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Volkswagen Diesel Scandal Spreads To Porsche and Audi
New submitter sumanareddyraval writes: The fallout from the Volkswagen diesel scandal is spreading fast to the company's other famous brands, including Porsche and Audi, and across the Atlantic to the U.S. The scandal reached down into the company's engineering corps as the CEO of Volkswagen's US business, the research and development chief from Audi and the engine chief from Porsche, which are part of the Volkswagen Group, are said to be following Volkswagen's CEO out the door of the company, according to multiple reports Thursday. The impending departures are a sign that the Volkswagen scandal is ready to grow to much larger proportions.
Give them a slap on the wrist. Do we really stand to gain more by dragging these guys over the coals.
Hiding car emissions was not done by a couple of people. A large number in the people inside these companies were involved in pulling it off.
BMW engines were emitting nitrogen oxide levels that were 11 times more than the current limit set by the European Union. However, it later reported that there was no indication of tampering with the vehicles. Citing road tests by the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), it said that a model of the BMW X3 was emitting more poisonous gases than the Volkswagen car that is currently at the center of the emissions scandal. http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/24...
will make this out as the worst possible crime. What an opportunity to let the hammer fall on the foreign competition. This will be handled in an equally unethical manner.
The real guilty party are the wankers in academia cherry picking data to fit their cause. God bless Tony Abottt for trying to get to the bottom of it.
http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-24/government-discussed-bom-investigation-over-climate-change/6799628
They must have crappy lawyers or something.
The penalties and lawsuits will quickly exceed VW's $126bn valuation.
-Styopa
Umm, the scandal isn't spreading to the U.S.; it started in the U.S. While the defeat device has been reportedly fitted to cars worldwide, there is as yet no confirmation that any laws were broken anywhere outside the U.S. Few places have NOx limits as tight as those that were being circumvented in the USA.
Where else can I get quick treatment for my mid-life crisis???
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
when the suits don't listen to the nerds, I'll bet. I'm sure at some point someone in engineering said that this was wrong, that they shouldn't cheat like this. I'm sure he/she was quickly told to drop it or start looking for a new job.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
My guess is that what happened is that Engineering was told to do something that turned out to be impossible. They built a diesel engine and determined what was the maximum performance and efficiency they could achieve. Then management told them they needed to hit those numbers while still passing emissions requirements. Eventually they realized that the only solution to meet the requirements was to game the tests.
They are going to do a recall. Folks will get their car's software updated and their mileage will go down a bit. It would be interesting to see how much the cheat improved mileage on the diesels.
Lawsuits? Maybe a class action one where if they win, every VW owner gets $0.53 and the law firm gets ten of millions.
Fines? Pfft! Chump change to VW.
In the meantime, for all of you who are shopping for a new car, now is the time to get a VW. As far as Audi and Porsche, since when did they make diesels? The cheat was only for the diesel cars.
Yeah, no kidding, why aren't we taking on the ingrained misogyny and rape culture of the EPA instead. Why are we attacking a company that makes an iconic car often driven by women? Can't we find one or two mean things said about the VW CEO on twitter and make that the whole story instead?
They should have said the requirement was for the car to pass emissions standards. What they actually said was that cars should pass emissions tests.
Be careful what you require.
Volkswagen own Audi and Porsche? Do we get another article tomorrow telling us that Seat and Skoda have been dragged into it? Any other crazy Volkswagen 'news' from the last 15 years? ;)
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
There is a reason Consumer Reports does most of its car tests on the road and the track -- it's more realistic. So I expect that the rules will change to de-emphasize lab testing on dynomometers and emphasize road testing using several different modes (in-town, highway, and off-road where applicable).
is cleaner than it was, but not THAT much cleaner.
As technology got better, we ignorantly placed all the blame on china and other emerging industrialized nations when the main problem is still how unclean automobiles are. Those VWs put out roughly the same as the UK’s combined emissions for all power stations, vehicles, industry and agriculture. http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/sep/22/vw-scandal-caused-nearly-1m-tonnes-of-extra-pollution-analysis-shows
Clime change nuts are chomping at the bit to get the torches and pitchforks ready. A few dead people thanks to General Motors is a drop in the bucket compared to this scandal of epic proportions.
Audi is owned by Volkswagen and was part of the original compliant against Volkswagen from the EPA.
