[Guna]

http://profit.ndtv.com/news/auto/art...-lateststories

11 million cars are affected worldwide!

[avira_tk]

Originally Posted by kovilkalai

First... VW just admitted that they "screwed up". See below:

Next... Lets say I have some jewellery locked up in a locker in my house that I hardly ever use..
stupidity/laziness still doesn't allow the maid the property to be hers.

Secondly, a testing standard is a declaration of intent...
they can suspend that license as well.

Regarding how the EPA is allowed to get away for screw ups. Lets say, they are slapped with an $18 billion fine. So... how is this not accountability? What more do you want? Getting $18 billion from these people?

VAG has issued quite a few press releases, I didn't bother to read any, every news agency has milked this for all its worth.

There is a concept of statute of limitations, if the maid stole from your locker and no longer has the jewellery, bad luck. There was no theft here, remember VAG is the productive party, what is the connection between your jewellery and Volkswagen car emissions?

A test that doesn't stand up to any scrutiny should be scrapped, the emissions test was garbage if one company among a few others( yes, there are others, the stocks have tanked accordingly) managed to game it and the regulators did nothing about it. A board of medicine that has no one with knowledge of medicine shouldn't be handing out any certificates or question someone's skill.

Read up on that toxic dump story, no one is getting compensated there, the EPA officials responsible are going to pay with a board of enquiry and guaranteed pay hikes and pensions with CoLA factored in, firing a government employee is next to impossible, especially federal ones. The chemicals from that dumping will kill sooner than the NoX ever will, but lets not worry about facts when you have a good story. The government can do nothing about poisoned wells, maybe you should get a reality check on how the system operates or you have very different standards for accountability. That Delhi cop story has nothing to do with this story, stop giving off topic examples that I didn't mention and no, you wont get 18 billion in damages from the government even if you employ former presidential candidate John Edwards as your lawyer.

[tj123]

Volkswagen’s rigging of emissions tests for diesel cars comes after nearly 20 years of the technology being incentivized in Europe in the knowledge that its adoption would reduce global warming emissions but lead to thousands of extra deaths from increased levels of toxic gases. The European commission was lobbied strongly by big German car makers BMW, Volkswagen and Daimler, to incentivise diesel. A switch to diesel was said by the industry to be a cheap and fast way to reduce the carbon emissions that drive climate change. Read details article http://www.theguardian.com/environme...alth-pollution

The VW fiasco has proven beyond doubt that oil burners pollutes . The tag line of CleanDiesel cars is now proving to be nothing but a deceitfully programmed Engine management system to fool the testing system. I am surprised why VW management never took corrective steps to curb such practice. I believe this is going to take the wind out of the VW group, as we can now expect multiple class action law suits, market capital loss, loss arising due to remediation action of potentially millions of car, damaged reputation etc.. More over the potentially weakened VW group may now may be a candidate for takeover by rivals like Toyota or others.

Another good article on Volkswagen's appalling clean diesel scandal, explained..

Since 2009, we now know, Volkswagen had been inserting intricate code in its vehicle software that tracked steering and pedal movements. When those movements suggested that the car was being tested for nitrogen-oxide emissions in a lab, the car automatically turned its pollution controls on. The rest of the time, the pollution controls switched off.

Regulators didn't notice this ruse for years. The problem was only uncovered by an independent group, the International Council on Clean Transportation, which wanted to investigate why there was such a discrepancy between laboratory tests and real-road performance for several of VW's diesel cars in Europe. So they worked with researchers at West Virginia University, who stuck a probe up the exhaust pipe of VW's clean diesel cars and drove them from San Diego to Seattle.

What the researchers found was shocking. On the road, VW's Jetta was emitting 15 to 35 times as much nitrogen oxide as the allowable limit. The VW Passat was emitting 5 to 20 times as much. These cars were emitting much more pollution than they had in the labs.

In May 2014, both California's air-pollution regulator and the EPA ordered Volkswagen to investigate and fix the problem, and the company claimed that it had done so. Once again, the cars performed well in testing, but real-world performance still didn't match up. At that point, EPA regulators really started grilling Volkswagen about the discrepancy, even threatening not to approve the company's 2016 line of clean diesel cars. VW finally cracked and admitted the existence of these defeat devices, which had been carefully hidden in the software code. Scandal ensued.

