The tricky part is that you want to end up with a car that meets both the advertised emission rating and the advertised performance afterwards. If that was so easy, then they wouldnāt have bothered to fake it in the first place.
F it in software would degrade the performance of the car. The reason that they took the decision to go through all this was that sticking to the standard, they couldnāt get performance up to where they wanted it. Specifically, both power and mileage would drop if they met the NOx standards.
So if they do fix it in software, there will be a whole lot of angry people who bought the car because they were promised X HP or Y MPG, and who just wonāt get that.
If they fix it by bringing the cars in and installing the new system, theyāll (apparently) be reducing internal volume, increasing the cost and possibly also degrading performance anyway.
I was, I suppose, forgetting that VW is not an American company. Executive salaries are only about 0.2% of profits, so cutting them back wouldnāt, as you say, make a big difference. But thatās not necessarily true of the industry as a whole. Ford pays their CEO more than Winterkorn made despite being much smaller. GM pays their CEO more than VW does, despite being less than a tenth the size. When 0.2% turns into 2% it starts to get a lot more plausible that you could actually have more nice things by taking those people down a peg (i.e. an order of magnitude).
My understanding is that the going reward for whistleblowers in America is a 6ā by 6ā cell that you arenāt allowed to lie down in for 35 years.
Almost.The trade-off was actually compliance, performance, cost, pick any two. They chose to optimize for the latter two. This is why I would be extremely pissed off if I were one of their competitors and had chosen to build a compliant, good-performing car at a higher cost to me.
Cost is the implicit leg of the trifecta - you can solve these problems if you throw enough money at it. Their aim, however (according to another article Iām reading) seems to have been āovertake Toyotaā, and their margins on vehicles sold was pathetically small. Itās difficult to imagine their keeping low prices, solving these problems and simultaneously overtaking Toyota.
I guess if we want low emission vehicles, we just have to accept higher prices or lower power. Which is not a bad thing, but itās going to make a lot of people grumpyā¦
No, but neither are they the final word.
To summarize, you canāt squeeze blood from a stone. Sure.
In another post, you have argued that (if I read you correctly) the automotive industry is already pretty efficient at driving down margins. I suppose; I couldnāt say one way or the other myself. Even if we take that as a given, I think itās still instructive to consider the big picture. Assuming a rational consumer (ha!) what the consumer is trying to optimize is cost of transportation, for a constant level of performance. Not ācost of diesel carā, just ācost of car that doesnāt suckā. Different manufacturers seem to get trapped, whether by religion, government incentives, stranded assets, or whatever, optimizing some particular technology. Sometimes this leads to technology dead ends, which it is starting to appear diesel may be for the small-car segment. Itās akin to the hill climbing problem in artificial intelligence ā you get stuck optimizing the wrong thing, instead of stepping back and realizing thereās a better way to get there.
Iām not yet willing to concede that VWās failure proves that the only other option is for prices to go up. That may yet prove to be the case, but there is considerable scope for innovation and competition still.
Yes, and that pretty much sums up what was wrong with them. Their explicit goal was to become big and bloated, instead of to serve their customers. It would strain the credibility of a comic opera.
Given how often this seems to happen in the corporate world, that opera would pretty soon descend into tragicomedyā¦
Or, for a significant percentage of the population, ācost of getting from A to B with the least hassleāā¦
Add a private jet to Germany and political asylum, prior to the whistle blowing, and you might get some takers.
ETA: @anon50609448 beat me to it 
I understand that the cheat was also designed to prolong the life of a specific, disposable, expensive component in the emissions system. The running costs of the cars would increase as well. This would be borne by VW for the current cars, but adds pressure on the cost of new vehicles.
My assumption is that margins are constrained by market forces. Consumers have many options and are typically price sensitive on cars. Blocking off an illegal option for ācomplianceā must force the engineers to a worse one (ignoring the environment and public health etc for now). They chose illegal because it was ābestā (other than for everyone else and until you get caught). They must now choose what was previously considered worse. i.e. more costly or poorer performance or some other compromise.
Apparently, the urea injection system they could have, but did not, fit was rejected partly because of the room it took up. Perhaps the compromise will be more cramped cars for passengers and luggage. Anyway you dice it, it seems likely that replacement vehicles will offer poorer value-for-money (except for the whole not-killing-the-planet-and ourselves-quite-as-quickly thing).