Maybe a competitor managed to change the software used by VW, making all the engineers believe their designs were more efficient :D
Theoretically possible perhaps, but what incentive would "lone wolf" coders have for making the mechanical engineers look good? Even if the mechanical engineers who designed the engine and pollution control systems didn't know about the code changes, they should have had a good idea of what the approximate test results should have been, and if they were way better than expected it should have raised major red flags. Same goes for QA. Even if the change wasn't caught in a code review, the too-good-to-be-true results alone should have raised questions. I bet lots of people knew about this and either didn't want to risk their jobs by asking about it or were told "don't worry about it, it's a decision made above your pay grade". Unfortunately, we live in a world that demonizes whistle-blowers.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
I think it would be a lot easier to keep a list of companies *not* doing this. It'll be a very short list.
Between the two badges, that might be all of a few dozen cars sold in this country since 2008. Few Americans have ever even seen an Audi with a Diesel that was made since the 90s, and even fewer ever knew that Porsche has had Diesel options.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Volkswagen own Audi and Porsche?
Oh my!
Nah,
1. A guy sits in the car with a computer and twiddles the settings to make the car drive well.
2. Then they stick it on a test ramp, plug in the air sampling computer and he twiddles the settings to make it pass emissions test,
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 over and over again till everyone is happy.
That's all that's needed to achieve this.
I know they say VW cars detected complex heuristics to determine if they're on the rolling bed.... thats seems unlikely, the risk would be too high. Being Germans, they will have been too smart, using optimization software techniques to maximize fuel efficency on the road, and emissions on the rolling bed, and not realized that the nature of doing multiple optimizations sequentially like this will result in:
{road AND smooth} OR {rolling-road AND clean}
*not*
{road AND smooth AND clean}
Tough luck, they're supposed to know these things, theirs to fix and fines to pay.
But I bet a lot of car makers did their emissions testing and optimization separately on a rolling road, and I bet a lot of them will fail!
Its not just VW. Its not just the auto industry. It's all over the corporate world and our governments. Everywhere there is closed source software, your stuff that uses that software is being used in anti-consumer ways. I wish people would wise up and say enough is enough. If 99% of the source code for the stuff we use every day were suddenly made public, there would be nothing short of riots in the streets. I'm not advocating that people and companies who write firmware or software should not be compensated, but I am absolutely advocating that the public be allowed to see and change the software for the stuff we purchase.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
Nothing says "teenage moderator" like a +5 insightful for the above "comment". Even if his attitude is justified, the post contains nothing but emotion. Engineers use logic to criticize an argument, not emotion.
It won't even be a programming thing. These ECUs are standard across a company, a set of parameters determine how it behaves, you use a software configuration tool, and edit the parameters and the map to make the engine perform as needed. Sports model of a car? Same software, different settings. Hot climate? Same software, settings based on outside temperature.
I bet its really as simple as them doing the tweaking for driving while driving and tweaking for emissions on the rolling road, and simply assuming that the rolling road is exactly identical to driving.
But it isn't, it will be subtly different, perhaps its less torque for the same speed or some slight difference. Which means the map cells for rolling road won't exactly overlap the maps cells for driving, they tweak the map separately for each driving situation and bingo, the VW problem.
Theres been stories circulating that the identical Seat/Skoda engines have always been in a different emissions band than the VW engines. VW/Seat/Skoda are essentially the same people, just rebranded as the cheaper end.
I suppose the theory would be that VW supply engines to the subsidiaries but without the defeat code. They can then claim their premier marques get far better performance, whilst the cheaper brands just arnt as good. Yet they can cash in on the economy of scale that infact theyre all the same engine with a couple of memory registers flipped.
The Spanish brand SEAT, part of VW group, used some 500.000 of these tampered engines. Jürgen Stackmann, the CEO of SEAT is also leaving this company.
However, apparently he is not being fired, instead he will become the group worldwide sales chief (link in German).
Interesting and sad to see how some people are being blamed and fired, while others (in the same position in other company of the group) manage to leave unpunished and even use this opportunity to climb in the group.
Obliterating VW will put a lot of people out of work sure.
But we have to make an example out of them.
Right RIAA?
Hey, VW didn't even need a pen and a phone to violate the law.
I suppose it depends on how you feel about car emissions.
No it depends on how you feel about fraud. The reason this is a big deal isn't the pollution though that is not a trivial part of it. No the big deal is that this company intentionally defrauded millions of customers. They promised their technology worked in a way that it didn't.
In my opinion the people who ordered and the people who carried out this fraud should see some time behind bars. They committed a crime that cost customers and taxpayers many millions of dollars.
