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kleinbl00  ·  3150 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Volkswagen emissions scandal could snare other companies, whistleblower claims.

Watch me demonstrate my piss-poor grasp on diesel emissions controls, but I think The Guardian isn't fully understanding the problem.

So check it out. The heart of the problem is Adblue. Urea is a mixture of urea and water, which pretty much makes it mouse piss. And mouse piss, when injected into diesel exhaust, reduces NOx by breaking it down into nitrogen and oxygen.

But not all diesels use mouse piss. THIS is the root of the problem: the diesels that VW got busted for are mouse-piss free. The bigger Volkswagens, as well as Mercedes and BMW, use mouse piss. VW's argument was that they were able to get performance and emissions up to snuff on their littler engines without resorting to mouse piss, because mouse piss is a pain in the ass (gotta top it up at $11/gallon every 10k miles or so) and a mouse-piss-free engine is more efficient.

But dirtier.

Combine that with the fact that VW had to make their pissless motors pass an American test only, the fact that the mouse piss system adds (according to some comment I read somewhere) $3k in expense to the powertrain and the fact that the VW Group is fucking nefarious, I can see this being limited to VW. I mean, it takes some balls to pull something like this. GM? Timid "maybe if we don't recall, we won't get blamed for not fixing this ignition switch." Nissan? "turns out one of our airbag vendors was scamming us." Volkswagen? "Yeah, fuck your regulations."

They haven't been having the best year anyway. I will say this, though - it's worth checking out that stock at 5-day. Bitchez got PUNISHED.

Now you know why this came out after the markets closed on a Friday afternoon. The brokers have been sharpening their knives all weekend but at least they weren't able to pile on in real time.

I'll bet there were some amazing insider short plays nonetheless.