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I previously owned a VW, but swore on my life that I'd never buy another one after the emissions cheating scandal. There are plenty of reasons why a VW likely w

• milkytron 6y ago
  Same boat here, I had a VW and sold it about a year and half ago. I will not be buying one again, they've lost me. But also, I don't really appreciate what any of the car manufacturers have been doing (location tracking, internet connectivity, subscription services, etc). Since I sold the VW, I haven't bought a car, and am currently without a car. I don't plan on buying one anytime in the near future.
  • selimthegrim 6y ago
    Me too, only owned a used old Toyota (pre ABS and OBDII) since and right now nothing. The VW I leased was a 2014 so I just managed to miss out on the era of rearview cameras though
    • anticristi 6y ago
      D00d, pre ABS and OBD II? My 13-years-old car feels state-of-the-art! :))
    • olyjohn 6y ago
      Aftermarket rearview cameras are dirt cheap if you really want one. Tons of kits less than $100.
    • drno123 6y ago
      You are aware that the old Toyota has higher emissions of greenhouse gases than VW which cheated on emission tests?
      • kbenson 6y ago
        It might generate higher emissions, but whether using it for another year or two generated more emissions overall, I think it's a bit trickier to know if it was worse overall. Enough VW's not sold mean VW's not built, and producing the car is a large amount of the car's expected lifetime CO2 footprint (I've seen from 1/5th to 1/3rd). If they were just delaying a less polluting vehicle purchase, a delay is a net negative, but since now they are driving nothing, that means it's actually possible the older vehicle was the better choice, especially since pollution from cars if very front-loaded (if we assume a new car that was purchased would be unused or very lightly used, since they are able to go without a car now).
        • reddog 6y ago
          Plus if you trade in one functional old car for a newer model with better emmissions, that perfectly good car is not magically lifted into automobile heaven never to emit again. It will be bought on the used market by someone else can't afford a new car (much less a $70K Tesla) and continue to emit whatever it emits today.
    • andrepd 6y ago
      What's wrong with ABS and OBD2?
      • selimthegrim 6y ago
        Nothing, I was (am) just poor.
  • AdamN 6y ago
    I believe Mazda was the last without phone home functionality but I that's over as of 2020.
    • core-questions 6y ago
      Mazda has also said they will be decreasing the importance of an infotainment screen and focusing on having quality switchgear. People who actually _enjoy driving_ like these kinds of touches; in general, in the segments Mazda competes in, they have some of the most fun offerings available. For people who consider a car to be a status symbol that transports them from place to place, it's not the ideal choice, but I'm glad there's some variety. Otherwise, we'll all just be driving electric jellybeans with an iPad awkwardly bolted to the dashboard.
  • davedx 6y ago
    We sold our VW and bought a Model 3. We had a serious look at VW’s EV lineup for my wife’s next car though. All manufacturers with a genuine EV programme have my support.
    • lmedinas 6y ago
      the VW ID4 is a great family car, imo its worth the wait.
      • Apofis 6y ago
        Not particularly striking, however.
        • reader_mode 6y ago
          I'd say the interior looks like someone stuck the cheapest sale parts at a surplus store but I haven't seen the car live. Having tested latest VW ICE cars when buying a new car a while ago I would be shocked if it's anything but cheap plastics all over the place inside.
      • neuronic 6y ago
        Europe here. I have been driving an ID3 nearly every day since a month or so (don't own it) and I absolutely adore the car. It's both simple and full-fledged at the same time. Voice-control is hot garbage but other than that it's fine. Disclaimer: I never drove a Tesla Model 3 before, but a few other EVs like the BMW i3. The VW ID3 feels like a genuine high quality car - as if the Golf simply reached a new era. BMW's i3 always felt like a weird toy and the Renault Zoes I drove where just an electric replacement for Smarts which are now electric too. I can see myself sitting in an ID3 for a longer trip with a nice charging pause. I would never even dare take a Zoe on the Autobahn or an i3 aside from a handful of kilometers. ID3? No issues here.
