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Comment by jeffnv | Hacker News Reader

I guess the whole 'cheating on the emissions tests' scandal didn't hurt them too bad. Here I thought it would destroy them. Silly me!

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I'm honestly not sure the public really cared about this - was anyone really surprised that this was happening? Most people I spoke to at the time seemed to be of the opinion that all the other manufacturers would be found out next. My friend bought a Golf the week after the scandal broke; I've bought a Golf GTI and a Polo in the last six months. They're just, well, pretty decent cars.

Well in the US, Diesel isn't very popular so the impact won't be as big, but people in Europe at least are going to rethink about getting Diesel, and the governments there might reconsider the big tax break they give to diesel engine which are supposed to be cleaner than gasoline (making diesel cheaper at the pump than regular gasoline for consumers in Europe).

Now we discovered that it's not only VW, but many car makers, so people aren't mad at VW as much as they were at the beginning of the Diesel-gate scandal.

I would have boycotted VW for life if they were the only one doing it. I'm certainly boycotting their diesel engines.

I thought it was only the tyrannically strict California emissions tests that they cheated on? The cars met standard emissions limits, unless I'm mistaken. Was it even an issue in Europe? I thought their standards were even more relaxed.

You are mistaken on US regulation. They did not meet NOX emission limits in the US. Europe has stricter fuel regulation, less strict emission regulation so it was probably cool there. Every TDI model over there is usually tuned for better performance.

Oh well, my chariot of lies gets bought back in 2 days. Best investment ever in a car! Since I got my parents and 4 other friends to buy TDI's too when they saw the mileage I was getting, they are all ecstatic that the cars are getting bought back at well over market. Imma buy a Chevy Cruze Diesel once the standard hatchback gets released. Until then I'll find a pre-ban TDI or maybe some other beater to get me through the year.

Added bonus: They tried to cheat me out of repairing the cheater emission system that failed just outside of the federal emissions warranty at 60k miles. I told them if they could program it to cheat, they could program it to overheat the DPF and cause it to crack and fail. Got a free replacement from that :)

Added bonus #2: Since I also suggested my parents get one before the scandal broke, they tried to cheat them out of a AdBlue urea heater (piss tank heater) claiming it would not be repairable under federal emissions because it wasn't directly a part of the emissions. The company finally bowed to the massive number of complaints on tdiclub and related forums and covered that as well.

So... they screwed you and your family over three times, and you're a happy customer?

Don't get me wrong, the above was annoying. But they were forced to pay for it and I came out ahead. There's no doubt in my mind that my 2012 model still polluted less than my former 1998 model. There were many times before the scandal broke that I considered removal of the DPF component to further improve efficiency. This would not have affected the NOX output, but would have reduced weight, fuel consumption, and cosmetic appeal. I wasn't keen on having the car blow raw diesel into the exhaust to regenerate the filter every few hundred miles. Would have averaged 50mpg instead of mid-40's...

I put over 100k mi on the car and will have received approx $19k for it after the goodwill + buyback. Total cost of ownership for 4 years of about $6k excluding fuel which cost about half as much as a gasser (savings was anywhere between $3-6k). So yeah, pretty happy all things considered.

They were fined by the EPA it wasn't just a California thing. Other governments have also taken some actions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal#G...

For instance, in Canada there is a buyback/rebate program.

Since VW has stopped selling diesels in the US, and said they don't plan to reintroduce them, I'm not sure a boycott of that drivetrain is going to have much effect on them.

Fortunately for Europe, most countries have been strengthening incentives not to buy diesel, since they have always contributed more to smog problems -- and the push away from diesel started long before VW got caught screwing the tests over.

I, for one, was very surprised this was happening. I don't know the first thing about calculating the emissions from my car...is there a noticeable smell or visible difference between cars that emit less vs more? Since I don't know anything about the topic, my default assumption is the car manufacturers are playing by the rules.

Although, once the news broke I did think we'd be hearing about other manufacturers too.

TBH, the old way of measuring emissions for diesel was to look out the back and see if there was a black cloud forming at idle and with slight throttle applied. Maybe California actually measured more, out east they didn't. It wasn't until model year 2007 that new regulation kicked in that made things a lot more strict.

For this emission issue, there was increased NOX coming out the pipe. The NOX by itself isn't a huge issue... it's when it combined with volatile organic compounds (VOC's) from trees'n shit. Then magic happens under the sun and it combines with carbon to become smog (ozone), which blows into cities and gives the kids asthma.

Some further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropospheric_ozone

EDIT: The old test handled particulate emissions... the DPF worked on these cars and no black smoke appeared until they programmed it to fail and crack (like mine!), you can't see NOX and I don't think it has a distinct smell...

Most people wouldn't be surprised the car was engineered to do well under the test, but having an algorithm which detects the test is occurring, and including an actual vial of urea which is used only under those conditions. That is above and beyond.

> they're just, well, pretty decent

Unlike their drivers, apparently.

I blame the regulators just as much as VW for making shitty tests that gave too much incentive to cheat (which wouldn't have been difficult to detect or eliminate).

I also own a Jetta which I've been very happy with for ~8 years. I don't get any sense that they were cheating on the quality of my car, and it seems justice is being done for the cheating on tests.

They've only now, in 2017, started the return program for the vehicles mentioned in that lawsuit, so this statistic probably doesn't reflect those returns yet.

Sales don't factor in returns. If you sell a car and it's later returned, it still counts as a sale on the books.

In terms of bookkeeping, VW knew how much it roughly had to write off as soon as April 2016.

The EPA's restrictions were mostly arbitrary and too restrictive, in my opinion. The European rules are more than sufficient. I don't think there's much moral issue with breaking more-or-less pointless regulations.

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