Volkswagon Caught Cheating!

Cool, sign me up for a higher performing new VW

 

pretty crafty.

 

uncle adolf would be proud..

 

I was fucked regularly in the 80s by my VW Scirocco. If I had known it was little more than a faster rabbit, I might have bought the Subaru XT, an equally fucked set of wheels. But the Scirocco managed to bankrupt me in repairs anyway. The dealership always found shit that HAD to be done to maintain the warranty, but wasn't covered BY the warranty. And the car had trouble exactly 3 months from when it was driven off the trailer in front of me. The steering would bind when making a lower speed turn, like in a parking lot. Every time it happened it felt like I would lose steering and slide into a parked car. VW always acted like it was my imagination. I later learned that a misshapen steering rack can cause that exact symptom. I also had to work on a CV joint which was bigger than I expected and looked primitive with bearing balls that looked like Muscadines.

I ended up parking the car at the dealership and taking the 7 year hit on my credit. Eventually the rude army of Aryan collection agents faded away. Taking a menial job at a food cart helped. I also had 3 roommates, a 10-speed bike and could only afford 1 class per semester at the local 2nd tier college. Took 4 years to get my associate degree. But only a year and a half more full time to get my bachelors. I discovered that the only 100% sure way to avoid Identity Theft is to simply maintain a horrible credit rating. Sure, I had to live COD. But it kept me out of debt otherwise (I never paid VW).

This emissions thing is exactly the kind of corrupt BS I would expect from them. The fact it was coded into the firmware is especially egregious. It demonstrates the sort of crooks they are. Think about it. The code for this would have been less than 500 bytes, less than a preset channel memory. But it can't just be dumped into the mix. It has to be compiled so that it doesn't collide with other routines. That means nearly the whole software development group was involved. They love to harp on and on and on about "German Engineering" when it's all a hoax. Think about the oldest VW (other than beetles) or Audi you see just tooling around town. You see far more older Japanese cars, especially when gasoline nears $4 a gallon. But most Japanese cars are bad for big American backs.

 

i own a sweater that says this lol. I should dig that bad boy out

 

Is this BS or not, 18 billion in fines?

Im too lazy too google

 

^ I've done the research, and I could give you a definitive answer, but now I don't give enough of a shit to tell you.

 

Sorry, you lost me at research

tl; dr

 

Lol, anyway the $18B in fines and the story in general seems to be legit, at least in so far as there are multiple MSM sources that are reporting the same thing.

The wikipedia entry for VW references this and cites the NYT.

 

Im also too lazy to go find out how much capital VW has

But 18 billion seems a bit extreme, especially if we are talking emission

If it was some serious safety defect where a bunch of people getting killed, then hmmmm ok

Then again, maybe designed to knock em out of business and send a strong message to all other manufacturers so the rest dont try the same thing

 

i don't think fixing cars can fix a transportation policy that favors them.

i wouldn't put that kind of monkeyshines past any automaker of course. its probably only a role of the dice that it was vw who got caught at it.

emission standards are still only a band aid that cannot cure an auto-centric transportation policy.

 

Chevy got caught producing defective ignitions, that killed over a hundred people.....Got fined....
Volkswagen got caught producing cars that failed emissions....could get fined.....
A peanut manufacturer got caught distributing a product that had listeria in it.....faces life in prison.....

 

I prefer pre '74 cars without smog controls and catalytic converters anyway

 

i think i spend too much time on hipforums. i saw the thread title and was trying to figure out who volkswagon would have been having sex with.

 

They were porking the environment. That's the really sinister thing about this.

Their customers didn't know what was happening and seemed quite happy with the unusually good performance, so it will be difficult to see them denouncing VW. And that's what's also very insidious about this. It's a classic con, only the customers were unaware. And it's not like they HAD to know something was wrong when they were zipping along AND getting decent fuel mileage. They're consumers, they're supposed to be stupid. And they have been told for decades about that "superior German Engineering".

This con is one of the reasons the US is so tight on Chinese vehicles. So many are packed with cheats like this and worse, mechanical cheats as well. But every single car maker does their best to shave a dime from every car leaving the line. They cut so many corners that the radius appears to be smooth. There was a time when you had to wait a year to get a car because it had to be literally made for you. Of course you can still find cars in that market, imagine being able to call the guy who built your car to bitch about the gear shift knob coming off in your hand!

Once upon a time Rolls Royce's final quality control test for a car was to run for 8 hours at full throttle.

 

I sold the last of my cars in 2005, I had 4 at one time. I walk most of the time and when I really need a car or truck, I call for a rental. Jane, my wife, has not been able to abandon her wheels. In her case I semi-understand since she has to be able to respond quickly and lives can be at stake. So I can see exceptions. But you are right about the way transportation regulations and policies have allowed other transport system to wither and decay. I freakin HATE getting on a subway in most US cities. They're badly managed, run and secured.

What I don't get though is how so many people can sit in gridlocked traffic for so long without launching a national campaign to rework all of it. Being this far into the 21st century, well into the information age, we still have employers who insist on having employees congregate into a central location. A massive chain of sheer waste because employers have failed to modernize. This kind of economic stagnation is exactly the product of ignoring our social problems as well. We have allowed our machines to creep in and even dictate our lives. What really sucks about that is that the machines themselves are too stupid to actually initiate this. We did it to ourselves.

I'm learning to make soap next.

 

couldnt be any worse that what Thomas Midgley did..