20 ms·
Volkswagen overtakes Toyota as the world's biggest carmaker
- jeffnv 10y agoI guess the whole 'cheating on the emissions tests' scandal didn't hurt them too bad. Here I thought it would destroy them. Silly me!
- bshimmin 10y agoI'm honestly not sure the public really cared about this - was anyone really surprised that this was happening? Most people I spoke to at the time seemed to be of the opinion that all the other manufacturers would be found out next. My friend bought a Golf the week after the scandal broke; I've bought a Golf GTI and a Polo in the last six months. They're just, well, pretty decent cars.
- vmarsy 10y agoWell in the US, Diesel isn't very popular so the impact won't be as big, but people in Europe at least are going to rethink about getting Diesel, and the governments there might reconsider the big tax break they give to diesel engine which are supposed to be cleaner than gasoline (making diesel cheaper at the pump than regular gasoline for consumers in Europe). Now we discovered that it's not only VW, but many car makers, so people aren't mad at VW as much as they were at the beginning of the Diesel-gate scandal. I would have boycotted VW for life if they were the only one doing it. I'm certainly boycotting their diesel engines.
- ams6110 10y agoI thought it was only the tyrannically strict California emissions tests that they cheated on? The cars met standard emissions limits, unless I'm mistaken. Was it even an issue in Europe? I thought their standards were even more relaxed.
- maxerickson 10y agoThey were fined by the EPA it wasn't just a California thing. Other governments have also taken some actions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal#Government_actions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal#G... For instance, in Canada there is a buyback/rebate program.
- joecool1029 10y agoYou are mistaken on US regulation. They did not meet NOX emission limits in the US. Europe has stricter fuel regulation, less strict emission regulation so it was probably cool there. Every TDI model over there is usually tuned for better performance. Oh well, my chariot of lies gets bought back in 2 days. Best investment ever in a car! Since I got my parents and 4 other friends to buy TDI's too when they saw the mileage I was getting, they are all ecstatic that the cars are getting bought back at well over market. Imma buy a Chevy Cruze Diesel once the standard hatchback gets released. Until then I'll find a pre-ban TDI or maybe some other beater to get me through the year. Added bonus: They tried to cheat me out of repairing the cheater emission system that failed just outside of the federal emissions warranty at 60k miles. I told them if they could program it to cheat, they could program it to overheat the DPF and cause it to crack and fail. Got a free replacement from that :) Added bonus #2: Since I also suggested my parents get one before the scandal broke, they tried to cheat them out of a AdBlue urea heater (piss tank heater) claiming it would not be repairable under federal emissions because it wasn't directly a part of the emissions. The company finally bowed to the massive number of complaints on tdiclub and related forums and covered that as well.
- scott_karana 10y agoSo... they screwed you and your family over three times, and you're a happy customer?
- joecool1029 10y agoDon't get me wrong, the above was annoying. But they were forced to pay for it and I came out ahead. There's no doubt in my mind that my 2012 model still polluted less than my former 1998 model. There were many times before the scandal broke that I considered removal of the DPF component to further improve efficiency. This would not have affected the NOX output, but would have reduced weight, fuel consumption, and cosmetic appeal. I wasn't keen on having the car blow raw diesel into the exhaust to regenerate the filter every few hundred miles. Would have averaged 50mpg instead of mid-40's... I put over 100k mi on the car and will have received approx $19k for it after the goodwill + buyback. Total cost of ownership for 4 years of about $6k excluding fuel which cost about half as much as a gasser (savings was anywhere between $3-6k). So yeah, pretty happy all things considered.
- stonogo 10y agoSince VW has stopped selling diesels in the US, and said they don't plan to reintroduce them, I'm not sure a boycott of that drivetrain is going to have much effect on them. Fortunately for Europe, most countries have been strengthening incentives not to buy diesel, since they have always contributed more to smog problems -- and the push away from diesel started long before VW got caught screwing the tests over.
- jasonmp85 10y ago> they're just, well, pretty decent Unlike their drivers, apparently.
- Brakenshire 10y agoMost people wouldn't be surprised the car was engineered to do well under the test, but having an algorithm which detects the test is occurring, and including an actual vial of urea which is used only under those conditions. That is above and beyond.
- Inception 10y agoI, for one, was very surprised this was happening. I don't know the first thing about calculating the emissions from my car...is there a noticeable smell or visible difference between cars that emit less vs more? Since I don't know anything about the topic, my default assumption is the car manufacturers are playing by the rules. Although, once the news broke I did think we'd be hearing about other manufacturers too.
