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VW Officials Knew Since Last Year of Misleading Fuel Economy Claims (reuters.com)
It's not just CO2 levels that Volkswagen manipulated; according to a wire story, Volkswagen officials knew at least a year ago that some of the company's officially-reported fuel-efficiency claims were overstated. From the linked article:
Volkswagen's top executives knew a year ago that some of the company's cars were markedly less fuel efficient than had been officially stated, Sunday paper Bild am Sonntag reported, without specifying its sources. ... Months after becoming aware of excessive fuel consumption, former Chief Executive Martin Winterkorn decided this spring to pull one model off the market where the discrepancy was particularly pronounced, the Polo TDI BlueMotion, the paper cited sources close to Winterkorn as saying.
everyone I know who has a VW, or has had one in the past 10 years (around 8 or so) has all gotten BETTER than advertized MPGs.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
News flash: companies are trying to sell you things, and most companies will lie as much as they can without losing face or legal reprisal to get you to buy their things.
I'm still glad the story is posted, but it's not even remotely surprising.
In the United States, it is illegal for a car manufacturer to advertise any fuel efficiency number other than the one determined by the EPA.
Even running an ad campaign to the effect of "Hey, the EPA says that this car gets 45 MPG, but our testing says it's more like 42. Just thought you should know." would be a crime.
Did VW engineers have problems measuring fuel, measuring distance, or dividing two numbers?
GM got caught out doing something similar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
They were fined $11 million but probably saved a vast amount more than that by conducting that fraud.
If you look at things in terms of unfettered entirely amoral capitalism Volkswagen had a duty to their shareholders to carry out the same sort of fraud since the financial benefits looked as if they would vastly exceed the penalty for getting caught.
As for reputation - who remembers GM doing this? In a few years time will we still remember this current fraud and jokingly call them FalseVagen?
These frauds are going to keep on occurring unless there is some sort of incentive to convince the people involved to stop. We've seen in China how far these things can go with poison in milk to pass a regulatory test.
Wait till they test the smoke emissions
None of such decision would go only thru the C level management. It was not put on paper but it was with almost certainty propagated up to the highest level through oral communication and order.
We need a better way to really make the execs accountable. I'd suggest locking the CEO in an airtight warehouse with their new, running auto for 1 hour, with the initial oxygen/air-quality conditions set such that if the auto meets the advertised spec then there's just barely enough fresh air to survive.
I mean, execs keep track of everything that goes on under their umbrella (so they'd never step into a failing test), right?
I am not a sig.
They have known for 10 years that their transmissions are crap but still haven't done anything about it.
Zoid.com
What if all the auto manufacturers are lying because the cost to make the cars with the emissions standards along with the safety standards would result in a car that would be too expensive for most people to purchase?
Those vehicles which consume less than 10 litres of petrol per 100 km, and those vehicles which consume more than 10 litres of petrol per 100 km. And then there are north-american market's vehicles which consume slightly over 10 litres per 100 km (10-14 L per 100 km), and those vehicular cows on four wheels which consume close to 20 litres of petrol per 100 km. I personally prefer turbo-diesels with common rail, unlike those north-american light and heavy trucks spewing dooms-day like amounts of tar-black smoke, which don't count in, because of their Volkswagen status (quo?).
"Acceleration is produced when a force acts on a mass. The greater the mass (of the object being accelerated) the greater the amount of force needed (to accelerate the object). Or F=MA or FORCE = MASS times ACCELERATION." http://teachertech.rice.edu/Pa...
So if an SUV is two times heavier than a light sedan it requires two times more force (energy, fuel) to accelerate (to drive). I mean if two cars are of approximately the same technological level the heavier one burns more fuel, and consequently emits more CO2. No way around Newton's second law of motion, no filters, no electronics, nothing, absolutely nothing can remove the mass M, i.e. the weight from the formula F=MA.
Unless the humanity solves anti-graviti scientific problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... what will not arrive soon.
But ... but ... but! We just threw a couple of perfectly good scientists and engineers under the bus!!!! You mean we did that for NOTHING?!?!?
They knew long before that.
Disregard that, I suck cocks.
I've been thinking that sometime next year might be a good time to buy a VW. The more dirt that comes up, the worse their reputation.
This in turn will likely have a negative effect on sales unless they offer some good deals/price-reductions.
