They sold a lot of diesel cars, and most of them probably have some hacks to meet Euro standards.
They should be forced to fix all cars, reimburse buyers for any losses, and be forced(!) to go green asap (which probably means at least 10 years, so yeah there should be some force)!
edit: reworded, and changed link
Vehicles from the early 70s often had similar gas mileage to smaller lighter vehicles from the late 90s-early 2000s but the newer cars had much better emissions.
If the makers of gasoline powered cars had cheated like VW did on their diesels, the diesel advantage would have been nonexistent.
In addition the design of a diesel engine does not require a strict stoichiometric air/fuel ration. The result is at less than full throttle the gasoline engine the efficiency of a gasoline engine drops off faster than a diesel engine. In an ideal efficiency engine (no emissions) a gasoline engine at full throttle is more fuel efferent than a diesel engine, but when at less than full throttle - which is where most engine spend all their time) the diesel engine is more efficient. Note I skipped a dozen pages of disclaimers on the above claim: there are many ways in the real world to cheat the above.
Source? Electronic fuel injection with closed-loop fuel/air control wasn't a mature technology in the 1970s, and open-loop fuel injection (not to mention carburetors) combined with 3- and 4-speed transmissions are inherently less efficient then closed-loop with 4, 5 and 6-speed transmissions.
It's a vicious circle because owner of diesel cars may think twice before voting if a candidate proposes to raise the taxes on diesel, even if year after year we get reports about the number of early deaths because of fine particles…
Wiki says the 1.6dCi is available in 130-180hp whereas the 1.6 petrol has 107-116hp
Fuel consumption will vary due to a lot of different factors, such as aerodynamics, transmission, driving style etc.
when i drove 30k per year i drove a diesel, now im driving 15k per year and drive a gasoline car.
My diesel Peugeot 306 1.9 did about 45mpg no matter how hard I drove it, whereas my friend with the same model with a 2L petrol engine said he was using roughly twice as much fuel as me. The later common rail 2L version was supposedly capable of 55mpg
I really doubt people care about the emission stuff at all...
SRC: http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/forum/post/index.htm?t=16748
diesels are for taxis suited (beyond that they consume less fuel) because they have torque down low and are not rewed as high as petrol engines, and thus not that abused.
look at large natural aspirated V8s, there are many with close to 1m miles, they pull small power form large displacement but could run forever.
Diesel is really for trucks, ships, agricultural and construction vehicles and some railway engines. It should be taxed more than gasoline because of NOx, particulate and sulphur pollution.
> It should be taxed more than gasoline because of NOx, particulate and sulphur pollution.
Diesel car owners already pay that tax through the expense of urea injection, oxidation catalyst, and particular filter systems, and with those systems diesel is every bit as clean as gasoline. Sulfur is a nonissue with ULSD these days, and if you want to reduce sulfur further that's something you deal with at the refinery, not the pump.
Correction: there is a trade-off between fuel efficiency, NOx emissions, particulate emissions, and cost. Urea injection + diesel oxidation catalyst + diesel particulate filters pretty much solves all emissions problems with diesel engines, and that's what GM and Ford diesels do, both in Europe and in the US. It isn't cheap for sure, but the 2014 Chevrolet Cruze diesel is worth every dollar in premium over the gasoline version.
Volvo, Renault, Hyundai, Opel and Audi are much worse, as you can see in the last graph.
There's also a highly polluting Jeep at the top: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/30/wide-ran...
So this whole "let's make an example out of VW" has nothing to do with the scale of the crime.