Drivers still like VW
bloombergview.com
bloombergview.com
It's a bit abstract right now. Let's see what happens after the fix is rolled out, the owners need to schedule their appointments for the recalls, deal with (possible) lower fuel economy and performance, and (possible) lower resale values.
But those effects are long-term and therefore less quantified and immediately apparent. Seems to me, the major influencer on how drivers feel about VW is the news items about how bad VW is.
The DPF is like a muffler with a trap to catch the soot and ash from the exhaust. That black stuff you see coming out of a truck but never from a TDI even when in cheat mode. When the DPF is cycling, the engine passes unburned fuel from intake to exhaust on every fourth stroke. The unspent fuel lands on the trap, and when the hot exhaust from the next stroke ignites that fuel, the soot and ash are reduced, which in turn reduces NOx emissions. If they are smart with the software, they'll try to run the DPF when the car is cruising not accelerating, and the impact on performance will be hardly noticeable at all.
Cycling the DPF more often will likely result in a longer lifespan for that unit. Currently they need to be cleaned when they become fouled. Cycling the DPF more frequently, thus burning the soot out of the trap more regularly will likely reduce fouling.
Not clear if these results will hold up, but CR ran some tests that seemed to indicate that running the car in "cheat mode" had a relatively small impact on performance - "both cars added less than a second in the 0 to 60 mph time. The Jetta saw fuel economy drop from 53 to 50 mpg, and the Sportwagen went from 50 to 46 mpg." http://www.wired.com/2015/10/vw-diesel-cheat-mode-mpg-perfor...
I'm pretty sure VW won't get hurt even a little by all of this. "Voting with wallet" doesn't work. If you don't make a corporation pay up front to the public (i.e. to the government), nothing will change.
I'm really sick of these TBTF corporations doing whatever they want. They do something illegal that causes a lot of harm and if they are caught they just cruise the waters of ignorance to safety and then rinse and repeat.
We are just sheep...
This is true for almost anything. Food industry is a huge greenhouse gases producer which indirectly causes pollution and some deaths. Meat, which might be considered a luxury, is the top ingridient in many dishes, environmental impact is higher for producing meat that that of driving cars (globally). Just heating causes pollution and death.
Our reliance on fossil fuels will in 100 years cause a lot of indirect deaths.
People aren't sheep. They just don't care.
That's a pretty tall claim. Have you got a citation? I'd also argue that there are ways to grow meat much more environmentally friendly and not all that more expensive than traditional feed lots.
> People aren't sheep. They just don't care. Sheep care, at least for their babies and each other.
You're a fool if you believe this. Sheep don't plan their environment in any kind of meaningful way, they just wander around eating. If you cut the field in half and move the sheep from side to side and actually manage their grazing you can get more production per acre than if you just leave the sheep to themselves.
Without the farmer intervening and selling sheep off, they'd quickly outgrow the feeding capacity of their naive grazing strategy, continue having babies, and start causing deaths from malnutrition.
Please learn about natural systems a little bit before spouting things that sound insightful but which are actually devoid of any reality.
FAO of the United Nations - report 2006 http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM
There are newer reports but I just want to point out how long the information is out.
This is the direct citation:
> The livestock sector is a major player, responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2 equivalent. This is higher share than transport.
What's also a little bit comforting is that the impact is reducing (production is getting more and more efficient). Although as Chinese became rich and started eating meat insanely fast doubling the consumption of the USA, same might happen to peoples of India and Africa.
Increase of demand might neutralize the efficiency increase.
> You're a fool if you believe this. ...
Well, this is not really sheep I had in mind. I was thinking more of the free roaming - no owner - kind of animals.
> Please learn about natural systems a little bit before spouting things that sound insightful but which are actually devoid of any reality.
I completely do not get how my half-assed comment about sheep escalated to your comments about my education (or lack of).
So burning wood from clearing brush in your backyard would be gross CO2 emissions, but burning gas in the chainsaw would be net emissions (at least until people start synthesizing fuel from CO2 and water).
http://www.treehugger.com/green-food/in-defense-of-the-cow-h...
http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/ss574
http://naldc.nal.usda.gov/catalog/39886
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep10892
https://www.environment.gov.au/climate-change/emissions-redu...
