The question is, whether VW as a German company is now going to end up being beaten by US competitors which could do even more nasty stuff unpunished.
VW has international sales, and OP's implication might've been that Germany has a national interest in VW being competitive.
Well yes, I of course meant the entire EU+UK market. Regardless besides US and a handful of other countries VW is hardly competing that much with any American car companies anywhere (besides Tesla).
American car makers are still struggling a lot more in relative market share terms (GM+Ford+Tesla barely had over 33% in 2024 in the US). While VW alone had 26% in EU/UK/EFTA (just German companies have 39% of the entire market there)
Mercedes don't have an easy filter, but they do have some cars available with diesel engines, e.g. C-Class.
Diesel is now down to 9.5% of new cars sold in Europe (Q1 2025), less than full EVs ([2]).
[1] https://www.bmw.co.uk/en/all-models.html
[2] https://www.acea.auto/pc-registrations/new-car-registrations...
It does seem like diesel is trending lower, but it's not gone yet, regardless whether you think that is a good thing or not.
In any case, my point was this:
> it would be impossible to create diesel engines which would comply with enviromental standards
is false. Which it is.
Or multiple car manufacturers are still cheating, I guess we must consider the possibility.
Compare that to e.g. Chevrolet, which tried - and failed - to get a foothold in Europe. The failure was mostly them not understanding the local market.
Also it overlapped a lot with Opel which a much more successful brand in Europe. Basically it was an off-brand/cheap Opel, which wasn't exactly doing that great itself...
Speaking from personal experience with a 2023 Chevy Duramax 3500, and a friend with a similar 3/4 ton Powerstroke.
Otherwise good point.
Just look at the hole the US has dug for itself when it stopped producing civilian sea-ships, nowadays the cost of producing or even repairing its war-oriented sea-ships is way too high. And not only that, but it doesn't have the people with the knowhow to build those ships anymore, no matter the money thrown at the problem.
Western Europe has certainly lost the capability of making even artillery shells at scale, let alone tank tracks, just look where we're at it now.
> as military technology typically comes first before any civilian application.
Diesel himself wasn't involved in any military thing, as far as I know, so I think you're wrong on that one.
The thing is that without a strong civilian industrial base focused on things adjacent to warfare (like the steel industry when it comes to building ships or artillery shells) any big power is going to come very short-handed in the next big war (assuming the war doesn't get nuclear, which is another discussion). So, if your country can't make diesel engines at scale, for whatever reason, then you can say goodbye to your logistics lines because you need lots and lots of trucks for said logistics as part of a continental war, i.e. forget the tanks.
Must be due to the lack of demand for civilian artillery shells, right?
They can buy a brand new truck sans engine and drop some terribly polluting piece of crap from several decades ago and bypass all modern emissions regulations.
The SCR/EGR/DPF regime that's been forced upon truck mfrs is at the ragged edge of reliability and maintainability, not to mention its effects on fuel use. So that regulators who've never heard of Pareto optimization can pursue cutting the final 1% of the emissions that a truck from the 1960s would have.
One badly-tuned mid-80s F700 can produce more particulates in a day than a brand-new diesel truck will in its lifetime, but somehow, the priority is not making it easier for the owners of forty-year-old equipment to update to the standard of...2004, but rather to decrease the number of milligrams per tank (at $infinity cost) of soot that a brand-new engine is producing.
It's funny how the Clinton admin forced a golden egg into GM's hands (the EV1) and GM tossed it away in disgust when Bush was elected.
Absolutely not "impossible" FFS, VW was cheating to avoid using a proper adblue system, which would have been perfectly sufficient. They could also have used a particulate filter and burn off scheme like some trucks but that would require significant engineering and probably doesn't work as well with a small diesel engine.
Orrrrrr they could have just done what the "cheat" mapping did: Run less lean. The entire point of cheating was to run very lean to make artificially high fuel efficiency figures. The cheat map for emissions would then run richer to kill off nox emissions.
I genuinely believe they still "cheat" somewhat. My 2018 GTI has a 2L turbo engine. The MK7 GTIs were the first to be EPA emissions rated at 89 octane gas, even though the power figures are still recorded using 91 octane gas. Previous GTI engines were EPA rated with 91 octane gas.
My tinfoil hat theory is that they run EPA tests on 89 octane so that it runs rich and reduces combustion temp, reducing nox emissions. Using higher octane fuel runs much leaner, and demonstrably produces better miles per gallon. They purposely chose to advertise a lower miles per gallon figure because, IMO, they couldn't pass emissions with the leaner burning 91 octane. Notably, low RPM (and emissions testing RPM) performance is utter garbage with 89 octane fuel, and the car becomes very stall happy, when at 91 octane it is very difficult to stall.
And the politicians which sanctioned these special diesel tests were not even named. Nor all the other countries who also choose the European Standard (not testing diesel engines) over the US Standard.
As early as the late 90's tuners offered features where doing something with the cruise control buttonss which would switch the engine computer back to stock programming to pass emissions, run on cheaper gas, or fool the dealer if it went in for service. How does everyone think they were able to do stuff like that without any hardware mods?
Oh, and all the car companies were self-reporting their CO2 emissions in the EU for decades. When EU regulators actually got around to testing cars, shockigly, the companies were lying.
It's basically accepted at this point that Telsa lies about their range and efficiency numbers, and recently there's evidence they have been fucking with people's odometers for the purpose of getting them out of warranty quicker.
Ferrari have all sorts of terms and prohibitions on things journalists can't do with their cars - one being track lap time testing. Why? Because they got caught by Top Gear specially modifying their cars for the Top Gear test circuit, as well as using tires that aren't on the production vehicles - and when Top Gear called them out, Ferrari permanently banned them *and have gone so far as to prohibit Ferrari owners from allowing Top Gear staff access to the owner's vehicles for testing, under threat of being blacklisted. Now that they've been caught cheating, they simply won't allow anyone to test their cars versus anyone else's.
The wheel keeps on turning.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgkell/2022/12/05/from-emiss...
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/a2c7ca01-461c-4dc2-8006-ec1d6b61a...
Yeah, they're actually not doing well at all right now.
Seriously, if people are framing this in terms of "what's good for industry" vs "what is the right thing to do", the crooks have already won and your national industry has already lost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal#U...
The emission limits being for ULEV vehicles, I don't think I have seen a ULEV truck - indeed California classifies most under the LEV banner.
None of this is to change the point around nitrous oxide emissions - the environment doesn't care whether it came from a VW TDI or a F350, just the amount.
But it is also far far easier to implement such low emission standards in the US because we just don't really use diesel like that.
And when you get to the heavy duty pickups (F250, F350, etc.), then most of that goes out of the window.
US emissions standards don’t allow some things that euro6+ does, and visa versa.
There is an effort to make them overlap to make it easier to meet both standards.