'Why the VW scandal will snowball'

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Paul Willis could not have been more clear.

“It's my opinion that the senior management of the company are very precise people. They are very honest people, very direct people. I know these gentlemen. I know them quite well. I find it implausible this is a deliberate intent to mislead people.”

That was three weeks ago, when Willis, head of Volkswagen in the UK, appeared before the Commons Environmental Audit Committee.

The MPs wanted to know about the extent of the VW emissions-rigging scandal. As well as heaping praise on his colleagues, and apparently implying the deception was an unfortunate accident, Willis went on to say it was unlikely that further revelations would come out.

I don't know where Willis was yesterday morning, but presumably when the news broke that VW had reported irregularities in carbon dioxide emissions (previously they related to nitrogen oxides, or NOx), he must have been rocked to the core.

That, though, has been the problem all along with this story: VW has wanted us to believe it's not so bad, that the cheating was confined to a handful of executives, that it's time for us all to renew our trust in the company and, as its ad puts it, to move on.

Instead, another and altogether grimmer picture emerges.

There's been a sense in some quarters of wanting to side with VW, of wishing to retain trust in the manufacturer. It's as if the wrongdoing could turn out to be so enormous, so epic, that we would rather not attempt to grasp its scale.

Plus, it exhibits a degree of cynicism that, even by greedy big business standards, is breathtaking. This was the duping of studies designed to make the planet a healthier, better place for future generations. And VW, that most wholesome of brands - maker of the family-friendly, cosy Golf - behaves otherwise.

WHERE DOES IT STOP?

Now we've got not one set of dubious pollution statistics, but two. To the 11 million vehicles affected, we can add another 800 000 - but, if the experience of the first revelations is repeated, that second number could go a lot higher. Certainly the financial markets thought so, sending shares down a further 10 percent.

What seized the investment analysts was the drip, drip of detail coming out of VW. This second discovery, the car giant said, was likely to cost €2bn (R30.3bn). But that's 4.1 times higher per vehicle than the first. In other words, this has the potential to be much worse.

What also grabbed them was that, in its latest CO2 admission, VW said “the majority” of vehicles it relates to were diesel. So, in other words, it affects some petrol cars too. And that's a significant step because until now petrol cars were thought to be immune.

It really should not be like this. We live in an age when we're constantly assured that transparency is all, in which corporations invest fortunes in making themselves appear open, clean and concerned.

Yet here is one of the smartest firms of all, one that in so many respects was an industry leader, falling back upon blandishments, being economical with the truth, and relying on the slow feed of opaque statements to divert us from the full horror.

It was obvious from day one that this was no one-off incident, and was unlikely to be confined to one or two executives.

The “defeat device” - they even had a name for it - was so fiendishly clever that it appears it must have been created deliberately and sanctioned from the very top.

WHY THEY CHEATED

When VW came to design the smaller VW diesel models they used what's called a “lean NOx trap”. Why? Because it's cheaper to install and takes up less space than the alternatives used by rivals. The VW version does not require a tank for urea, the chemical that is added in the other systems to break down NOx.

Here's the rub: the scaled-back VW type affected the vehicle's fuel consumption and acceleration. So someone came up with a solution: the lean trap was switched off when the car was being driven normally but would turn on when it was going through an emissions test. They replicated the conditions of the examination in a piece of software, so the trap kicked in and emissions plummeted.

And here's the important bit for the rest of us, who must share the Earth with VW and its products: with the trap turned off, a car on an open road was emitting NOx 40 times the permitted limit.

There's an adage in business that rears up time and again whenever a company is found to have been playing dirty: when it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Other car manufacturers could not understand how VW was able to pass the emissions tests with the lean NOx trap; now they know why.

BEFORE WE MOVE ON

VW would like us to accept that the defeat device was the creation of a small group of engineers and software developers at its Wolfsburg headquarters. That may be so. They may very well have had the idea. But did they authorise its execution and implementation?

Were they able to spend millions on the device - because that's what its development and application would have cost - and alter the design of a vehicle, without seeking permission from higher up? And this speculation, don't forget, concerns NOx. We've barely started with CO2.

So far, a handful of employees have faced suspension. If Willis is correct, they will be reinstated. I suspect he's wrong, and they will be far from the last.

VW, it's clear, should tell us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Only then can we, not they, make up our minds about what has occurred.

Only then, can VW be allowed to move on.
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http://www.iol.co.za/motoring/cars/...-scandal-will-snowball-1.1941085#.Vjt5x1V95D8
 
Them going bust would be great. If they have to return tax credits from falsified emissions results, bankruptcy is a possibility..