> Well, this is not really sheep I had in mind. I was thinking more of the free roaming - no owner - kind of animals.
Those animals too will not plan their reproductive urges around the environment so they will also tend to overpopulate and underpopulate in cycles. I don't really consider that caring, that's just nature taking its course.
> I completely do not get how my half-assed comment about sheep escalated to your comments about my education (or lack of).
If you want to be sarcastic, make it obvious. You made a lot of matter-of-fact statements prior, so why shouldn't I take it at face value? Show empirically that sheep do care, or say that you meant it sarcastically. Internet comments don't make it obvious that you're smirking.
No one is arguing that the environmental impact can't be reduced. I'm just saying that people are blind and don't care about deaths caused by having a car, but they are also blind and don't care about deaths caused by eating meat.
Yes, not everyone buys their meat from bad sources, I'd definitely like for it to become a majority.
Unfortunately, there's not enough land for that, I'd rather eat bugs.
> If you want to be sarcastic, make it obvious.
Yes I agree that my comment about sheep was entirely unnecessary, as was this whole discussion, I removed it.
Basically he argues that yes you can. There are a few reasons this makes sense.
1. All food comes from the sun to begin with (except for what diesel you add in via plowing, etc)
2. There aren't huge variations in different plant's ability to perform photosynthesis (might be 2x, might be 5x, but probably not 1000x)
3. This means it doesn't matter too much if you grow the grain, harvest it, transport it, feed it to cows or if you just grow grass and let them eat it
4. Grasses grow according to a S-curve meaning that there's an optimal height to grow a grass up to, and harvest it down to, for maximal production which is entirely different than annual crops
I'd really encourage you to watch the video, though, if you can stand it because it's very enlightening.
Nitpick, but all energy we use comes from the Sun (ok, ultra-nitpick, some come from the previous star, but we're talking nuclear reactions in Earth's core here) - all fossil fuels, as well as wind and hydro are nothing but accumulated and transformed solar power.
If VW will emerge out of this relatively unscathed it will create a dangerous precedent and the and the auto industry will have learned nothing. Personally I try to do the right thing, like trying not buying gas provided by BP or Chevron if possible and I can tell you rigth now that my next car will not be a VW.
Owning a car kills people indirectly, be it VW or not. Yes they deceived with a purpose but people accept the direct and indirect deception, be it in eating meat, or driving botched/normal cars. This is always the way it is.
One can have so many conflicting opinions and attitudes inside one's head, one can be mad about VW but not mad about the highly subsidised food industry, or transportation industry in large.
It's just the way it is. Yes, as you've said, almost everyone is ignorant about the bigger picture.
I was just trying to say that by looking at everything else I'm not at all surprised/shocked/disappointed with people's behavior. It's the way people are, and it always was as it is today, it might sound fairly pessimistic, but an average person needs a car to travel around quicker, needs meat to nurture their palate, needs heating to avoid the inconvenience of dressing several layers of clothes in their home. Given all of these entirely personal, individual, selfish needs it is no surprising at all that the majority doesn't care / see the bigger picture.
I am not fooling myself, i know this is our 'reality' but people act sometimes with great selflessness. I refuse to think that we can't rise above our selfish needs.
People have short memories for this stuff.
Right: the scandal is about VW fudging a test to mislead on the scale of an externality; unlike government tested fuel economy (which is about consumer information, so deception on that hurts primarily the direct purchaser), emissions testing is about protecting the public at large from paying (through environmental impacts) for benefits received by the particular consumer of the vehicle (and, in the form of profits from the trade, the vehicle manufacturer.)
So, on the VW scandal, drivers and the company are the beneficiaries of the deception, so its unsurprising that drivers qua drivers would not be angered by the company's deception.
"In the capacity of" "as being"
Those might not make the meaning clear by themselves ... Uh.
Ok so in this situation, drivers qua drivers is like, the drivers in being drivers, seperate from what they might be other than drivers.
I think the idea is like, they might care for other reasons, but they don't care about it as part of their being drivers.
I hope that this explanation is not insufficient for anyone who is looking to it to understand the term.
This is a silly distinction. You can't sensibly divorce "drivers" from all the other various functions of human beings who drive.