        • Sebb767 6y ago
          > ID3? No issues here. Can you actually use it on the Autobahn like a "normal" car, i.e. drive over 130 km/h with AC or heating, while still getting reasonable range? One of my major gripes with EV was always that the range on paper is good, but only if you drive like a truck speed-wise and turn off every comfort - which is honestly not what I want to do when investing in an (usually) pretty expensive car. Would be pretty awesome if VW managed to get that right.
• snemvalts 6y ago
  Are you aware of the fact that most companies cheated with emissions? Volkswagen was just a scapegoat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal#/media/File:Nitrogen_oxide_on-road_emissions_by_manufacturer_and_capacity.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal#/medi...
  • jtreminio 6y ago
    > I later learned that the more accurate story is that they bore the brunt of media attention for something that nearly every auto manufacturer was later found to be doing
    • failwhaleshark 6y ago
      News reporters are like parrots. They don't really know anything but mimic whatever they hear.
  • failwhaleshark 6y ago
    They were the first discovered by ICCT, and the media latched onto that. They should've waited to release their findings because their subsequent test results went widely unnoticed.
  • 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
    > What they did was absolutely reprehensible, but I later learned that the more accurate story is that they bore the brunt of media attention for something that nearly every auto manufacturer was later found to be doing - > That doesn't make it any less wrong, but it does put them back on par with just about every other auto manufacturer in my mind. And it does seem (as others have cited) like there was some genuine change that followed. Thanks for bringing that to our attention, but I think there’s a slight chance they might be aware already.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • knz_ 6y ago
    Even worse is now that every diesel car and truck comes with extremely unreliable and expensive to keep operational DPFs in place of the defeat devices. Now people who live in areas that do emissions testing are forced to use less efficient vehicles, and people who don't are just removing the DPFs (rather than paying thousands of dollars every few months in repairs) and putting out more emissions than defeat device era vehicles. A lot of ignorance surrounds this subject, and blind environmentalism has directly lead to a worse outcome than the previous status quo.
• tejohnso 6y ago
  > they bore the brunt of media attention for something that nearly every auto manufacturer was later found to be doing I find the same happens with performance enhancing drugs in sports. Everyone in the game knows that everyone is doing it. But someone gets caught, and people go full offense on them as though they're pure evil. Ben Johnson and later Lance Armstrong come to mind.
  • soperj 6y ago
    Lance Armstrong deserved it though.
    • fastball 6y ago
      Why? Everyone else was doping.
      • jdeibele 6y ago
        Because Lance Armstrong threatened to ruin (and came close in a couple of cases) the lives of anyone who looked like they might expose him. The doping is one thing. The effort to cover it up was something else again.
  • sangnoir 6y ago
    But wasn't the cycling top 10 basically decimated by the PED scandal? I think only 1 (or a couple of) cyclist(s) remained unscathed in the top 10 rankings. I'm going on memory, but they really gave the appearance of cleaning house, to an outsider like me. Had regulators gone after 4 or 5 manufacturers, including home-team companies, it would have been much better, and would appear less like Americans piling onto out a German manufacturing bellwether.
• aidenn0 6y ago
  My dad used to joke that if you wanted sneakers that were not made by child labor, your best bet was whichever manufacturer last got into trouble for it because of all the extra scrutiny. That this level of fatalism about immoral acts exists is a failure of society as a whole. I suspect that all of those who got rich either knowingly or being willfully ignorant about emissions cheating walked away completely unpunished. Maybe less rich than if they hadn't gotten caught, but still richer than if they hadn't cheated in the first place.
  • agumonkey 6y ago
    we decouple too much, every company is trying to survive the market and will always cut corners even though in the end no one ever asked for children to make shoes.. it was just global fear, frustration and risk that made everybody put pressure in the wrong direction.
    • 310260 6y ago
      How do you mean "survive the market"? Survive as in answer to shareholders with higher profits or succumb to consumer demand for cheaper shoes? In reality it's the former and the latter is stoked through other means.
  • failwhaleshark 6y ago
    I heard old Nike Jordans are unwearable because the soles crumble with age. Is that the case?
