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VW Scandal...It continues.

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Laurel Hill Crazie

AKA Rob Davis
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If anyone recalls, I posed a question concerning the eligibility of a TDI bought after the settlement date. Upon my understanding of the language we bought 2 more TDIs. A 2009 Jetta for my son and a 2013 Jetta that we would have kept and had repaired if we were wrong about its eligibility for recall. VW bought them all back, no eligible seller was identified so we got the full restitution for each one. With the proceeds we bought a 2017 Golf Sportwagen outright and my son bought a 2004 Jetta TDI and banked about $4000. I thought that I'd miss the mpgs but our Sportwagen gets high 30s consistently and occasionally (when Kathy drives) low 40s. I do miss the torque. I wish we could have found a 4 motion but we were pressed for time because if we didn't have a replacement when we sold back, we would only have my 1997 TDI which I still own with 225,0000 miles on the odometer and still running strong. Now, if the EPA were serious about emissions they would have allowed us to keep the 2009s and bought back every TDI built before that. In the meantime I watch so many diesel pickup trucks "burn coal" as they spew black soot from their "stacks". Real cool dude, nice ride for hauling groceries.

Toyota, Ford, and Chevy and I'm sure a few more had recalls because their defects resulted in immediate death and injury yet they wiggled away with a fine that was way less than VWs. VW owned their issue and promptly settled. In the sleazy world of corporated chicanery I chose to stick with the one that came clean. (puns intended)
 

Sibhusky

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@Bill Talbot that was a truly ignorant and misguided post. And I drive a diesel car. Please do more diligence before reposting garbage.
I personally questioned the article, having read tons of articles about this and never having heard of these California sniffer things, but mostly because I'd read that the car was programmed when it was idling to retune itself in case it was being tested. And that is why it had passed those common tests. But I thought the driving testing being done by the lab which discovered the cheat had found pollution. So it was news to me that there were other "driving" tests of any kind. But then I've lived in a non testing state for 15 years, and maybe tech (especially in California) had come a long way. Certainly I was going to look into these sniffer things to find out what I'd missed.

But I'm wondering what led you to post your response? Maybe you've done my homework in refuting the article for me? Because I wouldn't have posted this sort of reply without some links.
 

DanoT

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I find that the California road side testing of moving vehicles to be hard to believe (I am a skeptic). Given what we normally think of as the volume of California traffic, how would a roadside sniffer be able to tell which car the noxious fumes are coming from, especially after being mixed in with ambient non polluted air?
 

Sibhusky

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Here's an article mentioning this type of test, but it sounds new in 2015 (around this time this was all going on) and didn't mention California:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-make-the-air-cleaner/?utm_term=.cb487315153e

A nice summary of the whole thing, no mention of California having such tests, but a mention that in motion the car behaved differently and that it was admitted to be intentional by VW. Which is the essence of the charges. They admitted they had this undocumented programming to pass tests.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-vw-diesel-emissions-scandal

An article comparing before and after, saying they saw differences in the NOx levels with and without the "fix". https://www.caranddriver.com/featur...both-fixed-and-cheater-vw-tdi-diesels-feature

New tools for testing: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601324/a-secret-tool-to-catch-the-next-vw-style-emissions-cheat/
 

François Pugh

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German is banning diesel cars (so is Paris) from cities. This will hurt the manufacturers more than the fins than the USA imposed.

Ford and Chevy are introducing new 1/2T pickups that have diesel engines:huh:.

And in the US rolling coal......:doh:.

While what VW (and most other manufacturers) did is.....well just plain stupid.....the system seems to create a new problem in the exact same form as it tries to fix. Makes me wonder if those in charge are really right in the head.
Actually it's the oil companies and their friends who killed the electric car so they could continue making huge profits while polluting the world.
http://documentaryheaven.com/who-killed-the-electric-car/
 
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tch

What do I know; I'm just some guy on the internet.
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I don't usually get into these kinds of threads. But it popped up in my email, and I can't resist supporting Alexzn and saying Bill, that was a completely ignorant post. I don't know anything about "sniffers", so I won't go into that. But you allege that there is no evidence for "shibboleths" like climate change. The problem is that there IS evidence -- from disappearing glaciers to melting Antarctic ice to altered weather patterns to a constant climb in average global temperatures, there is LOTS of evidence. Some people may wish to believe (a fantasy in my opinion) that mankind has nothing to do with this (it does), but no one can dispute that the earth is warming. There is evidence. And just because we can't absolutely point to one person who has contracted lung cancer or emphysema specifically due to pollution doesn't mean there's no danger or harm to living creatures. (Remember, smoking cigarettes has never been listed as a specific cause of death although we all know the correlations and connections between that and morbidity).

Furthermore, your rant about the electric car "cabal" is outrageous and verges on paranoid conspiracy theory. What are we going to hear next? That we never landed on the moon? That the government is secretly spraying chemtrails over us? That Bill Clinton was really an alien masquerading as a human?

Come on....to imagine that there is some kind of conspiracy to champion electric cars belies their historical lack of government/regulatory/business support. Money is only being spent on supporting the industry now that the marketplace is asking for it. The only conspiracy has been in the established monopolies attempting to continue business as usual, despite intelligent alternatives. And as for the "damage" sustained by VW, future income from any product is not a guaranteed right, despite what some capitalists would wish to claim. VW marketed a product that was intentionally designed to bypass regulations instituted for the common good. They got caught and they should pay.