The penalties and lawsuits will quickly exceed VW's $126bn valuation.
No it won't. VW is a vital piece of the German economy and is part owned by the German government. They are almost certainly going to get slapped hard over this but it isn't likely to drive them out of business. It will cost them billions of dollars in fines and recalls and probably more in lost sales but they'll probably survive. Hopefully they will get slapped hard enough that they'll serve as an example to other auto makers who might be tempted to pull the same stunt.
VW make better cars than American companies.
Not according to any of the industry quality surveys. VW is perennially near the bottom of the quality rankings, almost always lower than the US makers.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/... says " Emissions testers at a site in Westlake Village, California, evaluated all the cars involved... If any vehicle failed to meet emissions targets, a team of engineers from Volkswagen headquarters or luxury brand Audiâ(TM)s base in Ingolstadt was flown in, the person said. After the group had tinkered with the vehicle for about a week, the car would then pass the test. "
Let's test the theory of justice. I say that it's really a way for government cartels to seize control over people and car companies.
Communications companies pull all kinds of stunts like this on subscribers all the time, as do banks, health care providers, and government agencies.
For example, a lot of government agencies are legally required to protect social security numbers, names and addresses etc in accordance to HIPAA, PCI and IRS requirements, but it usually goes unchecked. Unpunished.
Telecommunication companies often tack on other fees, under the radar, and switch services of customers without the customer approving it.
This issue has nothing to do with global warming, or NOx or CO2; it has to do with CONTROL. Government control over a corporation. I assure you they offer some sort of blackmail deal where the car company gets off easy if they agree to other "conditions"
As soon as most inspections went to a computer hookup instead of an actual "sniffer" in the tailpipe it was bound to happen. Any code can be cracked and a work around found. If someone can write the program someone else can find a way to screw it up.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
if only 2009 onward what were the diesel motors doing before then to pass SMOG tests? Did they switch to a new motor and find out it was not SMOG efficient and then had to fake the tests to get it to market? If this really was an engineering cheat I wonder why so many in management are leaving? One symbolic departure like the CEO would be enough unless it really was known all the way up the chain.
Then again, maybe management knows the company is sunk and they are leaving for new positions while they are still "innocent" and can claim to the new employers they were scape goats.
It's getting more interesting every day.
So... VW cheats on emissions -> 18 billion fine.
GM neglects ingition -> more than a hundred people die -> 900 million fine.
Why? Because the people who profited from this don't care if the company is fined into nothing in 5 years, they got theirs today.
The shareholders who are the actual owners of the company will care very much. Furthermore it's quite possible that criminal penalties will be handed out for this since it was fraud and I don't think it will be too hard to identify some/all of the guilty parties.
The CEO is leaving, he has his money from the past X years. What difference does it make to him what happens in the next X years?
He may or may not care but the guy who takes his place will have to care quite a lot. It's actually quite unlikely that the CEO was aware of this problem himself. It's not really the sort of thing he would normally deal with. If he didn't actually know then it's reasonable to assume he probably didn't condone or sanction this fraud. He's responsible since it happened on his watch but that doesn't mean he didn't care.
You need to find the people who actually did this, and punish them, not the millions of employees of a huge corporation who had no idea it was going on.
You need to punish both. The people who perpetrated this crime (and it IS a crime) as well as the corporation so that there is no temptation to do something similar again. There obviously needs to be controls in place for this sort of thing to ensure it doesn't repeat and the way to ensure that happens is through economic pain to the corporation.
this company intentionally defrauded millions of customers. They promised their technology worked in a way that it didn't.
Buy cars back, full price. Or you will get sued.
I want an FBI-intensive investigation that finds out who knew what and when, and then the HUMAN BEINGS responsible for it punished.
I don't see why RICO provisions don't apply here. This is an organized conspiracy to violate pollution laws and commit fraud. Fraud at this scale is a felony easily, and while I don't doubt the pollution laws are civil, not criminal violations, the felony is the the organized conspiracy to evade them.
Punishment SHOULD include jail time for those responsible for green lighting this scheme and probably financial penalties that claw back all monies made during the period of fraud -- not just what was left in the bank, but every dollar earned no matter where it ended up, including investment gains made with this money.
And personal financial culpability -- no corporate paybacks, executive insurance compensation. Let the cops auction off your personal property if necessary to pay the fines.
My 6.7L Cummins turbodiesel is probably better for the environment than all those pansy enviro weenie diesels.
Punishing the employees and shareholders does nothing, the vast majority of them had no idea this was happening.