- joecool1029 10y agoTBH, the old way of measuring emissions for diesel was to look out the back and see if there was a black cloud forming at idle and with slight throttle applied. Maybe California actually measured more, out east they didn't. It wasn't until model year 2007 that new regulation kicked in that made things a lot more strict. For this emission issue, there was increased NOX coming out the pipe. The NOX by itself isn't a huge issue... it's when it combined with volatile organic compounds (VOC's) from trees'n shit. Then magic happens under the sun and it combines with carbon to become smog (ozone), which blows into cities and gives the kids asthma. Some further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropospheric_ozone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropospheric_ozone EDIT: The old test handled particulate emissions... the DPF worked on these cars and no black smoke appeared until they programmed it to fail and crack (like mine!), you can't see NOX and I don't think it has a distinct smell...
- War_Machine 10y agoThey've only now, in 2017, started the return program for the vehicles mentioned in that lawsuit, so this statistic probably doesn't reflect those returns yet.
- joecool1029 10y agoSales don't factor in returns. If you sell a car and it's later returned, it still counts as a sale on the books. In terms of bookkeeping, VW knew how much it roughly had to write off as soon as April 2016.
- colechristensen 10y agoI blame the regulators just as much as VW for making shitty tests that gave too much incentive to cheat (which wouldn't have been difficult to detect or eliminate). I also own a Jetta which I've been very happy with for ~8 years. I don't get any sense that they were cheating on the quality of my car, and it seems justice is being done for the cheating on tests.
- wyager 10y agoThe EPA's restrictions were mostly arbitrary and too restrictive, in my opinion. The European rules are more than sufficient. I don't think there's much moral issue with breaking more-or-less pointless regulations.
- eganist 10y agoStrategic law-breaking pays off more often than not. In all seriousness, it shouldn't be much of a surprise given all the properties VW owns: Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche, Lamborghini, Bentley, SEAT, etc.
- seizethecheese 10y agoThe number in question is vehicles sold, so the only relevant brands here are Volkswagen and Audi, really. Toyota also has Lexus and Scion.
- nradov 10y agoNot any more, Scion was shut down as a failed experiment last year.
- tikhonj 10y agoThe cheaper European brands like Skoda and SEAT also likely have significant volume. Skoda, for example, sold over a million vehicles—a non-trivial 10% of VW group's total. Audi sold something like 1.8M, probably with better margins than Skoda, so it's certainly a more important brand, but SEAT and Skoda aren't trivial either. Just in terms of car sales, SEAT + Skoda ≈ Audi.
- ransom1538 10y agoOne thing learned from: Volkswagen,airbnb,google,amazon,uber,facebook is to CHEAT. Illegal hotels, copyright infringement, skipping sales tax, fake cabs,profiting on personal data.. and now, illegal emission testing.
- lumberjack 10y agoOnly works if you can raise billions really fast so that you can have the clout/means to get the legislators to bend the rules for you.
- gonzo41 10y agoThis is the logical conclusion when you allow corporations to be 'people' without the consequences of being a person. How do you send a company to jail? Its kinda of like that scene in fightclub where Edward Nortons character talks about the cost of doing a recall. The emissions scandal should have ended VW. Solution: Guillotine for corporate crime.
- ams6110 10y agoMany people look at emissions testing as an annoyance and I doubt that outside of environmental circles that very many people cared. And it was diesel car emissions -- a niche of the US market that's almost invisible anyway.
- CreRecombinase 10y agoIt isn't their job to care. The job of a citizen is to elect officials to act in his or her (the citizen's) best interest. Another way of looking at it: regulations are a noisy approximation of how much people "care".
- baddox 10y agoSo citizens that don't care are supposed to elect people that do. As if somehow, by adding an additional layer of separation and lack of liability, you're somehow going to get a better result. It's no surprise how often that fails.
- animex 10y agoI guess people got tired of driving boring cars with high resale value and luxury cars with missing front-ends. ;-)
- bcaulfield 10y agoYup. I drive a Japanese four-door sedan. It's twelve years old. 156k miles. Runs great. Paid for. But, yeah, I'm bored.
- pasbesoin 10y agoCan't help thinking/believing a fair number of people are going to encounter this headline in the media and think, "Too big to fail." As in, the fix is in, for such corporations. Which will play right into the current political climate.
- hkmurakami 10y agoFrankly this is a vanity metric anyways. Toyota's brake recall back around 2010 was directly related to its rapid global production expansion in an effort to become #1 in sales volume. Their QC and reliability/consistency across geographies suffered as a result. Iirc the CEO himself was quoted saying the company lost sight of what should really matter -- making products that fulfill the needs and desires of their customers. (sorry, it's been many years so I can't really pull up the source) When's the last time anyone's said "hey look at this #1 by sales volume car I just got"?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- kuschku 10y ago> Frankly this is a vanity metric anyways. Not really. The German government (through the federal government, the state of Lower Saxony, and the investment bank of the council of states) owns a large share of VW, and so a lot of this money goes directly back into the tax budget.
