mmarshall

A President can veto their action. Plus, right now, Congress can't agree on the time of day.

EPA itself, however, approved that engine for sale in the U.S., devices or not. So, if VW was able to pull a fast on on them, they've at least partly got their own inspectors to blame. Plus, look at what EPA itself did to the Colorado River.....that, IMO, was far worse than anything VW came up with.


That would (probably) violate free-trade agreements with Germany and Mexico, as not only is VW a German-based corporation, but also a close NATO ally of ours as well. A number of American-market VWs are assembled in Mexican plants. If our government banned VW from doing business here, you can be sure the Germans would find a way to retaliate. And they would have much of the European Union behind them.

Aron9000

Plus that would probably put about 30,000 people or so out of a job who make the Passatt in Chattanooga TN, and those that supply parts for that car(and other VW's made in Mexico).

I always wondered how VW was able to sell small, affordable diesels that met emissions regulations without using Urea Injection, while nobody else bothered. It was sort of a niche market, but damn their diesel customers are loyal, and their diesel cars have proven to be very reliable and long lived, something I cannot say about their gassers.

Sulu

This is blaming it on the victim. It is incorrect to blame this problem on the EPA. Yes, the EPA did approve the vehicles for sale but based on good-faith on the part of the automaker.

1. The EPA does not test all vehicles. They allow the automakers to test their vehicles and then verifies the results, and only performs their own tests on a select few. The EPA may not have actually tested VW Diesel cars. We learned this through the after-the-test problems found with Hyundai/Kia and Ford.

2. Unless the cheating device is right out in the open, it is very difficult to find; in other words, you must go looking for a hidden cheating device to find it.

It is even more difficult to find bad software that has been embedded in a device that has other, legitimate, functions; if the cheating algorithms are embedded in the ECU software and hardware, you will not find it unless you suspect it is there, remove the ECU hardware, pull the executable code from the memory chip and then look through the code, line by line (perhaps after decompiling it so that instead of machine code, you are looking at a high-level coding language).

This is an awful lot of effort (not to mention cost) to go through with every model that the EPA certifies for sale. Remember that the EPA does not even test every model it certifies. It allows the automakers to test the vehicles they wish to sell, trusting that the automakers will do so in good faith.

Now that VW (and Hyundai/Kia and Ford) have been caught cheating, the EPA will be more diligent when conducting their after-the-test audits but it is still bound by the budget that Congress gives it. There is only so much that the EPA will be able to do.

The EPA is not to blame. VW is completely at fault and, surprisingly, they admitted to it.

And this is NOTHING like the individual who installs an after-market device to gain more performance. The individual is doing so openly because the device will be easy to find; VW hid its cheating device by embedding software code, likely in hardware that has a legitimate purpose. The individual is cheating for his own purpose, which, in the grand scheme of things, is minuscule; VW is cheating to gain an advantage for business purposes, which, in the grand scheme of things, is worth millions of dollars. Honda and Mazda have tried to do the Diesel business and have not been successful; for a small company like Mazda, it probably would have cost much, much less -- with much, much greater gains -- if they had tried to cheat like VW did.

S2000toIS350

MODERATOR EDIT

S2000toIS350, please exit this thread. No need for rude personal commentary.

mmarshall

I respect your opinion (and your response), but I did not say that the EPA was a victim. If that was the implication, then sorry if that was unclear. I only pointed out that they themselves approved the engine and its software for sale. How much of it was good faith on the manufacturer's part, and how much actual deficiencies in the EPA inspection, it's hard to say without knowing the details of the test. That probably goes beyond the scope of this thead.

I agree that the scope is not the same. I was just comparing the two in basic principle, not actual numbers. Of course it is a far greater scope on VW's part....also sorry if I was unclear on that earlier. I still feel that the principle is the same, though, regardless of numbers...whether it is cheating by one person or by a whole corporation.

From what I can tell, Mazda has always been a different company than VW (I have owned three new Mazdas myself over the years). Mazda seems more customer-centered and concerned about the quality of their vehicles...especially now that they are free from Ford's heavy-handed control.

spwolf

Two new things that we know:
- VW issues stop sell on 2015 TDI models in the USA
- EPA is refusing to certified 2016 TDI models.

Also - looking over German automotive media, they are all ignoring this for now... when Toyota recalls happened, they published stories about it, most with sensationalist headlines that made Toyota sales in Germany fall heavily and never recover properly.

kolessc400

Ya vw will have to go back to the drawing board on this one...

rxonmymind

Question is if corporations are people, who will be jailed? Like the banks nobody is liable? Company gets a smack down and nobody is charged?

TangoRed

An EPA contractor allowed that to happen. And honestly, despite that VW's wrongdoing here is undeniable.

spwolf

companies get fined usually, sometimes if they are foreign, they go to jail too :-)


But overall they get fined + they have to fix the issue on cars on road... now thats the real problem here, because they wont be able to fix the problem without installing very, very, very expensive SCR hardware, if thats even possible.

Assuming that they have to "fix" the issue, quite possibly they might have to buy-out these vehicles... nothing like this has ever happened so I have no idea what they have to do from law point of view.

kolessc400

Agreed that is uncalled for they need to fix this

BornDriver

The cheater and Liar caught has to be punished!

Vladi

This doesn't surprise me one bit. Actually I've read these reports 3 years ago from some independent institute how VW declared numbers don't add up to real world numbers.

There is no way to fix this issue without spending major euros. So most likely EPA wont even punish them but rather force them to spend additional money to fix this. Somehow I don't see EPA punishing them into extent of billions of dollars but they would be pushed to fix this however they can.

Toys4RJill

I have a sneaky suspicion that we are going to see a CR article in October saying that 40% of diesel owners in a survey are reporting smellier drives to work and polluted clouds over their homes at night. Of course CR will not let anyone know how many vehicles are in the study or how they actually came to their headline baiting findings.

spwolf

what does VW cheating emission laws have to do with CR?