Yes it does. It forces the corporation and management to take measures to ensure something like this does not happen again. Unfortunately there will be collateral damage here but that's not avoidable. If you do not punish the corporation for violating the law then you are effectively sanctioning company management to try again. The shareholders are the owners of the company. If the company commits fraud then the shareholders should feel the pain.
Never punish the innocent, it is worse than letting guilty people go free.
In cases like this the economic fallout even if the company wasn't punished at all would mean that innocent people are going to lose their jobs. It's unavoidable. There is no solution to this problem that does not involved economic pain to some people that don't really deserve it. That's just a fact of life in working in a large corporation sometimes. Would be no different if the company management made dumb (as opposed to illegal) decisions.
I don't get it. Giant heavy SUVs' emissions are OK, but puny light VWs' are not OK. It just does not make sense. It is sort of against the law of conservation of energy. The bigger is the mass the more energy (fuel) one needs to move it. No way around it.
It's not a bug, it's a feature. People want this feature, and VW was just giving them what they want.
Why do you think there's a market for "CRC Guaranteed to Pass" and similar?
(Not to mention asshats "rolling coal" up and down main streets to see just how much smoke they can spew to give us all lung cancer to show off how f'n 'cool' they are, but that's another topic).
Anyway, a lot of people apparently desire this behavior from their cars. They want more power and fuel economy on the road and they don't give a crap what comes out the back of it as long as it will pass the required testing every year or two. Some "tuners" even go as far as pulling out most of the emissions control devices alltogether, including the catalytic converter, to get more power (and likely also fuel economy), and then put the cat in again when they're due for a test.
In the olden days, people would fiddle with the carb or throttle, or put in more alcohol, etc, before test. If the ECU now does it for you, it just saves you the extra work.
One thing I'm convinced of, based on my experience working with German companies, is that the audit trail *will* eventually lead one of two places -- the actual person who wrote the "benchmark mode" code and checked it in, or a black hole where records have mysteriously disappeared. German companies are fastidious record keepers, especially engineering companies. The CEO leaving is just to appease the shareholders -- the other departures are more telling, and if it got up to the VP of engineering level, there could be a lot more heads rolling.
Honestly, without trying to sound like a finger wagging do-gooder, this is going to be a really good case study in engineering ethics, or the lack of them. Especially in the software world, this is seriously lacking. Over-stressed corporate managers or crazy inexperienced 23-year-old Silicon Valley startup CEOs have software engineers over a barrel when it comes to ethical behavior. Without PE-style personal liability, every engineer is subject to the uncomfortable conversation that goes like, "Look, we need this feature in or the product can't ship/won't pass regulation tests/won't let us do something nefarious with customer data. And if you don't want to put it in, I have 500 H-1Bs and other hungry engineers who will be happy to."
It's too bad - most people can't afford to take a stand, and a lot just don't care enough to even if they could. They have families to feed, or debts to pay, or are worried about being blacklisted from the industry. I see a lot of posts saying the EPA was too strict with their limits -- VW has less than 3% of the US car market; they could have easily just expanded sales to China where emissions controls just don't exist at the same level. Unfortunately, the temptation is always there, and corrupt corporate executives always get away with these things, so I can see how some people think that if they just act like these guys they can join the party too.
Not enough teenage moderators on here to keep you pegged at +5 "insightful"?
Find me a single customer who cared about the emissions output.
20 seconds on google will find plenty for you. You simply haven't bothered to look.
People buy diesel cars for the durability and the fuel economy, and VW delivered on those.
Those are some but not all of the reasons people buy these. VW quite explicitly marketed these cars and won awards for their "green" credentials.
How did it cost taxpayers money?
Customers who bought these cars received tax credits. Ergo this fraud cost US taxpayers millions of dollars in tax credits that never should have been issued since the car was not as Eco-friendly as VW claimed it was.
The only people this really affected were the shareholders.
Wrong. It affects customers, shareholders, management, employees, suppliers to VW, taxpayers, regulators, dealers, the German economy and pretty much anyone else even remotely connected to VW. It will probably even have spillover effects to other auto makers selling diesel engines.
They will also care greatly when those cars must be retrofitted to force emissions-compliance, stripping them of their roadgoing performance.
There are two ways to fix the problem. One is to detune the motor. The other is to add emissions control equipment, most likely a urea injection system. Detuning is less expensive but makes the car perform worse. Emissions control equipment is MUCH more expensive and will have to be developed and produced since none currently exists for that motor. (not even clear if it is actually possible) Frankly VW is in a bad situation either way.
