more power would not be met. Would the owners be happy with reduced power and emissions? Would Volkswagon be sued for making the vehicles less powerful?

This is what puzzles me too. If they had a ready, no-power-loss fix, why didn't they do it before, or, at least, build it into new vehicles before?

Originally Posted by VW2010

I feel VW can save millions by just creating a buy back program. This recall and service cost including labour and time just doesnt make economic sense. ... ... ...

You can't say that until you have actual numbers to compare. If the fix costs even $1 less than a buy-back. then yes, over millions of cars, it does make sense.

It might leave customers (or at least some) happier too. They might not want to give up their cars.

Originally Posted by Turbanator

Buy Back and Sell to whom ? Export to third world countries or just recycle ? I am not sure if Governments can actually continue to run such cars which do not pass legal tests any longer . They will have to find some fix.

It would have to be buy-back and scrap. The publicity outcome of dumping them on the poorest end of the market would be even worse than now.

Perhaps they could do a refit, and then resell. Might result in some great bargains! But, if we talking about a hypothetical buy-back, I'd see it leading to publicly audited destruction. Bring on the crushers!