Thread: VW caught by the Yanks for breaking emission laws

Originally Posted by joel0407

just jumping back in mid conversation here.

There has been discussion about how much VW knew about the cheat program. I think initially most of them denied knowledge and blamed a few engineers. I don't know if that has changed.

I commented somewhere pretty early that other would have surely known especially with the work some tuners do.

I just remembered something today. A good friend of mine has a petrol Tiguan which has the the same ECU as the diesels. He had a performance tune programmed to his ECU by ARP. The tuner was able to load multiple engine maps, I just can't remember how he changed program. This was at least 5 years ago so it's been pretty common knowledge there was the ability to have different tunes but I guess the tuners just never knew why they were there.

Happy Days

I haven't read this in a while, but I would be pretty safe in saying , an ECU with the capacity to hold 2 (or more in your experience) states of tune and the ability to understand when its being tested and implement the "clean" running program would cost more than an ECU with room only for 1 running program that sets a lower level emissions down low but increases when accelerator fully flattened.
The approval for this more expensive ECU would be well out of the engineers hands and signed off upon much further up the tree. For a simple example lets say the twin program ECU costs $30 EU each, take this over the 11million vehicles equipped with it and that's a $330 million euro decision. Do many engineers you know order on that scale without senior approval?

There have been a few articles from Germany where Bosch reportedly told VW only to use the second tune/map in prototypes as it would be illegal, as well as a report that one of VW's own engineers reported issues but was ignored/hushed up. Now maybe Bosch are going to play the "we didn't know game" and claim they thought it was just a VW mistake that let them sell 11million of a more expensive unit that did nothing illegal. But when some articles are saying the programing was installed at the Bosch factory it could get interesting.
That is the difference between say a mazda or BMW that may put out 3-5 times when pushed harder in the real world but who do not have a separate program purposefully designed to beat the emissions testing like the VW while the real world program puts out 35-40 times the limit.

Originally Posted by isuzurover

As Slunnie says, Australia is way behind Europe/US, so I doubt the so called "cheat" software made the cars noncompliant with our laws.

Here we go - a non-issue in Aus.

It seems the issues were based in the US and their push to expand into that market.

No real changes for anything in Australia.

Volkswagen Australia confirms no local models exceed claimed CO2 emissions

That article is talking about CO2 emissions. The original problem was NOx emissions. I think someone, probably the paper, is either getting confused or being deliberately confusing. The comments pick this up.

But NOx emissions were never an issue in Australia. What will be an issue in Australia, and it will be interesting to see how the courts treat it, is the impact of the damage to VW's reputation as reflected in owner's resale value.

John

Originally Posted by frantic

I haven't read this in a while, but I would be pretty safe in saying , an ECU with the capacity to hold 2 (or more in your experience) states of tune and the ability to understand when its being tested and implement the "clean" running program would cost more than an ECU with room only for 1 running program that sets a lower level emissions down low but increases when accelerator fully flattened.
The approval for this more expensive ECU would be well out of the engineers hands and signed off upon much further up the tree. For a simple example lets say the twin program ECU costs $30 EU each, take this over the 11million vehicles equipped with it and that's a $330 million euro decision. Do many engineers you know order on that scale without senior approval?

There have been a few articles from Germany where Bosch reportedly told VW only to use the second tune/map in prototypes as it would be illegal, as well as a report that one of VW's own engineers reported issues but was ignored/hushed up. Now maybe Bosch are going to play the "we didn't know game" and claim they thought it was just a VW mistake that let them sell 11million of a more expensive unit that did nothing illegal. But when some articles are saying the programing was installed at the Bosch factory it could get interesting.
That is the difference between say a mazda or BMW that may put out 3-5 times when pushed harder in the real world but who do not have a separate program purposefully designed to beat the emissions testing like the VW while the real world program puts out 35-40 times the limit.

In real world testing VAG vehicles were the cleanest by a large margin,as I've already posted,if VAG had to cheat and their vehicles are the cleanest,how are the likes of Mazda getting through?. Pat

Originally Posted by PAT303

In real world testing VAG vehicles were the cleanest by a large margin,as I've already posted,if VAG had to cheat and their vehicles are the cleanest,how are the likes of Mazda getting through?. Pat

Umm, you've made this claim, but no evidence?
The original uni study tested vw and bmw, the vw exceeded the U.S. levels of Nox by 35 times , the bmw was only 3 at worst.
Of course if you could provide a link to a comparison study of NOx emiissions between a vw golf tdi and a tdi Mazda to the eu or us levels it would clarify what your saying?

Im keen to see some stats too. I have seen plenty of smoky Euro diesels but no Mazdas...

Cheers

I haven't seen any references to smoky Japanese or Korean diesels but I'd be interested in the results of any valid comparisons.

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Mazda Is a Ford brand. It's interesting that no investigation into U.S brands has surfaced. I'm no apologist for VW but unless all manufacturers are scrutinised to the same degree, the stoning of VW is a bit pointless.