The main reason why diesel consumer vehicles all but died in North America in the 90's was that they had developed a reputation as being "dirty"
Diesel engines of passenger cars died back in the late 70s and early 80s, mostly due to a bunch of absolutely terrible vehicles produced by the Big 3 during that time. It wasn't just that they were dirty (though they were) but they were incredibly unreliable and badly designed. They did things like converting gas engines to run diesel with disastrous results. It was so bad that demand for diesel vehicles in the US dried up for nearly 30 years. Now it appears that diesel has gotten another black eye which is unfortunate.
I'm sure at some point someone in engineering said that this was wrong, that they shouldn't cheat like this. I'm sure he/she was quickly told to drop it or start looking for a new job.
Spare me. The engineers (plural) carried out this and were just as culpable as the management. The guy who executes a crime is just as guilty as the guy who orders the crime to be committed. They had to know this was illegal and they did it anyway and said nothing. They are criminals and deserve to be punished. The "nerds" are not innocent here any more than the "suits". This was fraud and any engineer that was involved and said nothing should go to jail.
Between the two badges, that might be all of a few dozen cars sold in this country since 2008
There were quite a lot of Audi diesels sold in the US. Heck my sister owned a diesel A3 for a while. The Audi A3 diesel won all sorts of eco awards and it was hardly a secret in the US. The car sold reasonably well and they're not hard to find.
Porsche diesel on the other hand to my knowledge never did much in the US. I'm pretty sure I've never seen one myself.
If you are smart you realize the potential savings of having a common hardware and software platform for engine ECU across manufacturers, cutting down on the "VERY expensive" development costs. Simplified logistics, less expensive diagnostics. There is a reason embedded development has converged to Linux; it makes economic sense. Unfortunately the auto industry only seems interested in making cars more expensive, usually a sign of stagnation.
"the quality of Ford vehicles to have jumped leaps and bounds"
Well, yes. Given the starting point, there is plenty of room for leaps, and space for lots of bounds. I imagine it's the same for most American cars built in union territory. Given the crazy labor costs, driven by the big unions, you have to cut corners somewhere.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Soon, they'll be able to pick up The ENTIRE Volkswagen Group for a SONG!
Well, at least we know who will be building the Apple Titan...
Actually I would check all of the competitors. This could be the work of a rogue engineer (or manager or tester) who was paid a ton to do this to hurt VW.
You can't handle the truth.
We need accountability and prevention. Accountability should come in the form of corporate death penalties (as in the corporation's assets are seized to pay debts and the corporation no longer exists), and prevention in the form of publishing complete corresponding source code to all cars sold in the US as a part of the car. When you buy a car, you should own the car including all software installed on that car. Other countries would be wise to follow suit to protect their citizens and the environment from apparently malevolent multi-year fraudsters who wish to dodge ecological regulations.
The Free Software Foundation was right: all published software must be free. But since this situation highlights how fraud and abuse can be hidden in nonfree software, we can defend ourselves from this with strongly copylefted free software (right now that means AGPL v3 or later). I don't want anyone taking any car in for any work and coming out with nonfree software thus reintroducing this problem. You cannot have safe computer software without software freedom. And a strong copylefted free software license plus multiple freedom-minded contributors who are willing to pursue lawsuits will help defend against proprietary derivatives (as such legal work has done for the Linux kernel). As I said in the recent VW thread on this: I don't care about upstream copyright excuses should VW claim to have built their software on nonfree upstream code. Our individual and collective safety is far too important. This, like virtually everything else we do, is a matter of political will to do the right and just thing.
When people come around to seeing how an increasing dependence on computers (namely, putting computers in everything) means risking our lives, our civil liberties, our health, our freedom to move without being tracked, and more, we can easily justify pushing for more strongly copylefted free software.
Digital Citizen
The result of disabling emission control the way VW did, will actually IMPROVE fuel economy and power output. Yes, there will likely be more NOx, but I'd actually be quite happy with leaving the calibration the way it is if I currently owned a VW vehicle. Unless it impacts emission based tax bands, I doubt anyone with any understanding of the topic will care at all. Remember that the calibration of the vehicle is some tradeoff between performance and emissions. To meet legislation, performance and fuel economy are typically reduced to meet these emission targets (eg. running more EGR). As an ex-owner of a VW diesel, I can vouch for their excellent fuel economy. 50+mpg was worst case, even around the town. This was in a pretty heavy vehicle (with the old 1.9L).
