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Reports: Volkswagen Was Warned of Emissions Cheating Years Ago
An anonymous reader writes: More fuel was thrown on the Volkswagen fire today after two German newspapers reported that Volkswagen's own staff and one of its suppliers warned years ago about software designed to thwart emissions test. Volkswagen declined to comment on the details of either newspaper report. "There are serious investigations underway and the focus is now also on technical solutions" for customers and dealers, a Volkswagen spokesman said. "As soon as we have reliable facts we will be able to give answers."
there are unreliable facts?
Why would a "warning" make any difference? They knew what they were doing. You cannot just completely change the emission profile of a motor by magic, so every competent motor designer knew the performance the VW diesel-engines where claiming to have was bogus. That alone will be up to a hundred people. Of course their bosses knew and so did the VW leadership. The really interesting thing is whether this can be proven.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
... to find a couple of middle managers and engineers to throw under the bus.
Unrealistic.
The existing cars are already able to run in a compliant mode. All VW needs to do is patch them so they're always in that mode rather than only during emission tests.
Mind you, resulting engine performance will suffer and they'll probably get sued for false advertising, end up paying major penalties on top of what the governments are going to hammer them with, and have an uphill battle for future sales which might make them wish they could have just offered everyone brand new cars.
Log in or piss off.
Whenever something bad happens - 9/11, Challenger, Katrina, Bill Crosby, SUV rollovers, every president, Deepwater Horizon - someone will selflessly step forward and say "I knew it was going to happen, I warned you, but nobody would listen!"
Next time a screw-up is in the news, pay attention and wait for the inevitable soothsayer.
You don't need to be a soothsayer to figure out that cheating on emissions tests and then manufacturing and selling millions of cars based on those falsifications is going to get you into a shitload of trouble. This is especially true if all somebody has to do to catch you red-handed is attach an emissions analyser to the exhaust pipe of one of your cars and drive it through town for a while. Even when the idea of doing this was first proposed it was just bloody obvious it was a dumbs thing to do. Between plunging stock prices, the product recall, the government fines in the US/EU, the class action lawsuits that will doubtless be filed in the USA, law suits by VW stockholders, falling sales and the massive damage to VW's reputation there is a chance this could bankrupt VW. I just got through watching a debate on German TV where they were talking about this costing VW several tens of billions of euros and most of those costs could have been calculated accurately enough to demonstrate the galactic stupidity of cheating on emissions tests years ago and without the use of a crystal ball.
We are treated this worse then a safety issue where people died.
This is a safety issue where people are dying. NOx causes premature death and a whole host of respiratory illness'. Just because you can't grab a single person out of the mix and say "this person is specifically dead because of it", doesn't mean that people are not dying as a result of the deception. Its people like you who keep voting for the liars and scumbags that are ruining every democracy in the world. If someone came up with a law to disqualify people with your demonstrated lack of ability to understand consequences, I would support that law, no matter how flawed the test was, just on the basis of having some chance of keeping you and your ilk out of my political system.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Consumers bought the cars in good faith and got the performance they were promised. They didn't get the emissions controls the state was promised. The customers got "better performance than was possible with compliance " cars, despite the regulators attempts to artificially suppress MPG for the sake of NO2 emissions.
The only* reason consumers should be unhappy is if they are forced to get 2016 firmware upgrades to pass smog testing. Under those circumstances: they will no longer be getting the performance they were promised and have a right to be pissed off.
*assuming they don't care about pollution/global warming