Wakeup call for the rest of the profits at any price corporates we're surrounded by.
 
Budza said:
Them going bust would be great.
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eh no. Both on the going bust part and the "would be great" part. Germany won't let them go bust. And it won't be great because that'll leave a big gap in servicing cars and would also lessen competition.
 
SoftDux-Rudi said:
VW won't go bust. Nor will it snowball. In two month's time everyone will have forgotten the whole deal.
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Not so sure about that. This thing doesn't seem like its going to die soon. e.g. VW recently announced that their internal investigation spotted some dodge results on the *petrol* side.
 
HavocXphere said:
eh no. Both on the going bust part and the "would be great" part. Germany won't let them go bust. And it won't be great because that'll leave a big gap in servicing cars and would also lessen competition.
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Suppose it depends if we're talking about VW or VW AG. Not sure if VW can fail in isolation.

Anyway, massive fines and a nice burn for VW would be great. Proceeds can go towards proper testing in future.
 
HavocXphere said:
Not so sure about that. This thing doesn't seem like its going to die soon. e.g. VW recently announced that their internal investigation spotted some dodge results on the *petrol* side.
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Not to mention consumer confidence has taken a dive...

Perhaps bringing them to their knees but having them eventually recover is best. Outright bust is extreme.
 
Budza said:
Suppose it depends if we're talking about VW or VW AG. Not sure if VW can fail in isolation.

Anyway, massive fines and a nice burn for VW would be great. Proceeds can go towards proper testing in future.
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ai bru. Don't know why you think this is a good thing. At a minimum it'll hurt SA economy and likely also hit consumers in the pocket.
 
SoftDux-Rudi said:
VW won't go bust. Nor will it snowball. In two month's time everyone will have forgotten the whole deal.
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It's been almost 2 months since the scandal broke; and it seems it is just getting bigger.

Yes, VW will not go broke (or will not be allowed to go broke by the government), but it is still breathtaking how such a global manufacturer cheated on such a massive scale.

I have had debates with people here how I believe the local tests of VW performance vehicles always seem to be higher than quoted manufacturers marks. Maybe the cheating was even greater here in SA?
 
The Big Diesel Lie Grows While The Trump Administration Rolls Coal - Jalopnik

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Who can forget Dieselgate, the headline-grabbing, reputation-destroying pollution scandal of 2015? In which Volkswagen AG, one of the planet’s largest carmakers, was exposed for installing defeat devices on up to 11 million of its diesels to trick regulators around the world into thinking these cars complied with emissions standards when in fact they didn’t come close, exceeding U.S. limits, for example, by 40 times or more.

Who can forget? Certainly not Volkswagen.

Settlements in the U.S., along with follow-on prosecutions around the world, saw the German company hit with over $34 billion in fines, payouts and provisions, the largest penalties levied against any carmaker, anywhere, ever.

Sending a shudder down many a multinational’s corporate spine, a few VW executives were even sent to prison.

In Germany, former CEO Martin Winterkorn was charged earlier this year with fraud, unfair competitive practices and breach of trust related to the diesel fakery; the 10 years he faces in der grosser haus is 10 years more than any automobile industry executive would ever have expected, exalted as they are in the Fatherland, no matter the infraction.

And just before August began, Munich prosecutors charged former Audi CEO Rupert Stadler with fraud and some additional offenses, claiming the one-time whiz kid—who’d already been held in confinement for witness tampering last year—with continuing to sell cars with the diesel cheat device even after the scam went public in 2015.

Other investigations are pending, too, with prosecutors exploring whether Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess, Chairman Hans Dieter Poetsch and Winterkorn failed to inform markets about the diesel imbroglio’s scope, gravity and downside risk, fast enough.

Turns out, however, Volkswagen and Friends were not alone in their soot-covered perfidy. As many industry insiders privately opined at the time, VW was merely the tip of the iceberg, even allowing for its diesel-stained subsidiaries, Audi and Porsche.
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Kind Of Blue

Indeed, the U.S. government under President Barack Obama suspected as much, with EPA, DOJ, FTC, and the SEC opening criminal investigations into other well-known purveyors of diesel cars.

Automakers like Volkswagen, Mercedes, BMW, Fiat Chrysler, General Motors and Ford also marketed cars that combusted the extra-stinky fuel by touting environmental benefits they knew to be specious.