It is actually quite surprising to see Americans whining, given that the majority of vehicles on the US road have an abysmal environmental footprint, compared to a typical VW direct injection turbodiesel. Also, do these people who are complaining, even know have any understanding of what they are complaining about. These vehicles may not have as quite as good emissions characteristics as documented by their test results, but they are still vastly superior to almost anything else on the US roads, given the lack of availability of modern turbodiesels in this market.
The VW diesel issue only impacts Porsche and Audi because a) the two additional execs who are leaving were at VW when the diesel issue started and b) the Audi A3 used the same EA189 engine.
People continue to post stuff here like this issue effects all VAG diesels, when the problem is just the EA189 engine and not the more expensive engines that use urea to reduce NOx emissions. Do you homework before you post.
Ford's been repaying that loan at ~$465M per quarter and will have it payed off in 2022. They are paying US Treasury interest rates which are just below current market rates for large credit worthy companies.
And over an order of magnitude higher than the rates banks pay the Federal Reserve for money.
Meanwhile, the bailouts of GM and Chrysler were a payoff to the auto workers unions and raped the investors. The government massively violated the rules of how the assets of a bankruptcy-protected company are to be handled, giving the bondholders a small fraction of what they were owed (according to the laws in force when they invested their money into trying to turn the failing companies around). I think they ended up getting less than a third of what they were owed, after many months of having their money locked up.
One result of this is that, thanks to the government, the US bond market is no longer considered a good investment, because the government now has a track record of changing the rules, when trouble arises, to seize investors assets and bail out their corporate cronies. So loans from the government are practically the only option (and certainly the only affordable one) for a company in an industry perceived to be troubled. This was fresh in investors' minds when Ford had to go shopping for money.
IMHO Ford stayed away from government "assistance" to the extent it was possible to do so and stay in business, paid about what WOULD have been free-market rates (absent the government's retroactive meddling) for their working money loans, and protected their stockholders', bondholders', and employees' interests.
And they did it beautifully.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
A little article in the free newspaper in the subway to Paris today implicated Seat too. PSA (the major French automaker, owner of Peugeot and Citroen) apparently claims to be innocent, buuut I'm not going to put any money on that yet.
One result of this is that, thanks to the government, the US bond market is no longer considered a good investment, because the government now has a track record of changing the rules, when trouble arises
Lemmesee... US bond market in 2007: 36 trillions, US bond market size in 2015: 41 trillions. Yeah, investors surely lost all hope in the US bond market.
In the _actual_ reality, bondholders were given a much sweeter deal than they could have hoped for without government intervention. A firesale of all assets would have resulted in them getting pretty much nothing at all.
As for unions and workers getting their due before the bondholders - I fail to see issues there. Bondholders are paid interest because they are taking the risk, workers are paid because they actually do the work.
First off, we treat companies as individuals. As such, the company should be punished. That means either denying sales in locations where they cheated, or simply remove all profits for next 10 years. But when we allow companies to pay politicians, etc, then it is obvious that we must go much further on punishment.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I am shocked that auto manufacturers are gaming the system.
Shocked I tell you!
(croupier hands speaker a fat envelope filled with bribes)
Look, if you want to cut emissions, you know what you have to do:
1. Buy a plug-in electric car, hybrid or full electric.
2. Purchase green power (your own solar, wind, micro-hydro turbines, biofuel you grew; or through a utility (like in Seattle))
3. Laugh all the way to the bank as your ride costs 1/10th to 1/20th in energy as those poor fossil fuel users.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Lemmesee... US bond market in 2007: 36 trillions, US bond market size in 2015: 41 trillions. Yeah, investors surely lost all hope in the US bond market.
I consider gold to be "stable money" for looking at REAL inflation (as opposed to things like the consumer price index, which has been politically hacked of late to make inflation look small and inflation-"corrected" entitlement payments lower.)
Using approximate values off a graph: 10 Year gold price in USD/oz, for a quick reply:
Gold price in 2007: Call it $650 (to err on the high side and bias it in favor of your position). Latest close from the same graph's heading: $1153.80. Denominated in gold, that 36 trillion would be worth about 64 trillion in today's dollars. That makes 41 trillion about a 36% loss, more than a third of the market, not a 14% gain.
In the _actual_ reality, bondholders were given a much sweeter deal than they could have hoped for without government intervention. A firesale of all assets would have resulted in them getting pretty much nothing at all.