  • lumost 6y ago
    it's almost impossible to effectively regulate externalities in a global economy. Local regulators are not inclined to care about products sold overseas and all products compete with the lowest common regulatory framework. All it takes for child labor to enter into the supply chain is one bad regulator and a couple levels of outsourcing. The final "complete" product becomes nearly impossible to audit.
    • andrepd 6y ago
• clajiness 6y ago
  Exactly. Most other manufacturers were/are cheating as well. I've owned a few recent VWs and have found they're fine vehicles. The current gen Tiguan was underpowered, but my MK7 GTI and MK7.5 Golf R are amazing cars. I have a feeling I'll be driving the R for a long time.
  • kevinherron 6y ago
    I had a MK6 GTI and I loved it. Once VW has worked the kinks out of their electric platform I'll definitely take a look at them again.
    • madengr 6y ago
      I had a Corrado, which was sold to make room for a minivan. Thankfully the minivan days are behind me and now I have a used Nissan Leaf.
• arbitrage 6y ago
  > they bore the brunt of media attention for something that nearly every auto manufacturer was later found to be doing Maybe a better answer would be holding ALL of the automakers to task like we felt needed to be done with VW, instead of giving all of the parasitic capitalists a free pass to do it all over again.
  • tertius 6y ago
    How has that not been done?
• Shivetya 6y ago
  my second favorite car was my TDI Beetle Convertible (2013) and I would be more than willing to line up to buy a BEV version of the same. The closest it appears I will get is an Audi TT which may be the first mass production convertible to be available; the Tesla Roadster of past doesn't count. Their current BEV platform is a good first shot, I am disappointed in the lack of front trunk but I expect they will eventually go that way. The real issue this platform suffers from but should be a software fix is that they don't support auto negotiation with charging stations. Even Ford is able to do so with Electrify America yet VW who backed it cannot. As for the name change, its fitting provided they quickly move to an all electric fleet. There are some nice variations of the ID.* platform coming and the .Buzz is the neatest of them all in my book. By quickly I mean get there five years before everyone else.
• Fern_Blossom 6y ago
  >What they did was absolutely reprehensible, Okay, this is a bit much. I know you came to realize all the car companies were doing it, so relatively speaking, it evens out when it comes to image. But this concept of hating a company over false marketing, it's a "and cows moo" moment. All big companies lie about their performances and benefits. Every. Single. One. Who would have guessed people would lie to make money... what a revelation. It's extremely naïve to feel hurt by a company trying to gain the edge over another by lying. That's some weird identity tying consumerism right there. It was already an old joke when George Carlin did his stand up bit on marketing terms bs and that was some 20 years ago. It's time to grow up. No company is immune from this attitude either. Tech is fraught with it too. WeWork, Theranos are the nice examples. But remember, before it became publicly okay to rag on them, there were folks pointing out the bullshit. Folks who weren't believed because they were so negative about "wanting to change the world". Any time a company tries to play the, "We're making the world a better place" card, whether environmental, social, whatever, it's safe to assume bullshit is afoot. Plays out all the time.
  • TeMPOraL 6y ago
    How about we stop accepting this status quo? People will lie to make money, but we don't have to make it a socially acceptable practice. In fact, to make money, people just do whatever makes money. If they lie to make money, it means lying is making them money. If we could raise the costs of lying, for example by being much more eager to punish deceptive advertising with high fines, people would lie less.
    • Fern_Blossom 6y ago
      Humans have been lying for personal gain for only a short amount of time. I guess yea, we should all just decide that lying is bad. That's a novel idea.
      • TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Humans have been lying for as long as they've been human, but they've also shunned this behavior for just as long. It's destructive to both individuals and communities.
• takinola 6y ago
  When you are in an environment where all your other competitors are cheating, I used to think you had only two options - join in or quit. Now, it occurs to me that there is a third - blow the whistle. If VW, or any other manufacturer, had made a quick call to the authorities and told them exactly what to look for, they would have dealt a huge blow to their competitors and maybe even done a victory lap along the way.