Volkswagen hasn't explained exactly why it cheated, but outside analysts have a good guess. The NOx emission controls likely degraded the cars' performance when they were switched on — the engines ran hotter, wore out more quickly, and got poorer mileage. Some experts have suggested that the emission controls may have affected the cars' torque and acceleration, making them less fun to drive. (Indeed, some individual car owners have been known to disable their cars' emission controls to boost performance, though this is against the law.)

In other words, Volkswagen wasn't able to produce diesel cars that had the ideal mix of performance, fuel economy, and low pollution. (Or, at least, they couldn't do this profitably.) So they "solved" this trade-off by sacrificing cleanliness and loosening the pollution controls. And they accomplished this via software designed to deceive regulators. This was wildly illegal, and they got caught.

Read full article on http://www.vox.com/2015/9/21/9365667...passenger-cars

[arunphilip]

Timeline of the Cheat
While the initial reports appeared to indicate that this problem has erupted recently, a Washington Post blog indicates that what has happened over the last week is just the publicization of a longer-running saga.

• May 2014: Emission problems detected by the International Council on Clean Transportation and West Virginia University. The results were presented to VW.
• Dec 2014: VW told California regulators that they had a fix, and would “recalibrate” the ECU.
• May 2015: California officials run road tests on these cars. Despite the fix, the car showed higher than expected NOx emissions.
• Sep 2015: The shit hits the fan!

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/w...ixed-any-cars/

[Jeeper1941]

Originally Posted by arunphilip

Timeline of the Cheat
While the initial reports appeared to indicate that this problem has erupted recently, a Washington Post blog indicates that what has happened over the last week is just the publicization of a longer-running saga.

• May 2014: Emission problems detected by the International Council on Clean Transportation and West Virginia University. The results were presented to VW.
• Dec 2014: VW told California regulators that they had a fix, and would “recalibrate” the ECU.
• May 2015: California officials run road tests on these cars. Despite the fix, the car showed higher than expected NOx emissions.
• Sep 2015: The shit hits the fan!

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/w...ixed-any-cars/

VW also repeatedly, vehemently denied that there was a problem and tried to brush off the EPA questions as "technical errors" until they were confronted with incontrovertible evidence and a threat that the EPA would not certify VW's 2016 diesel engines. Only then did the VW executives somehow 'discover' that the company they were running had, for years, been operating in a way "inconsistent with our core values."

And now we know exactly what those core values were: VW's philosophy was that it's obligation was to find a way to get cars to pass the tests, not to meet the standards the tests are designed to enforce.

Also, yes, the US EPA may have crazy regulations (which is why many companies including Mazda and Mahindra were unable to get certification for their diesel cars in the US) but the point is VW had an option - meet the requirements or don't sell the cars. Nobody forced them to sell their diesel cars in the US market. The fact that VW chose to cheat the system in order to sell their cars is what is so cynical and shameful here.

Bottom line is, VW committed fraud. It's not even about the excessive emissions. It's fraud. VW knowingly duped their customers and various governments by selling a product that wasn't legal to sell.

Now I am beginning to wonder if VW used the same ECU trick on their petrol-engine cars (and by extension to their other brands; Audi has already been implicated in this diesel scandal). If sales of their petrol cars get halted for the same reasons as their diesels, then VW could be effectively out of the car business, permanently.

[DexterMorgan]

And there goes the resale value of my 2013 Passat TDI straight to gutter. Thanks VW. This was my second VW. But never again. You have broken many hearts :(

[deetjohn]

What baffles me though is that this took more than 6 years to be found. Manufacturers often examine cars from competition using a very fine comb. And to think that none of them could find this 'defeat device' on any of the VW TDIs is a little mysterious. I honestly hope for the sake of Diesel passenger cars that there are no other manufacturers involved in this so called Dieselgate.

[cingsman]

Guys,

The ongoing VW saga has left me wondering if the ARAI would sit up and take notice of this fact. South Korean and European authorities had announced that they would check vehicles VW especially) for any such defeat devices in their countries, which is when, VW came out with the 11 million shocker.

What do you think ARAI would do such a thing here?