No, a firesale of assets would have produced a lot of money, and the bondholders were in line after the workers getting back pay but ahead of the stockholders. For GM it would have worked something like this:
- The workers would have gotten some - but been out of a job unless/until somebody who bought the assets at the fire sale something new and rehired them - initially without a union. If any was left over...
- The bondholders - later investors (private-sector bailers-out) first - would have been next in line and gotten the bulk of the procedes. They might not have gotten full face value. But the late investors would have gotten more than the paltry sum they ended up with.
- Stockholders would have been last in line, and would have ended up with zilch unless there was more than enough to pay off the workers and all the bonds.
So the meddling shafted the bond holders in favor of the unions - mainly the union organization rather than the workers themselves.
As for unions and workers getting their due before the bondholders - I fail to see issues there. Bondholders are paid interest because they are taking the risk, workers are paid because they actually do the work.
Which is approximately the way the law worked BEFORE the government meddled.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I consider gold to be "stable money" for looking at REAL inflation (as opposed to things like the consumer price index, which has been politically hacked of late to make inflation look small and inflation-"corrected" entitlement payments lower.)
Ok. Let's look at the real inflation measured by directly checking the prices of a wide variety of services and goods: http://bpp.mit.edu/usa/ - inflation is actually below the target rate.
Oh, but I see. You're a goldbugger (i.e. you have a load of bug instead of brain). Sorry, can't be helped. But don't worry, you'll die pretty soon of terminal cognitive dissonance.
Ok. Let's look at the real inflation measured by directly checking the prices of a wide variety of services and goods: http://bpp.mit.edu/usa/
Unfortunately, that site's ouput is only provided as flash interactive something-or-other, which Firefox with noscript is unwilling to display for me today, even with everything unblocked. Their links to commercial distributors of the same information seems to require a subscription. Do you have a link to a less problematic way to view their results? Or can you quote their claims for the dates in question?
Oh, but I see. You're a goldbugger (i.e. you have a load of bug instead of brain).
Ad hominem. I win.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Ad hominem. I win.
No, you don't. You're terminally diseased and will die soon of brain explosion. It's been almost 10 years and there's still no hyperinflation in sight.
Here you go: http://www.pricestats.com/infl... . Again, this is measured directly by checking prices, no BLS or other government agencies are involved.
It also is useless, because:
- It's missing the explanation of what the brown and green lines represent.
- It only goes back to 2008
- It's the inflation rate, not the inflation. You need the integral of that.
(I note that the area between the lines and zero seems to be substantially larger in the section above the zero line than the section below. That would mean the inflation graph was climbing similarly to the gold price graph I referenced previously.)
So again feel free to post a reference to this project's data, in a form that can be actually used to compute the expansion or shrinkage of the bond market in terms of it, or similarly with some other value measure you're comfortable with.
I am perfectly willing to use any reasonable commodity basket to measure inflation. I just picked gold because it is usually a good indicator and generally recognized as such: It has little use except as a store of value (even when being used in jewelry) and its production costs don't vary much, so its pathologies when used as a reference for measuring value of a currency are minimal (and mainly related to short-term madness-of-crowds swings due to monetary system problems, rather than things like crop failures, wars, or inventions improving production of goods). For example, a high-end business suit has cost about an ounce of gold from colonial times to now. Gold will probably continue to be a good indicator until asteroid material mining drops its cost, decades from now.
It also can't be printed, so the gold price tends to expose governments that are trying to fake their currency's value by manipulations of markes and their legal system. This tends to make them want to discredit those who use it to point out their macinations. B-)
You seem to be projecting some personal mental image and reacting to it, rather than to what I'm actually saying. I'm sure you can do better if you back up and think a little. Meanwhile...
Ad hominem. I win.
No, you don't. You're terminally diseased and will die soon of brain explosion. It's been almost 10 years and there's still no hyperinflation in sight.
Bigger ad hominem. I win again. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I just picked gold because it is usually a good indicator and generally recognized as such: It has little use except as a store of value (even when being used in jewelry) and its production costs don't vary much
No, it's not. It's a regular commodity with a price determined mainly by fear and gullibility of the folks. By choosing a period it can be used to justify anything. For example, let's compare price of a can of Diet Coke at Jul 24, 2011. Costco says that it was $5.75 for a 4-pack, so that translates to 320 4-packs of Diet Coke per ounce of gold (price $1837.8 per troy ounce). Today Costco sells the same Coke for $5.87 for a 4-pack - and that translates to 196 packs of Diet Coke per ounce of gold (closing price today is $1146 per troy ounce).
