OT: Dieselgate

[R D S]

Is this a real thing? We had a VAG until a couple of years ago, can I get free money?

[John Rumm]

Yes

no idea!

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

You mean all the adverts, well they have got fed up with mis sold financial products, and personal injuries now they seem to be trying it with deisel cars and medical negligence claims. There has to be money in it for them so ask yourself, why are they doing it? Brian

[Richard]

[Tim+]

VW, Skoda etc, certainly web pages where you could enter your VIN and find out if it needed modification to make it comply. If it?s not a flagged vehicle I suspect you won?t be able to claim anything.

Tim

[John Rumm]

More to the point, if you do own one, do you actually want it modified so it performs less well, and is less "driveable"?

[R D S]

The thought of making this sort of law firm richer is enough to put me off.

[tim...]

I find the idea that more than handful of customers bought their car because of the emission numbers in the brochure, laughable

It's like EPCs for houses

not one even reads them before deciding what to buy

[Andy Burns]

Except company cars, where the BIK was based on the CO2 emissions

[Steve Walker]

It may not be why they bought it, but having the software changed during a recall, to meet the legal requirements, may well have increased fuel consumption and made the car less comfortable to drive, plus affecting the resale value. Those may have had real effects on owners.

[Dave Plowman (News]

Because Bosch fiddled the injection to make all these makes pass the EU emissions tests in the lab, but not on the road, it makes a total nonsense of such tests.

[bert]

Seems a bit pointless to me to change some software which was there specifically to detect test conditions and modify the fuelling to pass. Where would be the benefit to the owner?

[bert]

In article [e-mail]>, "Dave Plowman (News)" [e-mail]> writes

Certainly destroyed the validity of the results, which is why the culprits were punished.

[Steve Walker]

The modification to the software would not have been to remove the test bypass, but to to make the car meet the emissions standards during normal driving - hence increasing fuel consumption and reducing drive-ability.

[Andy Burns]

Not all surely? My 3l Audi didn't need any fix, my father's 2l VW did, neither were ad-blu cars

[John Rumm]

In a sense the results were actually valid - they reflected what the emissions of the engine would be *if* the emissions controls were actually operating as they should.

Bosch presumably provided a facility to disable some of the emissions controls. The manufacturers realised that that resulted in less negative impact on performance, and so chose to use the "off" setting as the default, and then arranged to automatically turn it back on when the car deduced it was following the emissions test program.

So who are the culprits really? VAG presumably got hammered since they were the first to be caught cheating. However it seems like many of the others were doing similar things.

So as an owner of an affected vehicle you could let them "fix" the problem but from your point of view an unfixed car will work better.

[John Rumm]

CO2 emissions were not changed by the fiddle though...

[John Rumm]

There is no direct benefit to the owner (unless they are particularly "troubled" by the NOx being out of spec, and would rather have a car that is more expensive to run and performs less well)

[bert]

That's what I thought.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Increasing fuel consumption and *increasing* driveability

Richer mixtures run beautifully. They just make black smoke...