  • TeMPOraL 6y ago
    ... and make themselves the enemy of the entire industry. That's the reason almost nobody ever blows the whistle: the prisoner's dilemma variant here is the iterated one, and there are more than two players. If you defect, you get blacklisted. It doesn't matter if you're an individual abused by an employer, or a big company that, for a brief moment, grew some conscience. The only time when blowing a whistle makes sense, from a self-preservation standpoint, is when you have a backup plan for what to do when the whistle gets ignored, but everyone knows who blew it. The corollary to that is, to allow for whistleblowing to be an option, the defector needs to be protected, and this must be public knowledge. If people have any perception of personal risk here, most will stay silent.
    • DSingularity 6y ago
      You are letting them off too easy. It’s probably a game of stag hunting. I don’t think this blacklisting applies either. You are ignoring the fact that whistleblowers can operate anonymously. These companies chose to then a blind eye on themselves and each other.
      • TeMPOraL 6y ago
        I'm not saying they're doing the right thing - just that the game theory is what it is. I'm trying to give an explanation, not an excuse. Anonymous only works in a small spectrum of possible whistle blowing - where the issue and the players are large enough to matter, but small enough that it won't be trivial to guess who the anonymous tip came from.
• josefresco 6y ago
  > but it does put them back on par with just about every other auto manufacturer in my mind I'm not buying this. Edit: I stand (mostly) corrected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal
• macintux 6y ago
  Other manufacturers were exposing monkeys to diesel emissions? Gassing primates is a pretty bad look for any company, especially VW.
  • Rebelgecko 6y ago
    Doesn't every car manufacturer (except maybe Tesla) expose primates (humans) to vehicle emissions?
    • lotsofpulp 6y ago
      Even Tesla if you include particulate emissions from tires.
• anticristi 6y ago
  I'm confused. My understanding is that all cars showed discrepancies between in-lab and on-road tests, due to overoptimizing the ECU for lab conditions. However, AFAIU, only VW had an "if in_lab: reduce_polution()" line in their ECU. It could be that the "final result" was the same, but the intentionality behind it was waaay stronger for VW.
  • mywittyname 6y ago
    Well, all of the companies using Bosch EDC 16 & 17 control systems were doing effectively the same thing. My understanding is that Bosch includes facilities for detecting dyno use "for testing purposes" and that manufactures were using these flags in production cars. VW was apparently a lot more brazen and aggressive in triggering it. While Mercedes and FCA were a big more judicious about it. I don't think BMW's case has made it through the court system yet though.
• thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
  I found it to be a bit of a Snowden moment. Of course they were doing it, why all the surprise? Balancing good performance in emissions tests with the power and brunt that consumers enjoy in the real world had already made turbochargers and variable valve timings widespread instead of simply increasing displacement. In fact there were multiple other scandals in the decades before where loopholes in emissions regulations were treated the same way as in accounting or racing. I believe regulators were complicit by using ineffectual metrics like NEDC - no car buyer really expects to reach the quoted performance.
• Krasnol 6y ago
  I always owned Toyotas and Nissans but when I got together with my SO, I sold my last Toyota (for a spectacular price even though it had quite a lot km) and we kept her VW. Afterwards we bought another one. The sheer amount of issues those cars had was astonishing. From bad electronics to just terrible manufacturing (water running down somewhere along the doors and causing mold inside for example) really cured me from VW and German cars altogether. We sold the VW when that emission thing came up and it looked like we might not be able to drive in our city with it anymore (Germany). Now we own a Hyundai Ioniq and it's great. I can even flash the firmware or update maps myself. The amount of electronic stuff that came inclusive is something you can only dream of with German manufacturers. I'm never going back from Japanese/Korean cars again.
• dghughes 6y ago
  >...they bore the brunt of media attention for something that nearly every auto manufacturer was later found to be doing... Car manufacturers any company really tries to get away with whatever they can until until caught. Here in Canada the latest news is Honda vehicles without any heat. People are driving in -20C or lower with no heater. It's the terribly outdated laws we have in Canada some laws haven't been updated for 60 years. Car makers know this and here in Canada car buyers are often ignored or strung along for months. Hyundai implemented a warning light to let you know if your engine lost all its oil and was about to erupt in flames. In other countries Hyundai had to replace the engine free of charge. Here in Canada we get "Hey your engine's gonna blow. Sorry" https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/honda-crv-civic-heater-1.5960676 https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/honda-crv-civic-heater-1.59... https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/marketplace-car-recall-investigation-1.5918348 https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/marketplace-car-recall-inve...