OMGWTF!!@#!111 We have a huge inflation, run for cover!!!11111
But if we instead choose 31 Dec, 2006 when the price was $545 per troy ounce (or 98 cases of Diet Coke), then we have a huge _de_flation.
So the best way to calculate the size of the US bond market is to use the currency in which it is nominated - the US dollar. The market grew, without any trust problems.
It still pollutes less than a V8 or a V10 and those aren't recalled for excessive emissions.
The side story is that the VW fraud was found by a couple of grad students doing a project for a non-government agency. Are vaulted and very expensive EPA didn't catch this.
So, why again are we allowing this massive tax sucking machine to continue to grow?
Oh, of course, a place to put loyal DNC voters. Can't get jobs in the real world.
This emissions scandal is a real stain on the reputation of VW's founder.
Adolf Hitler.
This is starting to sound like another pee pee dance media frenzy for the political left green weenies.
Hopefully VW, BMW, and all of the rest -- who are being convicted in the press -- will perform discovery on California's EPA and demon spawn, CARB. It's the only state level EPA, which due to the legal timeline, is allowed by the federal clean air act.
Circa 2009, CARB dropped the NOx limit to 1/2 that of the EU. Note that California has a consumption tax on gasoline making it $1 higher, per gallon, than the rest of the nation, and diesel fuel is exempt from at least some of these taxes. Every diesel sold in California is a huge loss of consumption tax revenue.
Apparently VW's emissions team went to management and told them that the only way to meet the new standard was to install the expensive AdBlue / Urea injection system on the little 4 cylinder, E189 diesel engine. VW refused to authorize the addition of AdBlue technology, claiming that it would price the low cost diesels out of the market.
All it really takes is one manager to do something like this. The so-called "defeat device" could be nothing more than implementing a test mode and setting a flag before shipment. How many times have Linux or other distros done exactly the same thing, sometimes by mistake? Thousands of times. Note how the press is starting to demand "real world testing" of the suspect cars. That's going to be thrown out immediately if adults start to get involved. Even the enviro-nazis in California test three speeds over a handful of minutes. There is no reason for a carmaker to accommodate a rule beyond the rule, and no legal justification to alter the test after the fact, to harm a defendant.
Apparently a few of VW's emissions engineers, stuck between the arbitrary California demands and their employment with VW, flipped California the bird. The real question is -- given the same choice -- serving a foreign government, a state that is biased against your product, and your paycheck and employment, what is the decision? Quit or hope you don't get caught? Apparently they didn't quit.
Today we're seeing demands for real world testing of all diesels and the elimination of diesel technology. What immense stupidity. Diesels, especially with AdBlue / Urea system, are often cleaner and more powerful than their gasoline alternatives. Changing the test in the middle of an investigation and flooding the news is the act of defective child mind, as are extreme solutions.
It's likely that practically every fossil fuelled engine routinely emits 25-40x the emissions limit. That's why we test on rollers at a few, specific RPMs. Drivers who continually mash the pedal and brake, like first responders, probably exceed the limits significantly, for very short periods of time, many times a day. The goal is to help clean the air, not perform 24/7 monitoring of every human on the planet, although there are a lot of people on the political left who want exactly that. The same kind of people that have caused millions in vandalism and property damage for their "cause".
At some point the California EPA and CARB are going to need to be dissolved. It's insane to have so many standards bodies for emissions -- EU, US, CARB. No employer should be based with this nonsense. Especially when the California governor simply appoints his pals and lets them run rampant over the global economy and what is, in reality, a pretty good automaker.
Until there is discovery on CARB, we can't know what processes were used, and why they chose to suddenly lower the NOx requirements so drastically below the levels of the EU. If it was to enhance tax revenue, CARB and CAL-EPA should be dissolved immediately for violating the restrictions against taxation without representation, and VW should be unconditionally pardoned.
Let's get this straight: A large, trusted organization that had been providing (supposedly) efficient, economical, and environmentally friendly vehicles we can trust has actually been deceiving us about this?! (Do you think this is the first?!) Does it not seem that this is a mere symptom of the abilities (of technologically savvy companies) for circumvention of the regulatory system in place? How about testing the ACTUAL emissions without telling the car's electronics that they are being tested? WTF?!?!?! Keep It Simple, Stupid! Sample exhaust without connecting to the car's computer. What am I missing here?
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
You can have cake and eat it too.