Well, the tragedy if VW is not that they needed to resort to cheating but that it was made possible by the management structure, a wrong strategy, political weakness and the authoritarian style with Winterkorn led his company (even high managers didn't dare contradict him and bad news resulted and shouting and carpeting people). In the meantime there have been some reports of what was going on behind the scenes (also what happened at the board meeting last Friday), which explains a bit why the whole mess happened and why it wasn't addressed earlier. I hope that the current editorial of DER SPIEGEL will be available in English next week, then I will paste it here. It's titled "The suicide".
I have a cousin who works at VW as an engineer and the hardest part for him is to accept that a company like his, absolutely obsessed with engineering and technology, had such a huge slip-up. So I don't think they cheated in another way. After all, it has a reason the price of a VW is usually a bit higher than of its direct competitors. Other car makers might have a better record in reliability but it's because they simply went for the simpler solutions. The Toyota Prius, for instance, is from a technical standpoint a very simple solution. For instance the top speed is limited due to certain technical necessities, not because Toyota doesn't believe in speed...
Anyway, I am digressing. As I said: I can understand the disappointment and the mistrust but I can't understand the sometimes hysterical reactions. The issue here was what can be considered a quick and cheap fix, a software delivered by Bosch (who already warned VW in 2007 about using it illegally), and not a construction or design fault. What keeps me amazed a bit is how long it took to find out the manipulations. It took how long? 8 years? 8 years, when every engineer in the business must have been able to tell that something couldn't be physically right there...
There were a *lot* of people in the US wondering how VW managed to meet the smog regs without using DEF in their diesels. Thing is, they were running the EPA test cycle on their examples of the VW products in question so they were getting the same results. Eventually, VW would likely have been caught out by the US's growing fleets of roadside sniffers.
Also, you are in denial. "I don't think they cheated" is in direct opposition to the fact that they did, in fact,
admit that they cheated on the EPA test cycle. Let's call it exactly what it is - not a slip up, not an error. It was a deliberate lie, it was deliberate, intentional, purposeful cheating.
Your "it was just software" claim can be disproven by the fact that the two VW software updates prior to the EPA dropping the hammer on VW didn't solve it, the addition of urea injection didn't resolve it, and experts from the real diesel tech leaders (like Cummins, not VW) are saying that no, they're not likely going to be resolving their problems with a software patch - not and be able to maintain their power and fuel economy numbers at anything like their current outputs.
Unless of course the cheating happened everywhere else, too, and the others were just lucky and wise not to push the diesel in America so much.
I repeat - BMW's USDM diesels have already been cleared by the same people (ICCT and WVU) that found the VW cheating. It's not so much that other manufacturers "didn't push diesel, didn't get caught" in the US because they had millions of dollars in incentives to bring 'clean diesel' to the US (see: Cash For Clunkers and CAFE, among other programs) so much as they paid out and complied with the law here because there are
dire consequences if you don't. The incentives to bring clean diesel vehicles out in the US were such that even goddamn General Freaking Motors, the same people that poisoned the diesel car well in the 1980s with their diesel-converted ex-gasser V8 engines, came out of decades long aversion to diesel cars, did the homework and brought out a diesel Cruze. (They still screwed it up, just not in the area of emissions.) VW apparently decided "rules are for the little guy" and arrogantly forged ahead with the cheating.
From others' reports, I'm sure everyone cheats in Europe; there doesn't seem to be much of any legal consequences to cheating there. The thing you don't seem to get is that in the US, emissions violations like the ones so overlooked in Europe *are* a big deal and are *not* swept under the rug.
Why is it a big deal? Here's why.
See that brown-gray pall lying over downtown Los Angeles? That's not clouds, that's not fog. That's toxic, choking photochemical
smog, directly caused by vehicle emissions. Especially the kind VW so nicely had their cars dump millions of extra tons of into the air. This is a
bad thing. We don't want more of it, we want less of it.
- - - Updated - - -
How A Little Lab In West Virginia Caught Volkswagen's Big Cheat (Bolding mine.)
Volkswagen was recently brought to its knees when scientists discovered the company had installed a device in its diesel-powered cars to fool emissions tests. Its stock price tanked, its reputation has been damaged and its CEO resigned on Wednesday.
So who made the discovery that sent the German car giant into a tailspin? A group of scientists at West Virginia University.
WVU research assistant professor Arvind Thiruvengadam and his colleagues test and experiment on cars and engines. He admits his is not the sexiest lab on campus, but he says he got superexcited when they won a grant in 2012 to test a few diesel cars.
"Our happiness was, 'Wow, we are going to be the first guys to test diesel cars on the road,' " he says. "And then after that, when we were getting the data we were like 'OK, we're going to write a lot of journal papers, and we'll be happy if three people read these journal papers.' That's our happiness at that point."
The International Council on Clean Transportation is a nonprofit that tries to provide independent science to government agencies that regulate the environment. It hired the university to do a standard emissions tests on diesel cars in the U.S. Volkswagen has been hyping diesel cars that are environmentally friendly and fuel efficient. Volkswagen had the boldest claims and the highest sales, but Thiruvengadam tested two VW cars and found that the claims of low emissions never panned out in the real world.
"We were never seeing those low emissions during most part of our drives on the interstate. That part of the emissions program was interesting," he says.
In none of their road tests could they get their two Volkswagen cars to meet the claims, even though a BMW they tested did fine. Very early on it was pretty clear to the scientists that something was wrong.
He says the team kept double-checking its procedures. "And then, I mean, we did so much testing that we couldn't repeatedly be doing the same mistake again and again," he says.
Volkswagen was cheating. That's what everyone in the project began to suspect but wouldn't dare to say out loud.
"It's the sort of thing you just don't go around accusing companies of doing unless you're absolutely sure," says John German, with the International Council on Clean Transportation ? the group that commissioned the test. German immediately suspected Volkswagen had done something not completely unheard of in the car business: install what's called a defeat device.
"The quick definition is something that tells the computer when you're on the official test cycle and when you're not. And when you're not, you change how the emission control system works," he says.
German says the deceit doesn't just stop with a programmer writing code.
"It's both writing the code, but you also need to do validation. So someone had to take these vehicles out, test them on the standard test cycle, make sure that the emission controls are supposed to be working when they're supposed to be working," he says.
German's group turned its data over to the Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board. He says things like this start with one little lie or cheat at a time.
"You take a little step, you don't get caught. So yeah, you take another little step," he says. "And then maybe you don't even realize how far over the line you are."
So does he feel vindicated?
"I think vindicated is the wrong word. I feel satisfaction that we have contributed to something that will have a major impact on public health," he says. "But vindication implies that we are out to get somebody. And we weren't. We had no idea that this was out there."
The question now for investigators and prosecutors from Korea to Germany to the U.S. is how many people at Volkswagen knew and how far up that knowledge went.
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