The planet killing and public health costs are external and socialised i.e. my personal decision to drive a pickup when I could ride bicycle doesnāt result in a material change to the environment - but our collective choices do.
Oh yeah, that reminds me. This article article in the Economist makes an interesting argument about why VW made the tragic error they did. In short, the author thinks VW was lulled into a false sense of invulnerability on the regulatory front, by their experience with slavishly-compliant European regulators (āa large part of their reason for believing this would have been that carmakers, particularly European ones, are used to getting away with a great deal in such mattersā). As a result, they grossly erred in their estimation of the potential cost of their trick, royally screwing up their effort to optimize their cost of goods. Iām inclined to credit this explanation because it was independently made to me by a friend who used to work in the German auto industry, at a VW supplier.
To relate this back to the subject at hand, I think your argument about how the quality of the product inevitably has to go down, or the price up, partly rests on the assumption that the engineers were doing a reasonably good job, that they only would have taken such a ridiculous risk if it was the only possible way to ship their product at the required price point. But the Economist article suggests that this is not necessarily the case.
Mind you, I donāt mean suggest that the engineers are bad automotive engineers. Actually, I rather like their cars, and have owned a few of them in my day. I do mean to suggest that in the Junior-Armchair-Economistās-Club sense weāve been discussing, they canāt be said to have done a good job if they made a crucial decision to optimize cost based on an estimate that was orders-of-magnitude out of whack.
Just to stick some made-up numbers on it by way of a thought experiment, letās suppose they internally charged (say) $10 per car against the risk of getting caught. That amounts to a $5 million insurance policy in the US, which turns out to have been maybe four orders of magnitude low. That absurdly low charge against risk would easily justify them leaving out (say) $25 per car worth of emissions control parts. That $12.5 million dollars worth of saved cost of goods would be enough to make an employee a hero at most companies Iām aware of. On the other hand, an increase of $25 in the cost of a car hardly even signifies on the scale of costs to an individual consumer buying one. (No, I donāt think they ever actually did the cold-blooded calculation of sticking a per-unit price on āinsuranceā, but itās a way of modeling the behavior.)
(Of course now VW will have to find someplace to pay for the shitstorm of fines and lawsuits landing on them, and that will end up in their pricing eventually ā where else? Assuming they stay in business, that is.)
I very highly doubt that porsche sells a cayenne with a 2L diesel. Only small diesel engines were at issue here as VW tried to get around using the accompanying urea system that larger ones require.
I think porsche was just listed because theyāre the same company
Itās an excellent point you make. If the cost of the illegal solution was viewed by engineers as trivial (due to an assessment that the chance of being caught was minimal, and that the expected value of fines or censure was near zero), then the next worse option might not be so expensive after all. They may simply have been lazy and/or incompetent, choosing an easy (but illegal) option over a viable but slightly more difficult/expensive legal one.
I donāt necessarily agree, however. My assumption is that the engineers chose the illegal option only after working extremely hard (and failing) to meet what management had set as non-negotiable targets. I am ascribing them some morals, some professional pride and some competence. This might be misplaced.
But I also ascribe a reasonable probability that management knew they were backing the engineers into a corner, and fully expected and accepted an illegal outcome. They then chose deliberate ignorance and consequent plausible deniability as their shitty defence against what they viewed as the small risk of being caught.
Thatās also my understanding.
[quote=āHumbabella, post:24, topic:66447, full:trueā]My understanding is that the going reward for whistleblowers in America is a 6ā by 6ā cell that you arenāt allowed to lie down in for 35 years.
[/quote]
Thankfully, VW run a prison where your 6x6 cell that turns into a 5000ft^2 apartment whenever the guards arenāt lookingā¦
These men are nihilists, thereās nothing to be afraid of.
Nihilists! Fuck me.
Sounds very slow (as in immobile), but I suppose I could buy a properly constructed Bugatti with the proceeds from selling the solid gold Bugatti. 
mentions this 1998 paper on cycle beating. If iām reading this correctly, audi and opel had catalytic converters that work, while toyota and volvo had emissions controls that were tuned for the test. Of course, this was years ago.