Along with that, the EPA and various others are going to be up their ass BIG TIME if they pull any more crap (and thus they have an incentive to be take extra care to toe the line in the next while).
What's with all the weasel words, the VW executives ordered the programmers to write software to cheat on the emission results, and then lied about it in public.
everyone I know who has a VW, or has had one in the past 10 years (around 8 or so) has all gotten BETTER than advertized MPGs.
Its funny, maybe it is a US vs Europe thing but I've never known anyone get anything near the official MPG. There is an interesting paper from the European Federation for Transport and Environment which shows that the average difference is now 36%, and that despite real world MPG scarecly improving since 2012 the manufacturers claims continued to reduce. Strangely VW is far from the worst, being bang on average with a difference of 36% from real world figures, whereas Daimler manages a 48% difference.
My 4 last cars include 2 Audi, one Ford and one Mazda
This is not a VW issue but rather a industry wide problem. Ever since MPG became an important selling point of auto's the automakers have tried to do everything
to win a number that is better then their competition. I take them with a grain of salt as merely a guide to what is possible with the vehicle not what is guaranteed.
Far too many variables in driving a vehicle to give a reasonable estimate of MPG for everyone. Obviously people buying a diesel engine smaller vehicle would be expecting very good MPG and those who buy a 4 X 4 pickup would not. The laws of physics are never overcome buy any miracle engine, fuel or device.
As consumers we would all be better off seeing a more basic rating of fuel economy as for example good, better, best in class type rating.
My last two cars have been diesel Focus models in the UK. The last one was bang on the official MPG, the current one is averaging 60 and the official one is 61.3; and the difference is probably down to the fact the new car has auto-stop ignition which the MPG tests give way too much influence to. That said, I still think the whole set up needs refining as it is clear that lots of cars MPG stats are complete bollocks.
GM kills over a hundred people with a known fault and nobody in the US seems to give a shit
The flaw in the GM cars was obviously an accident. Nobody thinks GM was designing their cars to hurt people or violate the law even if they later covered up or ignored the problem. VW clearly and deliberately ordered their engineers to design the car to pollute more than allowed. One is some combination of negligence/incompetence and the other is deliberate fraud.
We can forgive a company that makes a mistake, even one that in hindsight is really dumb and obvious. Harder to forgive a company that intentionally and with malice aforethought tried to defraud customers and regulators. Pollution hurts people and the environment and there are very good reasons why we care about what comes out of vehicle tailpipes. We have reasonable estimates of the number of people killed each year directly and indirectly by pollution. Don't think for a moment that VWs actions didn't have any effect on the lives of others.
"VW Officials Knew Since Last Year of Misleading Fuel Economy Claims"
Of course they did- in all likelihood they were the ones that came up with the idea and instituted the program. This wasn't the work of some rogue engineer screwing around in his cube late one night. This was planned and endorsed at the highest levels in the company.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Bild is German for shit. Nothing else to add, really.
Bankrupt VW. Take a bite out of the German economy. Fuck those frauds.
Your fuel economy depends almost entirely upon how you drive. My car is rated at 13/18 but I routinely get 16 around town and 20-21 on the highway because I drive very gently, most gently than the EPA test calls for. I know other people who get substantially worse, but they drive like jackrabbits.
I think we have gotten incredibly bad at common sense and management of expectations. We also seem to have developed an incredibly level of technological ignorance where people don't believe that how they drive affects or even should affect fuel economy.
Read into it a little before responding defending them if you want to have a reasoned discussion.
I've read into it plenty and I work in the industry. I'm not defending GM, I'm explaining why people are able to forgive their actions slightly more easily than those of VW. GM made a technical error and then management decided it wasn't worth correcting. In hindsight this was clearly wrong but there is at least plausible deniability that it was an error instead of a fraud. My company makes products that go into GM cars and I'm VERY familiar with how GM operates. I'm very willing to believe the problem was mostly a matter of incompetence because that would be entirely consistent with my direct dealings with GM engineering and management. I can very easily believe they thought it wasn't significant enough to justify a recall even though that decision was clearly epically stupid in hindsight. Furthermore the engineers at GM didn't commit the fraud, GM's management did. The worst you can really say about GMs engineers is that they weren't competent.
VW's actions on the other hand were clearly not a mistake or incompetence. They set out to intentionally and deliberately deceive customers and regulators. They intentionally and knowingly engaged in what is basically toxic waste dumping. VW engineering AND management were complicit in this fraud.
