Michael Horn, President and CEO of Volkswagen Group of America, didn’t mince words last night during Volkswagen’s launch of the 2016 Passat midsize sedan, according to Automotive News.
At the vehicle launch in Brooklyn on Monday night, the executive said, “Our company was dishonest with the EPA, and the California Air Resources Board and with all of you. And in my German words: We have totally screwed up. We must fix the cars to prevent this from ever happening again and we have to make this right. This kind of behavior is totally inconsistent with our qualities.”
Volkswagen has opened themselves up to $18 billion in fines in the United States alone. Additional fines could be levied if the group’s 3.0-liter V-6 diesel engine is also found not to comply with EPA emissions regulations.
And so goes VW’s plan for world domination. I wouldn’t be surprised if Akio Toyoda is savoring this moment.
You never know when karma will strike.
Possibly.
The schadenfreude must be tempting, what with VW’s crowing about how they were so brilliant as to a) utterly failed in America, and thusly not had any sales to speak of to lose in 2008, and b) not have any presence in Japan to be washed away by a tsunami.
VW was very lucky. What was galling was to see their executives trumpeting luck as brilliance. Personally, I’m enjoying watching this crow-eating contest.
One wonders why a company would want to hold the #1 title. All of the past three (GM, Toyota, now VW) have experienced almost instant scandals that brings shame and market share decline upon them. Maybe being Subaru or BMW is a good place to be in these cutthroat business.
Agreed. When I buy a car, I don’t care how large the mfr is, only that they can service it for years to come.
I don’t care who’s #1, but maybe shareholders do.
If they are going to replace Winterkorn, this is the sort of guy they should tap for the job. VW Corporate could use some people talking plainly, instead of continuing to dance around this issue. (Not to mention VW seems to persistently have zero clue whatsoever about the US market.)
When VW Corporate is still talking about “clarifying irregularities in the software”, this guy is simply stating “Yep; we screwed up, we are in big trouble, and we deserve it.”
OK, as a TDi owner, I’ll accept
a) a bumper to bumper warranty for 150k, or
b) a transferable (sellable) voucher for ANY VAG group product anywhere in the world for $5,000.00.
what we’ll get is:
Software that will gut the engine (I have learned too much about NOx in the last 48 hours), and…
VW will be fined, and a few execs sent from Wolfsburg HQ to a brake parts factory in Hungary for a while.
This makes me so upset I need to take my two stroke jetski out for a blast :)
Well played Speedlaw. As I type this, I can see my neighbor’s landscape service working. They have old Snapper mowers and old Echo blowers and line trimmers. The sweet smoky blue haze of 2 stroke oil hangs in the air.
Yep, speedlaw, you got ripped off…big time.
If you don’t want to suffer lower power and fuel economy, you’d be wise to keep your TDi far, far away from any VW dealer (for the rest of the car’s life).
Find an independent VW mechanic if you haven’t done so already.
Yup, and just spew spew spew away.
I actually thought I could balance my extreme mileage with less pollutants..oh well…it was a nice idea.
TheTruthaboutVAG.com
It’s wall to wall vag around here.
I thought we were all middle-aged men pretending to be 17-year-old girls?
Peak VAG?
Where’s Bertel?
He has a new gig – here’s the article he wrote yesterday:
http://dailykanban.com/2015/09/vws-diesel-shenanigans-bigger-headaches-yet-to-come/
One would have image of Germans – punctual, well organized, black-and-white sort of people. Yea, right. Just as corrupt as everyone else. Even though, punctual. German engineering, Das Auto, yawol…
I originally posted this in one of the other VAG threads (are there any other kind these days) but I thought it was worth repeating.
___________________________________________________
September 14, 2015
http://motrolix.com/2015/09/volkswagen-group-ranked-most-sutainable-automotive-company-in-recent-study/
“Sustainability investing group RobecoSAM AG has found Volkswagen Group to be the most sustainable automaker in the world in this year’s review of the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (DJSI). This year’s review analyzed the performance of 33 different automotive companies, with VW topping all of them with a total of 91 of 100 possible ratings points.
“This distinction is a great success for the entire team. It confirms that the Volkswagen Group is well on the way to establishing itself long term as the world’s most sustainable automaker,” said VW Group chairman Prof. Dr. Martin Winterkorn.
VW was awarded 93 points in the sector of economic sustainability, 91 for social sustainability and 89 for ecological sustainability. It also received full marks in the areas of codes of conduct, compliance and anti-corruption as well as innovation management, climate strategy and life cycle assessment. RobecoSAM also found VW to be the industry benchmark for supplier management and environmental reporting.”
Wow. What a difference a week makes.
How can you actually read articles like that!? So full of nonsense words and praise.
The only way to (potentially) fix the cars with NOx traps is to crank up the EGR system to absolute max via a software update, which will result in all the cars having their EGR systems plugged up with carbon / soot within 10,000 miles. But even that might not bring down NOx levels to acceptable, it might take a much larger NOx trap being installed, which will further sap performance. Or maybe an adBlue retrofit… what a headache.
If they decide to go the EGR “to the max” route, I can see owners taking their cars in for annual EGR reaming-outs.
I see an increasing market for Rawtek exhaust systems and DPF delete tunes. Which would totally go against what the EPA is trying to fix. But I can see it happening if the performance and economy take enough of a hit and people decide to keep their TDIs instead of trading them for a Honda. Nice that the VWoA guy admitted what we all know.
Who would voluntarily bring their car in for such a “fix”? The TDIs already out there are going to stay just the way they are. This will only affect future VW diesel sales, and by “affect” I mean “obliterate”.