[B747]

http://ht.ly/34w41a
According to above news even petrol cars could be affected.
As the real emission is 40 times more than permissible limit in US, does this mean even in India these cars will fail real world test (as 40x more) ? Also not to forget what all else could be false claims, like power, mileage, engine/DSG life etc?
I own new Octavia TDI which comes with EA288 engine and I guess this engine could be running the cheat software.
Looks like VW is built on top of unethical and zero integrity ppl top to bottom, no wonder why their customer service/dealers/ASS sucks so badly when compared to other manufactures.

Lot of details can be found here
http://forums.tdiclub.com/showthread.php?t=448336

[tbppjpr]

Originally Posted by B747

http://ht.ly/34w41a
According to above news even petrol cars could be affected.
As the real emission is 40 times more than permissible limit in US, does this mean even in India these cars will fail real world test (as 40x more) ? Also not to forget what all else could be false claims, like power, mileage, engine life etc?

First you need to know how exactly the other diesel cars are able to pass the norms which VW 2.0TDI failed. US emissions norms, especially for diesel vehicles are far stricter than India. Then its also important to know how the diesel emissions are different than petrol emissions.

Mostly the diesel cars in US use a mixture called 'AdBlue' in the tank to reduce emissions whereas VW tried to prove that their engines are such cleaner that they don't even need to mix anything else in the tank to pass the norms. But norms and test standards were far stricter than they thought so they chose to apply some software tricks to get away from the tests whereas they new the real world usage results will be far different.

There are chances that VW diesel engines are found more cleaner compared to many other diesel engined cars being sold by other manufacturers if they are also tested without that 'AdBlue' mixture.

There is possibility that VW adds a separate 'AdBlue' tank in the existing cars as a fix for this blunder and when their cars are tested again, they also come out clean.

Look at here for more details:




"Diesel engines must run ‘lean’ (i.e. with a greater proportion of oxygen than is theoretically required for complete combustion of the fuel) in order to prevent the formation of soot and other particles. This excess of oxygen leads to the generation of oxides of nitrogen (NOx) which contributes to ambient NO2 emissions.

Unlike petrol engines where the normal 3-way catalyst reduces CO, HC and NOx, diesel NOx emissions can be reduced by a SCR catalyst which involves a controlled dosing of AdBlue® (32.5% high purity urea and 67.5% de-ionised water) into the SCR catalyst. Once dosed into the catalyst, AdBlue® decomposes into ammonia (NH3) and CO2. The SCR catalyst and the ammonia reduce NOx into water and nitrogen, which are both harmless.

AdBlue® is stored in a tank onboard the vehicle, and is used at a rate between 2-6% of diesel consumption volume. The quantity is dosed automatically depending on the engine conditions, and the low usage rate ensures that tanks need only be topped up infrequently."

Diesel Exhaust Fluid - Adblue



These are also interesting reads:

Why do some Volkswagen diesels use AdBlue and others do not?

The Truth About Clean Diesels: AdBlue Is Freaking Expensive

[itwasntme]

Are these engines the exact ones used in India as well? As per Wikipedia: Volkswagen has also stated that 11 million vehicles sold worldwide are affected in addition to the 480,000 vehicles with 2.0L TDI engines sold in the US. According to Volkswagen, vehicles sold in other countries with the 1.5L 4-cylinder TDI engine known as Type EA189 are also affected. The EA189 TDI is a 2.0L four-cylinder engine which includes the incriminated selective catalytic reduction (SCR) technology. This software is also said to affect EA188 and the 2015 EA288 generation of the four-cylinder.


Official statement from VW (highlights mine): http://www.volkswagenag.com/content/...formation.html

Volkswagen AG has issued the following information:

Volkswagen is working at full speed to clarify irregularities concerning a particular software used in diesel engines. New vehicles from the Volkswagen Group with EU 6 diesel engines currently available in the European Union comply with legal requirements and environmental standards. The software in question does not affect handling, consumption or emissions. This gives clarity to customers and dealers.

Further internal investigations conducted to date have established that the relevant engine management software is also installed in other Volkswagen Group vehicles with diesel engines. For the majority of these engines the software does not have any effect.

Discrepancies relate to vehicles with Type EA 189 engines, involving some eleven million vehicles worldwide. A noticeable deviation between bench test results and actual road use was established solely for this type of engine. Volkswagen is working intensely to eliminate these deviations through technical measures. The company is therefore in contact with the relevant authorities and the German Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA – Kraftfahrtbundesamt).

