VW Dieselgate - No More VW Diesel Vehicles In the US?

I bet Ross-Tech is seeing dollar signs right now because I’m sure that about 24 hours after the first car gets this MPG killing fix they’ll have figured out how to turn it off with VCDS. Should help them sell a bunch of cables and software licenses.

Or people will just get one of the other aftermarket tunes.

This brings up a good question. What happens when owners refuse to get the recall done because they don’t give a shit about NOx emissions and prefer getting better MPG and horsepower? This isn’t like a regular safety recall where there’s an increased chance X% of vehicles will have a part fail. Without this done 100% of the recalled cars don’t meet EPA regs. Can the government MANDATE that you get a recall done? My guess is if they can mandate you buy health insurance they can mandate just about anything.

Well, it’s already against the law to modify a car in such a way that it will increase emissions, it’s just a matter of enforcement.

They don’t force you to do safety recalls so who knows

Yeah, but in the legal world there’s a big difference between actively doing something (modding your car an increasing it’s emissions) and simply not doing something. Especially when doing that something (the recall) is going to hurt your MPG, likely the main reason you bought a TDI to begin with.

      • Updated - - -

Right, but like I said, a safety recall is a game of numbers. It’s a relatively small percentage that are likely to experience the issue the recall is based on. In this case it’s every single car 100% of the time. Well, I guess 99.99 percent of the time since the car will run clean when it’s on the smog test. :slight_smile:

I don’t know the answer, I just brought it up because it’s an interesting question.

if I end up buying one of these i would never bring it near a vw dealer just incase they try and pull some shit like that.

It’s definitely a good question. States with an inspection process could just fail a car if there is no proof\certification that the car was repaired. I imagine that’s what California will do. Otherwise they could not renew registrations on cars that haven’t been repaired, but I think that would have to all happen at the state level. I’m not sure what enforcement powers the EPA has at the consumer level.

      • Updated - - -

I’m also really interested in how whatever the final fix is, is going to affect the lifespan of the DPF.

That’d be a first, NOT having a recall done being a selling point lol.

This guy:

So let’s ban them. Let’s wipe the diesel-powered passenger car from the earth.

http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a26891/the-end-of-diesel/

It’s click bait, but you knew at least a few people would call for it after this news.

With the American attention span we will move onto another topic next week so while this seems like a big deal(And im sure VW will pay a bunch in fines) poof onto the next thing.

For me, the final nail in diesel’s coffin was my trip to Barcelona earlier this year to drive the new Miata. Few places on this still-green Earth are as lovely as Spain in the spring and as I hustled the little Mazda up and down the coastline I felt blessed to be alive. Yet every time I pulled up behind another car, I was choked by the Freightliner stench of an imperfectly-tuned diesel engine. Every small car, every minivan, every family sedan. Diesel all of them, and most of them stank, and some of them smoked. It made me wonder why anybody in Europe would buy a convertible.

I think if we as Americans had to deal with that we probably would have banned diesel already. It’s rare here in the US to see a diesel passenger car but he does have a point about the smell. When you only smell it maybe once a month because that’s how often you actually get behind one it probably doesn’t bother you. Now picture driving around where the diesels outnumber the gasoline powered cars the way they do across Europe.

a properly running diesel car or truck is not a issue. In lower income countries that don’t have massive salt use to ensure that none of the cars on the road are that old you have really old worn out cars that smell and smoke. Other than people who mod their diesels here this does not happen because when you hit 15 years old your car turns back into earth piece by piece.

Yeah in that article he fails to mention the year of the vehicle he was driving behind. New diesel cars do not do that unless you intentionally modify it to roll-coal.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v406/LowlyOilBurner/356A73EE-FDF6-4D4C-B69D-D336F624A8D2.png_zpscb2zazph.jpeg

via jalopnik

Not a lot of new info, but an indication that the German fix (which needs to be filed by tomorrow) will not likely be the global fix.

America!!

ROLL COAL!!!

The TDI in question does not have a diesel exhaust smell. My Golf has no difference in exhaust smell from my wife’s Prius.