- Eric_WVGG 10y agoI was sort of wondering why VW wasn't fined to the extent of the value of the company minus $1, or some similar scheme to effectively nationalize the company. I guess that wouldn’t accomplish much…
- veli_joza 10y agoBeing in automotive embedded industry, I'm sad to report that Toyota's unintended acceleration doesn't have a single traceable cause. It's result of sloppiness and bad practices across the industry. I wish I could post some code here for your inspection. Suffice to say that what I've encountered is 90s-style C code with technical debt that noone wants to pay. Once I stumbled upon some code that was actually well structured and readable. Turned out it was open-source graphics stack, developed outside the automotive industry. Some modern practices are slowly being incorporated, but the industry is to inert to catch up. It's not only about developers, but there are also serious issues with tooling, determining project priorities, on-site and off-site communication, labor outsourcing and quality control.
- lazyjones 10y agoDo VW's numbers include their self-registrations, which make up 30% of their "sales"? Explanation: http://dailykanban.com/2014/05/that-car-filled-test-track-actually-was-empty-each-time-google-came-checking/ http://dailykanban.com/2014/05/that-car-filled-test-track-ac... (towards the end).
- NamTaf 10y agoFor all the criticism about their cheating of metrics and rules, I recently hired a VW Polo Diesel for a month to drive around Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and France and found it to be a comfortable, performant, nimble and all-round decent car. It handled doing 160 down the Autobahn quite comfortably without steering judder or anything I'd expected at higher speeds. It accelerated surprisingly well (not even considering it's a diesel!) all the way up to 100 making entry onto roads and highways a breeze, it had great steering which helped parking in cramped spots and did well for fuel efficiency - I was getting about 750km to a (45L, if I recall) tank in a combination of highway and town driving. All in all, I think I did something over 5000km in total and it did it everything I could have asked for. I was quite impressed by it. Compare that with the Vauxhall I had in England for a couple of days, which was utter horseshit and struggled to accelerate up a moderate incline at 80 in 4th gear (I had to put it down to 3rd, rev the hell out of it and even then it was losing speed up the hill) and I can only say good things about the VW Polo.
- sitkack 10y agoAll that acceleration is enabled by it violating the environmental laws of every western country.
- wyager 10y ago> violating the environmental laws of every western country. European nations aren't "western"?
- RhodesianHunter 10y agoThey violated European laws too, that's why they're recalling them over the next two years.
- DiabloD3 10y agoI think he was saying, essentially, "not only European nations, but America as well"
- developer2 10y ago
- wyager 10y agoI'm well over 200,000 miles on my '98 Land Cruiser and looking for a replacement, but frankly, Toyota's current offerings aren't looking too hot... The 200 series land cruiser is trending towards a suburb-mobile and is basically unsuited for offroad use, whereas the 70-, 80- and 100-series are awesome for offroading, even in stock off-the-lot configuration. The 4Runner is a decent offroad vehicle, but doesn't have the same legendary over-engineering as the Land Cruiser. I might just try to keep my 100-series going for another few hundred thousand miles.
- mulmen 10y agoI am disappointed in Toyota's current offerings. Take a look at what is on the lot today and what was on the lot in 1997. 20 years ago you could pick up a world-class Supra or a proper Land Cruiser or a Tacoma or a Camry or Corolla that could practically be the last commuter car you ever need. All of them stubbornly reliable. many of the cars Toyota had on the lot in 1997 still sell for close to their retail price! Today what do you get? I guess the Camry and Corolla are still good cars but I'm not convinced the reliability is still there. The Prius is "innovative" in some sense but it isn't the kind of vehicle the Supra and Land Cruiser were. There doesn't seem to be anything interesting or exciting on the lot from Toyota anymore.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- pshposh 10y agoWhat about the Toyota 86? 2-door, rear-wheel drive. Other than that I agree with you for the most part. edit: http://www.toyota.com/86/ http://www.toyota.com/86/
- mulmen 10y agoIt's a Subaru Impreza with a different body. It's a nice car but it isn't a Toyota. They also tried to market it in the US as a Scion until that experiment also failed.
- 10y ago
- p0larboy 10y agoI had a Volkswagen Scirocco. That car looks nice and had a reasonable price range. But that car was the stuff of nightmares. Just google "scirocco dsg gearbox problems". I simply cannot imagine why a huge car manufacturer could produce such a faulty car. Apparently, scirocco is not the only model to be affected by this.
- chrisper 10y ago> I simply cannot imagine why a huge car manufacturer could produce such a faulty car. Sadly, American Car companies create lots of faulty cars as well. Not sure why.
- rozap 10y agoBecause cars are hard to make?
