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.
So, I'll just throw some random thoughts here and there and see what you and WanderingEng think. I know about the whole urea addition thing, thanks to the all of the chatter this has caused over in r/cars on Reddit. BMW and others are willing to use them, Mazda and VW would rather not. Mazda, despite their best efforts, seems to have trouble getting things off the ground. Since VW is cheating, it's no wonder they seemed able to pull something off that Mazda couldn't. One of the things that has been picking at my noodle since this whole thing was announced, and was talked about a few times over on r/cars, is that car manufacturers allegedly find little ways to cheat on emissions tests all the time. This just happened to be something beyond "fudging with the drive train a bit" and went into a whole new territory. VW knew that this was trouble. Outright. No doubt. No company that big could be that dumb. Here's the thing though, which is crazy, every single diesel car with this system that they bring to the States increases their chances of getting caught. Every single year that goes by that these cars are on the road and being worked on, increases their chances of getting caught. Given enough time and enough cars, it'd probably be inevitable that they'd get caught. So why do it in the first place? Why take such a big risk? It's stupid. It's crazy. It never should have been an option in the first place. Let's even pretend, for a moment, that the EPA and all the other regulatory agencies would be willing to turn a blind eye to this whole bit, it's still stupid. I mean, look at The Ford C-Max or Hyundai and Kia. Those class action lawsuits were just because the manufacturers decided to fudge the numbers a bit when it comes to MPG ratings. VW? They outright lied. They literally invited the barbarians to their gates with this whole thing and the barbarians happened to have passed the bar exam.
Here's my two cents: VW knew they were cheating, but had they convinced themselves they were close enough to the letter of the law to get away with it? In my industry (totally unrelated to cars), there were two lawsuits a few years ago. The first was Company A had a project that touched a bit of one of Company B's assets. Company B sued, saying the agreement signed by everyone said they had to share the project. Company B won. Maybe a year later, Company 1 had a project that touched a bit of one of Company 2's assets. Company 2 sued, saying the agreement signed by everyone said they had to share the project. Company 1 fought the lawsuit. They hired the best lawyers, the same lawyers Company A used. Guess who won? I think it's easy at the corporate level to get some groupthink. Everyone might be sitting around thinking "wait a minute, we could get burned on this," but nobody is saying anything. Everyone assumes someone would say something, and when nobody says anything, they all assume everyone agrees it's ok when someone on the outside might be screaming "what is wrong with you idiots?"
I suspect there's some truth to this. It's like, "hey, John Yoo wrote us a memo about how waterboarding isn't torture. So now we can torture- I mean, waterboard people." And then you discover that the public doesn't give a fuck about John Yoo's memos.