Odds are, any state that follows CARB will expect this recall to be performed to meet their ongoing emissions testing, right?
On the other hand, if you live in a non-CARB state, you’ll probably be able to get a hell of a deal on a used TDI soon.
Not all states check for NOx during a diesel emissions test (my state only checks the opacity, or amount of soot/PM).
So no need to worry unnecessarily.
Good question, DeeDub, but given that these cars have to pass emissions and everyone’s wise to the game now, owners may not have a choice.
And they’re going to be SERIOUSLY pissed.
This is one for the books. I wonder how many thousands of graduate dissertations will be written on this example of VW’s corporate malfeasance.
Most of the time this sort of scandal is simply tedious. Fines, executive wrist-slaps, a fresh challenge for the marketing department. But the scale of this deception will make the who-knew-what-and-when game worthy of a Michael Lewis book. A LOT of people had to be in on this.
I’m an interested party. I bought a new 2015 GTI a month ago. Not affected by this particular calumny, but doesn’t do much for my confidence in the brand!
Institutional mendacity seems to extend down to the level of the VW sales force: I remarked on the Soundaktor, “a device which pushes synthetic engine noise into the cabin by vibrating the front windshield” according to one online description. (The noises it creates are almost as stupid as the word “Soundaktor.”) The salesman assured me that such a thing did not exist and that the engine noise was authentic. He needs to note the 46,800 hits that “Soundaktor” gets on Google.
The car is a pip to drive, though it was the first new car for which I’ve purchased an extended warranty. We’ll see how that gamble pays off. Based on the first 1600 miles I’m nevertheless delighted with my GTI.
I’m four months into a lease on a 2015 GTI, and feel like a dodged a couple of bullets. I’d be worried about resale value across the VW brand, frankly.
My first thought is just turn it in and thank your lucky stars its a lease not a buy, but if you like it offer them say 5K below the buyout because the brand is going to be radioactive for awhile (says the guy who is now slightly radioactive, quite a pun!).
I was thinking exactly the same thing. We’ll see how things look a couple of years hence. I’d offer them a buyout now, but given both the current news cycle and VW history, I’m planning on spending the entire three-year lease term making sure that my car actually runs the way it’s supposed to.
Yeah, just keep on spewing and figure out how to save yourself some dough.
Spewing what? The GTI isn’t part of this mess, other than sharing a body with a car that is.
Offering them 5K below buyout isn’t going to work. If you want it, your residual figure is the price. During the lease, the buyout is whatever is left on your lease plus the residual (plus tax). I’ve had three different buyout transactions with VW Credit. All worked pretty much the same. They’ll just send it to auction or put it on their used lot instead of giving you a discount.
Well aware that that’s the business deal. But that doesn’t mean I can’t hope that VW residuals will be so torched that I can buy out my GTI lease at a huge discount.
I would hope for that too. Just remember that VW Credit isn’t the easiest bunch of folks to work with. That’s who you’d have to buy the car from.
There a very good chance VW’s financial arm is going to take a bath on those leases. I don’t know sane dealers who touch VW, although I do know one insane one who does.
So disappointing. So glad I bought a Mazda instead. Next car will be a BMW instead of VW.
Maybe that’s the real problem with Mazda’s diesel engine that they haven’t brought to North America. Mazda couldn’t figure out how to properly cheat on the test.
Well Mazda has had problems with their diesel engine all on their own. However, you are right, it wasn’t going to meet emissions here without being a dog of epic proportions.
I interviewed for a job at VWofA corp hq in VA in 2010 before declining to continue in the process. I didn’t like the feel I got for the place – seems like I was vindicated.
Michael Horn: “We have totally screwed up.”
Says the man who’s almost certainly looking to jump ship.
Or move upward into the newly formed vaccuum above him.
I hear Cadillac has a job for him.
Like, totally.
Wow. What an about face from the previous boilerplate corporate non-apology of ‘mistakes were made’ and ‘were sorry that this happened’, et.al.
Micheal Horn is dissembling. A “screw up” implies a mistake. This was not a mistake. It was a deliberate crime.
“We slipped and fell onto a decision to implement a systematic program that used bespoke software to deceive regulators and hide the fact that our cars massively violate emissions requirements.”
+1 to both John and Astigmatism for reading through the propaganda and recognizing the crux of this biscuit.
mis·take mə-ˈstāk
1: to blunder in the choice of
A bad choice made deliberately can still be a mistake.
Of course it was a mistake. The mistake was getting caught red-handed.
Part of me thinks this was a pretty neat and snickery bit of passive stealth.
The rest of me is generating blood glucose which threatens me more than anything VW did.
Bad self! Stop it!
I’m with John…this wasn’t a mistake, it was a massive fraud.
I think they’re going to end up having to reimburse owners on this, in addition to whatever other legal penalties they’ll have to pay. The customers who bought these paid thousands of dollars extra for the diesel version, and they all got completely ripped off.
What a disaster.
This is going to be like Watergate. Remember Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon?
Ironically, he’s the one who gave us the EPA.
Possibly he was the last truly progressive president in the US. Or at least the last president for whom progressivism was worth being concerned about.
I know that European and US market cars differ, but am I understanding this right in that it’s just US market cars in which this software is installed? Do European market cars spew 40 TIMES more NOx???
Current reports are 11 million cars with the software worldwide, about 500k of those in the US. Previous reports (before last Friday) suggest that Euro-market cars from a variety of manufacturers have been over the limits in off-treadmill operation.
Wow! Ug-lee just begins to describe this.
The Diesel automobile in the U.S. is now dead.
I actually thought about buying one years ago, but the added complexity of Diesel engines in general effectively talked me out of a potential mistake.