The issue was a design mistake, but the process of covering it up and not acting to fix a life threatening issue wasn't;
I believe that is exactly what I said.
Ah, that's exactly what GM did. They hid a problem they knew was killing people.
They hid (and/or didn't recognize) a problem once the data was brought to their attention. The engineers were incompetent but probably not criminal. The management was quite possibly criminal in addition to incompetent but the cover up was of a mistake, not an intentionally engineered fraud. With VW both the engineers and the management were criminial. Both companies have blood on their hands (literally) but most people are more willing to forgive what GM did that what VW did. It speaks to VW being more corrupt from top to bottom which compared with GM is kind of saying something.
For reference, the 1% begins at a yearly salary of somewhere around $180-190k. Even at that salary, it's gonna take you a while to save up to have so much disposable income (and no mortgage etc) to own a Lambo. What most people mean when they talk about 1%ers, and think of people sat on millions of dollars, is 0.1%ers.
To add to the anecdotals, I have a 2010 Ford Fusion (US). My MPG has been consistently inside the range at which it was advertised. It was sold to me at 25/34. On road trips I'd get somewhere between 33-36 if I reset the meter, and on my commute driving over a month averaged it'd be between 25-27. Only time I got worse efficiency than advertised was when running max AC in midsummer during rush hour, and only worse efficiency if I leadfooted a bit.
... so that the A7 can come within my range.
During the previews before a movie I saw last weekend, one of the big oil companies (I think it was Exxon) talked about growing fuel as somehting they were working on. Based on the pictures they showed, I think the work they were discussing was using algae to grow oils for diesel. If this could be made practical, we could (in theory) setup big farms out in the ocean and then harvest it from that.
They released a commercial with a Nazi era beetle with a fake German accent to make sure everyone remembers Hitler invented the Volkswagon brand and you expect them to operate their business on the up and up? Their company is being run by complete morons! Since it's Germany, they're probably all drunk 24/7.
Why single out VW when every single auto manufacturer does it? Do they just change scapegoats every year like the NCAA does?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
That's a bad idea. It locks us in to oil-based products, even if they are renewable. The oil companies don't care, they just want to own the production, distribution and sale of the fuel, no matter where it comes from. And we already do something similar with ethanol, burning plant sugars, rather than plant oils.
Much more sensible would be solar at your home, and power your car from that.
Learn to love Alaska
With the old system, I was always a couple mpg off of advertised.
In the mid 00s they recalculated the formula in the US, and consistantly if matches or is beaten in every car I drive.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I own a VW 2.0L TDI, and I get better than the EPA estimated MPG. My combined (city/highway) average is somewhere around 37 MPG. More than 50% of my total miles driven have been city driving. I have tracked the mileage/fuel economy since I bought it new, both in a notebook and by using fuelly.com, not by going off the car's estimated consumption display (those seem to always read better economy than what you actually get).
A quick look at fuelly.com for some of the 2.0L Jetta TDI shows very similar results in economy.
http://www.fuelly.com/car/volkswagen/jetta?engineconfig_id=103&bodytype_id=&submodel_id=
Of the 1170 vehicles compared in this link (you can find others that are just listed as something slightly different, such as Jetta Sportwagen diesel,, or Jetta diesel, or Jetta 2.0L L4 diesel, or TDI diesel), 847 of them fall between 32 MPG and 42 MPG. With another 253 vehicles that report over 42 MPG.
Of course, we have no idea on the driving habits/conditions of these vehicles, but that is a significant portion of them that is within the estimated MPG, and quite a few that are way above the estimate.
How the heck do you calculate MPG when you buy your fuel in liters and measure your distance in kilometers?
On Fords "Max AC" is actually AC with recirc turned on. With this the air going over the evaporator coil (inside coil) is recirculated inside air, and not hotter outside air. So the system runs more efficient than normal AC (though all you are breathing is recycled farts).
part of it has to do with how the cars are tested. There was some talk of changing the tests because they artificially gave hybrids an advantage that didn't exist (they ran them for extended periods of long runs, times when a hybrid would be running on just battery and so their fuel efficiency would go through the roof on tests, not cheating the test but how they are supposed to operate on long runs)
Correctly.
Seriously the press is focusing on VW? Why work so hard? All you have to do is a simple investigation in any U.S. car or motorcycle company and you've got news to last for years.