VW Faces $17B Fine for Emissions Scam

See... this is why the Internet needs a Sarcasm font. )

MERGED

I can only imagine the chaos if there weren't school buses hauling kids. All the extra traffic from parents dropping off their children. The number of vehicles a school bus keeps off the road for the trip to school is pretty good. Then I look at this one bus stop near my home. If I'm running late I get stuck there waiting for it to finish loading. The bus is probably 90% filled from this one stop. A large number of elementary students get on this bus. Several years ago the bus they used for the stop was a non flat front bus, now they have one of those flat front buses and I have a feeling that may soon not be enough. With three students to a seat we're looking at close to 72 on a bus. Think if mommy or daddy had to get them to school? Instead of having say 72 cars (max) driving to the school to drop off you have 1 vehicle dropping all those kids off.

That's one serious rig in the back of that vehicle.

 

Lexus dealer was caught doing what many other toyota dealers were doing, doubling up on floor mats. This was during a time where Toyota was actively lobbying the NHTSA that there was no problem. They also siloed safety information illegally, and illegally hid the known pedal defect from US regulators. They hired a regulator from NHTSA to lobby against doing a $100M fix that could have saved lives. They used their influence to have congressmen to lobby the NHTSA not to look into things. All throughout they pretened that they were completely innocent. There was a corporate mandate to short circuit safety regulations that directly resulted in dealths. That is why toyota pleeded no contest to the fines, they were definitely guilty. They spent tens of milllions in legal fees to try to short circuit safety acting as if dealths were simply a pr problem. No heros here. Toyota is part of the guilty culture. I hope they have changed, but saying things like only 6 people died or pretending that this culture did not lead to dealths and from the lawsuits imprisonments of innocent people that cars because of the problems and toyota testified that their cars worked fine, was a which hunt.

It is refreshing that Winterkorn finally admitted what VW was doing and resigned. VW's lying and cheating caused pollution not deaths as the Toyota anti-safety culture and GM's (ignition switch) did. Big auto does not self police, until their is a big scandal. It is sad.

MERGED

I'm not getting your point. I said they should make the school buses cleaner, and explicitly said we need school buses. I believe clean diesel is about $50,000 more per bus than the non treated diesel busses I road on and are prevelent around here. That means higher fuel efficiency, SCR, urea, and particulate filters. That goes for city buses too. When the state forces individuals to buy more expensive cars to solve a problem that is created by polluting trucks and busses it doesn't make much sense. Maybe the transition should take 6 years to save money, but lets not pretend the current NOx limit for cars really reduces exposure in a city if they don't look at the much heavier polluters.

Maybe you are simply agreeing with me?

Yep, budget $50,000 including some money to grad students. Pretty small cost for the EPA. I remember as a kid a university of colorado professor built a detection device that showed instantaneous out of a tail pipe. Houston's air is still polluted but they moved out of the top slots by identifying point sources, instead of haphazardously just looking at increasing levels in new vehicles. Remove the worst 30% of pre-1996 cars on the road and the old polluting trucks and busses, and probably LEV II is strict enough on NOx ... but of course EPA doesn't do a good job catching cheaters, so they will keep making it harder and more expensive to comply, while cheaters keep

 

There are now accusations that German chancellor Angela Merkel may have known about this.

Did Angela Merkel cover up Volkswagen emissions scandal? | Daily Mail Online

And BMW stocks have dropped now that a German automotive publication (Auto Bild) have accused them of similarly emitting illegal levels of pollutants.

Europe's carmakers caught up in VW storm - Yahoo Finance

This rabbit hole may go much deeper than anybody expected...

 

Yes but peak efficiency is only part of the picture. A diesel car can maintain its peak efficiency only a tiny fraction of a real world trip.
Average efficiency in real world trips is even more important and here, the hybrid like the Prius G3 wins.

 

Yes. I was agreeing with you. I was just making a statement if we didn't have school buses roaming around hauling all those brat... er I mean... lil darlings to and from school. Just trying to put perspective on the number of additional vehicles which would be driving to school on top of those which already do. Most parents complain now about congestion around the schools. They'd need a heck of a lot more road to handle the mass amount of traffic.

 

Compliance depends on region, but heavy duty diesel engines have had to meet similar if not more stringent (per bhp-hr) emissions standards.
Emission Standards: USA: Heavy-Duty Onroad Engines
The biggest polluters have had to retire, and those in between can I believe retrofit their emissions systems to comply.
http://www.arb.ca.gov/msprog/onrdiesel/documents/fsschoolbus.pdf

 

Yes I see.
But as higher energy-per-gallon counted in, the average fuel economy gap between a "good" non-hybrid diesel and a good gasoline hybrid like Prius G3 could be really small sometimes.
That's always bragged about by TDI fans.

 

Yes, "good" diesel - a car with a defeating device?

 

The 3.0L TDIs don't have the defeat, and can rival hybrids in fuel economy.

 

Did WVU test the 3.0s?


MERGED, YET AGAIN


Also, who can trust anything from VW now that they've been caught lying? BIG time lying at that?

 

That couldn't be more vague.

Numbers? Ratings? Links?

 

There is a very easy fix. Just drive the car exactly as in the EPA test all the time.

 

So, Mexico should increase security at the border?

Dealers, owners feel betrayed by VW scandal

 

Still, they got away with it for six years. Likewise, what caught them were two things highly unusual.
1) A contract to promote how clean diesel cars could be used volkswagens.
2) The EPA (gov. organization) actually paid attention to a non-EPA group's research.

It was good they got caught, but it was certainly shocking how long and how far they got when you think of the size of the deception.

 

Do not know about the 3.0L, not sold here.
The 1.6L TDI are popular around here and have the defeat.

 

npr was killing them this morning. must have a few prius drivers.

 

Strange example. I thought the 2014 tdi passat was not included in the caught cars with defeat device. Not that it won't go down in value, but we have no idea if vw cheated on that model. Why dump it at the bottom?

Taxpayers and EPA got duped. EPA took a long time to catch them. I wonder what else it has been missing.

Not suprising. Its only the 2L tdi that they have caught vw/audi on in the US so far.

 

But, you don't know that yet!
EPA Expands VW Diesel Probe To Audi, Porsche V-6s; All Diesels To Be Tested

California will test 6-cylinder diesel engines from VW's Audi ...

 

With respect to school buses there is relatively inexpensive fix: retrofit them with CNG kit. That would reduce amount of NOx