  • interestica 6y ago
    > Here in Canada we get "Hey your engine's gonna blow. Sorry" It seems that there isn't even the 'sorry' part. I wonder what the design is like: generic light? icon? a "do not check engine" light?
    • nickspacek 6y ago
      It's a blinking check engine light. Ours came on steady shortly after we got the firmware update applied when the recall went out and I hadn't been told what to watch for, so I pulled over immediately and called the dealer. Then they told me...
    • dghughes 6y ago
      The light should be a big dollar sign: $
• nrki 6y ago
  I also bought a VW Golf GTD and ended up having to sell it right as the scandal was heating up. Apart from the ~$10k I lost and the betrayal by VW executives, I was also upset that the car I bought to try and be a little bit eco-friendly was decidedly not. I received a paltry payout from the class-action lawsuit, which helped. However I will never buy a VW-group car again. It has also forever jaded me about the lack of punishments for corporate malfeasance.
  • neuronic 6y ago
    Are you also going to move your money from all major banks? Same pieces of thieving shits, same lack of accountability and punishments. USA only went after VW to put political pressure on Germany for their export surplus. It's literally the only reason why suddenly one of the hundreds of large corporations in the West needs to be held accountable for something while dozens of others - European and American - continue rampaging around.
    • nrki 6y ago
      Well, this was in Australia. The settlement payouts were orders of magnitude larger in the USA! I keep no money in major banks, not just because they are largely morally bankrupt though. :)
• qrbLPHiKpiux 6y ago
  Regardless of what you think they did was right or wrong, it was pretty clever.
  • handol 6y ago
    What's clever about it? They cheated, got caught, got fined $20 billion dollars, and spend some time in prison. It sounds pretty dumb to me.
  • hef19898 6y ago
    Nah, they very just too cheap to install large enough AdBlue tanks and too greedy to allow people fill the small tanks up themselves. Or they were unable to come up with engines meeting emission standards.
• robomartin 6y ago
  We've owned three VW's including a diesel. I am not going to condemn an entire group of people (they employ over 600K people) for the acts of a few. Particularly when authorities have dealt with the situation. This is no different from forming opinions about a population, social, ethnic or religious group based on the actions of a very small percentage of people belonging to said group. I think it's wrong in all cases. Even if 100 people were involved (I think it was a LOT less than that), this would represent 0.02% of the "population" of VW. How is it, in any way, fair, to condemn them all for the sins of a group that has already met their deserved legal consequences? Let's say the entire world stops buying VW because of this and over 600K people lose their jobs. How is that a morally and ethically supportable position? Of course, everyone is free to reach their own conclusions. I would rather buy an electric vehicle from any company other than Tesla and, VW will certainly be a candidate. No, I don't hate Tesla, I want to support electrification of our transportation system. That can only happen if other companies earn our business. As more competition surfaces we'll have better and better options. Tesla might still win my business. I just want to see what the top ten auto manufacturers have to offer first.
• shrimpx 6y ago
  I bought two VWs after the cheating scandal. My impression is that because of the cheating scandal, the carefulness and quality per dollar is very high. I did a bunch of research when purchasing, and quantitatively, features and comfort per dollar have also been higher with VW than other brands. It's been a "buy the dip" situation and I don't care about brand loyalty. In fact, the years of scrutiny VW has faced due to the cheating scandal increases my confidence in the brand relative to others. And, like you said, the other guys were cheating, too. Just not being as scrutinized.
• tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  One of the sub-aspects of it also seemed to be tradeoffs between kinds of emissions (where driving down one drove up the other). Weren't the cheating VWs extremely fuel efficient (and thus less CO2 emitting), at the cost of emitting something else nasty?
• hef19898 6y ago
  Well, there is a crucial, legal, difference between using illegal devices (VW) and using edge cases and loop holes (everybody else). The first one is illegal cheating, the other smart playing the rules. Both are not ok, so. But only one clearly illegal.
• kvgr 6y ago
  And it was basically founded by Hitler. Wrong