As global concern over climate change began to mount earlier this century, the Germans came together to announce a new era of “clean” de-sulphured fuel and new turbo-diesel engines which they called “blue” or variations thereon—BlueTec was Mercedes’ tag, BlueMotion for VW and BluePerformance for BMW.

Blue, the colour of the exhaust-cleaning urea additive, “AdBlue,” that was big new thing about “new” diesel—was a good, fresh-sounding name for diesel technology, and represented a contrasting honest impulse for the companies. Because there was nothing “green” about them. Tellingly, diesel smoke is kind of blue.

Like Clean Coal, so-called Clean Diesel was an oxymoron, a brazen lie, even, but, oh yes, they went there, in a decade-plus green-washing campaign aimed directly at socially conscious buyers.

22b73a88920e47e8945dd28a83473fd2.jpg

People who claimed to care about the environment, just the sort of people Volkswagen wanted to cozy up to with their Jetta TDI wagons.

Think thoughtful media types and college professors, just the sort of outward facing folk they probably shouldn’t have pissed off by telling them something that was actually very bad for the environment was very good for it.

Off they’d go, feeling ripped off, to their jobs as the day editors at NPR’s Morning Edition or deputies on the Washington Post editorial page.

So of course VW got what it deserved and deserved what it got. The cost to the public of the fake news they peddled about diesel was high and foreseeable.

A study published in the scientific journal Nature concluded that 38,000 additional people will die prematurely each year from diesels’ emissions of vehicles known to be out of compliance, added to 70,000 people that would likely die each year from diesel exhaust even if the vehicles met the letter of the law.

While it is true, as advertised, that compared to gasoline engines, diesels emit less of the greenhouse gas CO2 and offer better fuel economy while also producing greater torque than gas engines of similar size, it’s also the case that they emit even more harmful pollutants, which everyone forgot to mention.

The particulate matter in diesel exhaust plus higher emissions of oxides of nitrogen (NOx) wreak havoc, potentially fatal, upon respiratory and cardio-vascular systems. They are linked to heart disease, stroke, asthma, emphysema, and various cancers.

But with the ascension of the Trump administration and the virtual suspension of media scrutiny of carmakers following VW’s very public whipping, few know today that the diesel scandal was far more pervasive and more consequential for the environment than was initially reported, and even more cynical.

Or that the Trump administration has slow-walked the government’s cases against the diesel polluters, seemingly content to let these likely prosecutions wither and die.
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Read the full article at the link below:

https://jalopnik.com/the-big-diesel-lie-grows-while-the-trump-administration-1837177598
 
While the VW fan club shrugs dieselgate off and car mag writes about how impressed they are by VW's 'engineering', imagine the lost sales by other manufacturers who could not go down the small diesel route - not because they did not have the ability to make engines (VW hardly a technical leader) but because they could not compete with a non-compliant system while being compliant.
 
Seoul to fine Volkswagen over 'illicit' emissions devices - M&G

South Korea said Tuesday it will issue fines and file criminal complaints against Volkswagen and Porsche for installing “illicit devices” that helped multiple diesel vehicles cheat pollution standards.

The environment ministry said over 10 000 vehicles sold in South Korea by Volkswagen and Porsche from May 2015 to January 2018 were fitted with the devices, resulting in 10 times more nitrogen oxide emissions than standard levels.

The certifications for eight models — including Audi A6, Volkswagen Touareg, and Porsche Cayenne — will be revoked and the carmakers will face an estimated fine of $9.5-million, the ministry said.
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“We plan to continue responding firmly to manipulation of gas emissions in future,” a ministry official told reporters.

The announcement comes just weeks after former Audi chief executive Rupert Stadler was charged in Germany with fraud and illegal advertising amid Volkwagen’s deepening emissions scandal that broke out four years ago.

The charges against Stadler are linked to over 434 000 Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche cars fitted with “defeat devices” to fool regulators’ emissions tests.

Such software, applied to diesel-fuelled cars, allows the vehicles to detect when they are being tested in a lab and squeeze output of harmful gases like nitrogen oxides far below actual levels released on the road.

A study released in March 2017 said that pollution from 2.6-million rigged Volkswagen cars sold in Germany would likely cause 1 200 premature deaths in Europe because of the excess emissions.

In Germany more than 410 000 customers are demanding compensation, as are investors.

mg.co.za

Seoul to fine Volkswagen over 'illicit' emissions devices - The Mail & Guardian

The charges are linked to over 434 000 Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche cars fitted with "defeat devices" to fool regulators' emissions tests
mg.co.za mg.co.za
 
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