Many drivers are also people who enjoy living in a clean city with minimal pollution. Many more do not enjoy being lied to by a company they have paid in an explicit contract to exchange money for certified goods. Some of these drivers are also angry that they are being disrespected by their elected officials who are unable or unwilling to represent them in an appropriate manner.
Sure, drivers get a cheaper car in a vacuum. But this vacuum doesn't exist and is merely an academic distinction/rhetorical argument.
For my part, I can say I was toying with the idea of buying a Golf, and now VW is firmly off my list. But I'm not really serious about buying a car at this time anyway.
"drivers qua drivers don't care" says that while the part of a driver which cares about driving doesn't care, it very strongly implies that there's another part of drivers that does care. Otherwise the OP would have just said "drivers don't care" instead of "drivers qua drivers don't care".
Adjusting the code to lower emissions will absolutely impact power output and fuel efficiency. This impacts the consumers directly. And anecdotely, was the reason most people bought TDIs - the amazing combo of power, efficiency and percieved "greeness"
As soon as an owner takes their vehicle in to get the water pump replaced, or more Urea added to the system, or a host of "dealership only" maintenance tasks that are cropping up in modern cars, their gas mileage will (presumably) take a very large hit. The dealers will have to install the EPA emissions fixes. A manual 2014 VW Passat TDI can hit 50 MPG in a highway driving situation. Fuel efficiency was traded for emissions. The emissions 'patch' will presumably reverse the trade off, and instead of getting higher fuel efficiency, you'll now have lower emissions output. Having a lower fuel economy directly impacts the consumer experience.
Most of the responses to the finding have been snarky comments about "how vw is bad." (We need to find out what went wrong and fix it... circlejerking about the whole issue, or the negative press, isn't going to do a lot of good)
Um... That is exactly what they did. They falsified their emission test results. The car you are driving is NOT the same as the one that passed the tests.
The fact that it was possible to deceive the tests does not change the fact that they were blatantly and illegally falsifying them. The performance of the vehicles when they pass the proper regulations is likely to be significantly lower than the advertised performance, because the LIED about the their emissions.
The one redeeming factor for VW seems to be powertrain options and selling a station wagon that isn't an SUV or a Subaru (Golf Sportwagen).
Depends on the model, but Golf for the last 5 years has gotten a Very Good (4/5) for reliability from Consumer Reports. They used to be terrible in the mid-2000s, but improved drastically since then.
Some will be outraged, but a bunch of other people will be happy. It will be interesting to see which group is larger!
Some rogue engineers made a hack to have the MPGs come out as 31/40 instead of 29/38. That's what happened. VW will take corrective actions across the board, right down to fixing your vehicle to comply with emissions regulations.
As another commenter said, I really don't care about "the deals and tricks between giant corporations and the Government".
Well you should care a little, because the result of the "the deals and tricks between giant corporations and the Government" can impact you financially in both a positive and negative fashion.
On the positive -- the financial incentives that VW is offering as a result of the scandal -- IIRC, up to $6K -- make it a great time to upgrade or buy.
On the negative -- public perception of the scandal could lower the resale price of any diesel VW you might own.
I do think that it is highly naive to say one doesn't care about the deals and tricks that big corporations pull off. Especially with the rampant consumer economy in the US, being an uninformed consumer is irresponsible. However, I have to agree with the GP, I was just saying yesterday that I also would still be willing to buy a VW. they are really (subjectively by some measures, objective by other) good cars, despite the recent scandal.
Beyond a sufficient level of terrible, relative comparison is unnecessary.
There are ethical and moral implications and trade offs for all. I think that judging the OP because VW makes a diesel car that gets only 35MPG instead of 42 and saying it's equivalent to buying clothes from sweat-shop brands is disingenuous at best. As I said above, I do not agree with the lassie-faire sentiment of letting corporations do what they want to buying whatever.
EDIT, for context, the highest level commenter was downvoted below 0 before.
I guess you don't care how much pollution you spew -- which doesn't strike me as a commendable attitude -- but the rest of us do, and we're not going to let VW continue to sell cars that pollute well beyond the legal limits in actual use.
Linkbait, anyone?