- closeparen 10y agoIt might be a good idea to start hoarding Toyotas, if you are so inclined, before the tariff erases the savings on maintenance and repair.
- adventured 10y agoToyota makes an immense number of vehicles in the US, with American labor. They'll easily dodge most of the effect of any tariffs.
- forgetsusername 10y ago>Just google "scirocco dsg gearbox problems" Or Google "subaru head gasket issues", or "tesla drive unit failure". I don't think there's a manufacturer that can avoid having runs of faulty lines.
- dylanz 10y agoI'm on my second Tacoma (sold my first to move overseas) and it has been the most reliable vehicle I've ever owned. My only VW experience has been a 71 bug that I'd have to fix on the side of the road once a month, so I can't "really" speak to VW reliability :)
- samtho 10y agoJust to point out that this is purely anecdotal. If you bought the 71 bug in any other era except for the early 70s, you probably didn't buy it for exceptional reliability.
- brohoolio 10y agoSomething like half the sales are in China. They don't sell a diesel there. Across the rest of the world sales are way down. They would be way ahead of Toyota if they didn't cheat. The other thing to remember is that cars are engineered a few years out. It will be a while before they compromise quality to make up for the large fines. Cheating doesn't mean you win.
- matt4077 10y ago> It will be a while before they compromise quality to make up for the large fines. That's not how business works. Absent an existential threat, their calculus regarding the quality level required for optimising profit is not influenced by the fine.
- fusiongyro 10y agoThere's a local dealer who sells VWs and Mazdas. The Mazdas outsell VW 2:1, but they have 4x as many VW technicians. I had two VWs: a Jetta and a Passat. Both required an astonishing amount of maintenance compared to the Toyota Camry I had before. VW has really mastered the art of "this feels well-engineered" without actually being well-engineered. My current car is a Ford Flex and frankly I love it. It's not a perfect car but so far so good. It has the same solid feel as the VWs did. I hope it turns out to be more true. I wish the rest of Ford's cars felt as good as the Flex. Maybe they do, but I didn't want to try a Fiesta or a Taurus.
- Yhippa 10y agoI've had friends who have owned VW's and I've heard the same things about them and German cars in general. I purchased my first Mazda a few years ago and I'm shocked at how well-engineered it is, how easy it is to maintain it, and how much nicer the service experience is than it was for Honda and Acura.
- pasta 10y agoVWs are very unreliable. Every year they end up below avarage in reliability tests (Honda and Toyota always share the top). But I think people buy them because they look great. I owned multiple VWs but never will buy a VW again. And because my Mazda keeps on going I think I will be a Mazda owner for a long time to come.
- arethuza 10y agoNot my experience - we've had 5 VW group cars in the last 15 year or so (VW, Skoda, Audi) and not one of them has required anything other than regular servicing. Now when I had a BMW that was never out of the dealers.
- emptyfile 10y agoRemember reading comments 3 months ago on HN about how VW will be bankrupt in 15 years and Tesla will be the world's biggest car manufacturer.
- celerrimus 10y agoThis is very puzzling for me. You know, volkswagen as volkswagen, they will do anything to increase profit, but how it's possible that people buy those? Because it's not that thet they produced more cars, someone buy it. I can't understand how company having such long miserable history of cheating it's own customers (one sample, manufacturing defected TFSI engines they refuse to repair under warranty), and society as a whole (poisoned by deadly particles that shouldn't be emitted), still is commonly desired. I was searching for new in 2015, also considering VW, but they were overpriced, especially if you don't want basic version. After some research we decided to buy Toyota. They were maybe little delayed in terms of design and equipment, even slightly old-fashioned. But on the other hand they have long history of solid reliability. Of cource they have some bummers (like some d4-d engines), but at least Toyota always tried to fix them, even after warranty.
- d3ckard 10y ago>> They are were maybe little delayed in terms of design and equipment, even slightly old-fashioned. You answered yourself.
- celerrimus 10y ago>>> You answered yourself. True. But tought that more customers will choose more reliable cars, especially if future of VW after emission scandal was not so certain. Last year they updated most models, new RAV4, Avensis, Corolla are much more suited to current trends. Looks like new C-HR will be popular in it's segment, so interesting how stats will look this year.
- d3ckard 10y agoAsian cars, Japanese in particular, are generally less advanced. They do not use turbocharged gas engines, have less bells and whistles inside and have worse design for many European tastes. That's just it. Of course, there are exceptions - Mazda is considered to look pretty cool across whole model range. Still, for my use, I much prefer my 1.4 TSI than whatever I saw available in Asian cars. Volkswagen cheating was unacceptable and I'm pretty happy they got their asses handed to them over the issue. At the same time I'm aware that American diesel regulations are a way to protect your own brands, since Americans don't have the tech to make their own - you're more gas/hybrid/electric market.