I keep waiting for people to remember that VW was not the first to cheat

But I have not seen any mention yet so here is the story. The big three diesel truck engine manufacturers pulled a Volkswagen years ago.

http://articles.herald-mail.com/1998-10-23/news/25108825_1_engine-manufacturers-emissions-tests-pollution-controls

The trucking industry is still feeling the fallout because part of the punishment was to meet future emissions targets early which they mostly could not do. Truckers are still paying the price in unreliable expensive trucks that don't really work properly.

I was waiting for someone to say something about it. I'm honestly surprised it's taken this long for a car manufacturer to get nailed.

I see it included in news coverage regularly, and it has been discussed here.

VW not being the first to cheat on emissions testing is not some secret.

Who cares if they were the 1st or not,they did it and got caught so time to pay the piper.

and did't I read somewhere this week that BMW has been popped also ?

Everybody cheats. Some get caught.

I'm not taking the time to look into it (call me lazy) but there are levels of cheating you know?

500,000+ cars in the US alone running 40x the emmisions is pretty bad. Not sure how bad the trucking industry was referred to above.

one billion dollar settlement back in 1998.

In reply to ebonyandivory:

Okay, you are lazy. The article linked above (how hard is a click?) says 1.1 MILLION of the illegal truck engines were on the road when they were caught. So...if you want to talk about "levels of cheating," the truck manufacturers were far in excess of anything VW did.

WHAT VW DID WAS NOT CHEATING!

The test was broken.

In reply to pointofdeparture

Not hard to click, to answer your facetious question. Hard to read while getting a 12 year old boy, a 9 year old girl and a 5 year old girl dressed, fed and out to their buses whike also exercising our puppy.

I now have time to click but now I don't need to.

Plus I wrote that I wasn't sure how bad the trucking industry was. Which means I WASN'T SURE. If you read that as "I think it wasn't as bad as VW" then that's on you.

In reply to pointofdeparture:

How in the world is 1.1mm > 11mm???

ebonyandivory wrote: I'm not taking the time to look into it (call me lazy) but there are levels of cheating you know? 500,000+ cars in the US alone running 40x the emmisions is pretty bad. Not sure how bad the trucking industry was referred to above.

yes and no … 40x is bad .. but still WAY better than before … shrug

but I am glad that when I made the decision to buy … VW diesel was high on my "look" at list … it wasn't the Golf TDI

In reply to ebonyandivory:

Sorry, it just grinds my gears when people openly say stuff like "I'm deliberately not going to look into this, but I'm going to wax rhetoric anyway!"

The fact is that the trucking industry cheated way worse than VW did, but it was in an era where the average person didn't give a rat's ass about climate change, etc. The manufacturers didn't even have to admit wrongdoing, they just paid a big fine and moved on. VW's scandal is actually somewhat trivial by comparison (domestically at least), but the social and political climate has changed considerably, meaning a bunch of execs are basically gonna hang because of this, they're going to lose a E36 M3load of brand equity, and this probably marks the beginning of another sweeping wave of EPA emissions testing reform...

Shame on all of us for voting for a government that has created rules so strict and expensive that it's easier to cheat than to build compliant cars that would be cost-prohibitive. Some regulation is necessary, but this has gotten out of hand.

In reply to racerfink:

You have to compare numbers apples to apples; we're going on U.S. numbers, not global.

The initial recall, was forced by the government. They are looking into more, and Audi and Porsche as well.

I wouldn't call it apples-to-apples comparing three seperate diesel companies to one single company who also produce gas cars (I don't have any numbers, but I would guess VW sells at least three times the amount of gas cars.

In reply to racerfink:

You're mixing your numbers up. Only 482k VWs recalled in the U.S. That 1.1 million number is how many diesel trucks were caught for cheating and recalled back in '98. 11 million is how many affected cars VW has sold WORLDWIDE.

Source: http://www.wired.com/2015/09/vw-owners-arent-going-like-fixes-diesels/

So, 1.1mm divided by three is roughly 366k apiece.

pointofdeparture wrote: In reply to ebonyandivory: Sorry, it just grinds my gears when people openly say stuff like "I'm deliberately not going to look into this, but I'm going to wax rhetoric anyway!"

I'm sorry too. Sorry that you assumed that me typing "Not sure" meant "VW was worse".

What grinds MY gears is when some stranger falsely attributes a specific attitude from a post then apologizes for doing so but then does it again.

I didn't have time to read the link that's true. But I never "waxed rhetoric" about anything.

I actually wrote that I thought VW's scandal is pretty egregious but wasn't sure of the trucking industries level of cheating. Never once did I make one comment about how bad that industry cheated.

I'll end my thread derailment now, I just hate it when things get incorrectly attributed to people because guys that seem to have an agenda feel the need to do so.

I suspect there are two kinds of truck/car manufacturers out there. Those that have been caught cheating and those that are cheating and have yet to be caught. Who's next? I am getting cynical in my old age but the world is a crooked place.

In reply to ebonyandivory:

To say "there are levels of cheating, you know" is the establishment of a hierarchy. That statement is a rhetorical device that pre-supposes a conclusion, and since you followed up with a statement that essentially said "VW cheated pretty bad," it's not hard to interpret your post the way I did; I basically read your intent as "there's no way anyone else cheated as bad as VW." I'm sorry that wasn't the case, but you also said "call me lazy for not reading" which conveys a flippant "I don't care what the facts are" attitude, as opposed to something like "I'm a bit busy to read the details" or similar which doesn't have the same attitude to it.

I legitimately am sorry, but your initial post DID come off as pretty snarky itself.

And VW not being the first some how makes it less of a crime? Really? They cheated and got caught. It is like saying that the second murderer caught is less guilty than the first so it some how makes it less of a crime. So it is some how ok that VW did this because they were the 2nd company to do it?

I don't understand how being the 2nd to do something illegal makes it any less of a crime. As far as I am concerned VW should be hammered even harder than GM as there was a precedent set and yet VW decided to ignore it. They should be made an example of. Bring the hammer down to the full extent of the law so may be the message will get to other automakers that this is not acceptable. Also I think that the EPA is pissed and they are not going to let this go lightly. If they do then it will greatly reduce there ability to enforce the law's in the future.

The BIGGEST problem is that VW has a plant in the US that the state of Tennessee has invested huge $$$$ into as well as it is the life blood of the economy in that region. So we have the Government now tasked to enforce the law on its self (as a investor in VW) And by enforcing the law it is potentially going to cause there investment of taxpayers money to go south and devastate a regional economy in the process. This I see as a huge problem and should be looked at very closely as this puts the Government in a conflict of interest situation with respect to handing out punishment to VW.

In reply to pointofdeparture:

I did NOT establish a hierarchy. Those exist all by themselves.

If you read my comments in the context of the previous posts (which is how threads generally work), you see even in the initial post (following your logic) there is a "VW cheated but others did too so VW is not as bad as people are saying".

If you're going to invent specific attitudes when they don't exist, then you need to do that from the first post, not just mine.

Here's the emmissions test,

"OK everybody, we're drug testing next week!"

What kind of test is that if everyone is notified prior to testing?