Oh...and by the way, I own a VW, first a diesel and now a gas Sportwagen. I was massively disappointed in VW, but not to the point of defending them.
 

DanoT

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I find that the California road side testing of moving vehicles to be hard to believe (I am a skeptic). Given what we normally think of as the volume of California traffic, how would a roadside sniffer be able to tell which car the noxious fumes are coming from, especially after being mixed in with ambient non polluted air?
 

Alexzn

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Sib- your understanding of the way WV cheated on the emission test is correct, and that story has been told and retold a thousand times. Whoever wrote Bill's article either lived in a cave, or was deliberately Ignoring a well known set of facts.

The piece Bill posted was so misinformed that it has to be a deliberate lie, in other words, it was a propaganda piece.
 

DanoT

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And by the way the sight of a skier denying climate change is hilarious (and deeply ironic).

I am not a denier or promoter of climate change, but here in western Canada we have not had our ski areas adversely effected as of yet with regards to numerous mild or dry winters, although we have had a very mild winter in 2014-15? and a colder than normal winter in 2016-17. That said, it is not hard to make the claim that the western Canada interior does have the most reliable snow conditions, year in, year out, in North America.
 

oldschoolskier

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I’m not happy with what VW did, however, let’s put this in perspective.

Lithium battery production cause serious pollution if you count mining it and disposal.

Muscle cars, (even under powered cars) well watch them accelerate hard, smell the exhaust and look at the color.

No solution is perfect. This issue is when you restrict a method beyond what is possible, yet not hamper the other methods. It leads to solutions that are unorthodox. VW cheated, ok, they met the rules as they were written (though not the intent which what everyone is upset about).
 

graham418

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Now that the EPA is busy rescinding all regulations, would the TDI's pass now?
 

Alexzn

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I’m not happy with what VW did, however, let’s put this in perspective.

Lithium battery production cause serious pollution if you count mining it and disposal.

Muscle cars, (even under powered cars) well watch them accelerate hard, smell the exhaust and look at the color.

No solution is perfect. This issue is when you restrict a method beyond what is possible, yet not hamper the other methods. It leads to solutions that are unorthodox. VW cheated, ok, they met the rules as they were written (though not the intent which what everyone is upset about).

That's a very unorthodox defense of corporate cheating if I saw one... I am sure you would be happy to apply the same logic to a maker of an anticancer drug who cheated on the FDA application to make it look effective when it was not, an aviation safety device prone to catastrophic failures, and a million other things. Corporate cheating is bad for consumers, period.

The fact that you (and I) like diesels should not be a license to corporations to cheat. My diesel has an expensive urea-based emission control system that is a pain in the rear end. But I accept it becuase I am aware of the health risks of the diesel exhaust, and I think they should be mitigated. So, you either accept the extra cost of DEF-based emission control and enjoy the performance and economy of a diesel engine, or you buy a gasoline or electric car. VW wanted to have their cake and eat it. That's cheating, and I am glad that they got caught. If anything, the punishment was not strong enough.
 

Alexzn

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My opinion anyway is that I want more cold weather, no matter what the cause.
I am actually quite annoyed by people taking an "agnostic" position on climate change. Climate change is a proven scientific fact. Whether you favor public policy solutions to deal with it, is indeed a matter of opinion and a reasonable policy debate, but denying that climate patterns have been changing is akin believing in flat Earth.
 

Sibhusky

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I am actually quite annoyed by people taking an "agnostic" position on climate change. Climate change is a proven scientific fact. Whether you favor public policy solutions to deal with it, is indeed a matter of opinion and a reasonable policy debate, but denying that climate patterns have been changing is akin believing in flat Earth.
Yes. But I don't want to get put in detention.

And really, it's all very well to argue about how we got here, but what's most important is what to do about it. I'm not going to waste my time arguing about the cause. The fact remains that a whole shitload of people don't even want to try and fix it, because they are too busy saying it's not their fault. Give up the blame game and work on the solution. Even if God gave us the flood, he gave Noah the tools to build a boat. Same here.
 

oldschoolskier

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That's a very unorthodox defense of corporate cheating if I saw one... I am sure you would be happy to apply the same logic to a maker of an anticancer drug who cheated on the FDA application to make it look effective when it was not, an aviation safety device prone to catastrophic failures, and a million other things. Corporate cheating is bad for consumers, period.

The fact that you (and I) like diesels should not be a license to corporations to cheat. My diesel has an expensive urea-based emission control system that is a pain in the rear end. But I accept it becuase I am aware of the health risks of the diesel exhaust, and I think they should be mitigated. So, you either accept the extra cost of DEF-based emission control and enjoy the performance and economy of a diesel engine, or you buy a gasoline or electric car. VW wanted to have their cake and eat it. That's cheating, and I am glad that they got caught. If anything, the punishment was not strong enough.
Wasn’t intended as a defense, just pointing pointing some of this hidden issues that are causing similar problems, yet are deemed acceptable.

I won’t do down the route of corporate cheating or greed as it will get into a political rant.
 
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