“Above all, I am stunned that misconduct on such a scale was possible in the Volkswagen Group.” “But for years, VW cheated the system”.
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Bear with me as I repeat this somewhat fantastic factoid: The VW brand’s best sales year in the USA remains 1970 when Beetle & Co. hit 569,696. “The strong precedent for this case makes VW’s behaviour all the more surprising”.
After more than a year of stonewalling investigators, Volkswagen stunned two senior officials with the US Environmental Protective Agency and California’s environmental watchdog by admitting the automaker hacked its own cars to deceive USA regulators about how much their diesel engines pollute. They tend to be more durable and less prone to expensive early repairs.
A USA law firm said on Wednesday it was suing Volkswagen in a class action lawsuit.
I was surprised when Subaru passed VW division USA sales in 2013. “That looks like the easy piece in terms of putting a price on that”, he said.
Now that it has been outed that Volkswagen rigged diesel emissions tests on 11-million cars, an analysis by The Guardian suggests those vehicles may be responsible for almost one-million extra tons of air pollution annually. At the same meeting, representatives of the California Air Resources Board, a state agency that had been pushing VW hard, were also given a verbal notice of the deception, people with knowledge of the events said.
Lash Volkswagen of White Plains, N.Y., has been scrambling to accommodate affected Volkswagen owners by giving them loaner cars and picking up or dropping off their cars when it’s time for fix, said Tom Backer, general manager of the dealership in New York’s Westchester County. “The company could quite easily fix the problem”, said Mr. Cheyne. The delay between VW’s confession and the United States exposure of the scandal occurred as regulators prepared their response to the disclosure. It is also expected to affect the company’s global sales. VW uses the technology in one of the passenger cars concerned.
Though American and Asian makers were reluctant to return diesels to the USA market, German brands rushed over an assortment of models. That task in Europe goes mainly to Skoda and Audi.
Jo Barnes, also from UWE’s Air Quality Management Resource Center, said she hoped the scandal would focus minds on holding vehicle makers to account on environmental and health matters. Now, it will need to put enough cash on the hood of its cars to compete on price against Kia and Mitsubishi.
PERFORMANCE – Many diesel engines produce more torque than gasoline engines for a given displacement due to their higher compression ratio.
Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF) or AdBlue as it is called in Europe, is used in Selective Catalyst Reduction (SCR) as a way to reduce NOx emissions. Mayors there want to ban diesels from their cities because of the sooty particulates that can concentrate in local skies. NOx generically refers to mono-nitrogen oxides which are produced during combustion in a vehicle engine. The third diesel that Carder tested was a BMW X5, which matched its EPA test numbers in the real world. “So, it’s not like every Volkswagen out there has got a diesel motor in it. They sell an bad lot of cars with good gas mileage and great safety records”.
First, there’s no reason you can’t make a clean diesel. There must be hundreds of us in the U.S.
The expanding Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal now includes 11 million vehicles worldwide and threatens to destroy the credibility and value of a giant automaker that was already showing signs of instability. Over seven weeks in spring 2013, they drove the cars around Los Angeles and up the West Coast to Seattle, comparing them to a BMW X5 sport-utility with a diesel engine, said Daniel Carder, who led the WVU team.
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My bold prediction: We’ll see small, steady growth in sales of diesel-powered light-duty trucks such as the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Chevrolet Colorado/GMC Canyon.