To cover the necessary service measures and other efforts to win back the trust of our customers, Volkswagen plans to set aside a provision of some 6.5 billion EUR recognized in the profit and loss statement in the third quarter of the current fiscal year. Due to the ongoing investigations the amounts estimated may be subject to revaluation. Earnings targets for the Group for 2015 will be adjusted accordingly.

Volkswagen does not tolerate any kind of violation of laws whatsoever. It is and remains the top priority of the Board of Management to win back lost trust and to avert damage to our customers. The Group will inform the public on the further progress of the investigations constantly and transparently.

[graaja]

Originally Posted by B747

...Also not to forget what all else could be false claims, like power, mileage, engine/DSG life etc?
I own new Octavia TDI which comes with EA288 engine and I guess this engine could be running the cheat software...

Originally Posted by tbppjpr

US emissions norms, especially for diesel vehicles are far stricter than India. Then its also important to know how the diesel emissions are different than petrol emissions...

Originally Posted by itwasntme

Are these engines the exact ones used in India as well? As per Wikipedia: Volkswagen has also stated that 11 million vehicles sold worldwide are affected in addition to the 480,000 vehicles with 2.0L TDI engines sold in the US...

The size of this scam - dieselgate as another user pointed out, is appalling!!!

Just to understand the effect of this scandal on Indian cars, I did some comparision of emission standards of India, Europe and USA. Below are the emission standard charts.

India


Europe


USA


In India, the NOx emission norm for passenger vehicles is 0.25g/km, in Europe this is 0.060g/km, and in US it is 0.05g/mi which is 0.031g/km. US norms are twice strict as Europe and 8 times strict than India. So, at least for current owners of VW or Skoda diesel cars (including yours truly) there should not be any immediate concerns about recalls, government bans etc.

However, as a Jetta owner (and about to be Polo TSi owner), my main worry is the future of the company. With some news articles claiming the worst case scenario of VW not recovering from this crisis, it is depressing to even think about future support for the cars.

Note: The information for Indian and European norms are from their Wiki pages and the US norms is from EPA website. Experts please correct me if I am wrong in interpreting the emission standards.

Information Source:
Indian emission standard - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharat...iesel_vehicles
Europian emission standard - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe...passenger_cars
US EPA standard - http://www3.epa.gov/otaq/standards/l.../tier2stds.htm

[itwasntme]

Great post graaja! I was digging around on various websites for this very data.

A point to note is that India may expedite the move to a similar to Euro 5 standard very soon given the pathetic air quality in Delhi coupled with the (rather heavy-handed) NGT activism.

A simple move would be to make a DPF compulsory in all new diesels sold in metros; this would easily add 50k to all new diesel cars. A draconian move would be to mandate a retrofit DPF to all older cars!

Net net diesel cars are now screwed!

[deb_majumdar]

The so called corporate integrity is a myth. Ultimately the goal of every big MNC is to make money and they tell lies everyday. The demarkation would be between harmless lies (those which would cause you just money: for example, if they cheat on BHP rating) and harmful lies (such as this one).

I feel bad as a recent Polo GT TSI owner though my car is run by petrol. I still love the car, but had this happened two months earlier, it would have probably changed my decision as well.

[tbppjpr]

Originally Posted by itwasntme

A point to note is that India may expedite the move to a similar to Euro 5 standard very soon given the pathetic air quality in Delhi coupled with the (rather heavy-handed) NGT activism.

I want to make two points:
(1). Euro 5 (Bharat Stage 5) are already projected for 2020.
(2). Nobody gives a damn about existing norms, which are also far liberal by standards of other countries. Look at the way we get our PUC here and then see how sincerely cops check it.

Originally Posted by graaja

However, as a Jetta owner (and about to be Polo TSi owner), my main worry is the future of the company. With some news articles claiming the worst case scenario of VW not recovering from this crisis, it is depressing to even think about future support for the cars.

The current issue may affect VAG's presence in US for short term at most, I doubt this is going to affect their global presence in long term.

Look at how GM, Ford, Honda, Toyota etc have got away with many other issues where some of the issues were rather direct life threatening where vehicles were affected with faulty airbags some were prone to fire etc. Nobody bothered about them and moved on then this is a concern about environment which is least of priority for the whole world. People are just trying to pretend to be environmentalists or else cars and other machineries running on fossil fuel should have completely been banned by now considering how seriously the environment has been affected.