Is it a good time to buy VW shares or is the company finished? Will the scandal affect Audit, Seat, Skoda, Porsche, Bentley, Lamborghini et al too? Will other manufacturers be implicated. Will those of us unwittingly driving dirty diesel's get fined? Will the German-led EU hammer VW or be soft on it? Will executives get jailed? Should they be if the allegations are correct?

I wouldn't be surprised at all to see VW officials or executives be jailed in the U.S., along with massive fines and penalties.
The (now) home of the free market usually wastes no time in attacking a foreign business that's in direct competition with its own.

All of course in stark contrast to the banks.

What VW has done is obviously going to be treated as fraud and heads will roll but you have to admire the hypocrisy of the yanks.

The top three selling vehicles in August were pickup trucks and in the number two slot with sales of 387,179 in the year to date was the Chevy Silverado which has a six litre petrol engine as standard with a 6.6 litre diesel as an option. Top seller was a Ford with a modest 2.7 litre as one option. Or you could go for 5.0L instead.

Emissions? What emissions!

Is what they did really worth a jail sentence for the top brass at VW?

Surely the fines and penalties imposed will be sufficient, and the dent in the companies profile from here on in enough of a punishment.

VW have deliberately cheated the regulations and defrauded their customers. This isn't just a case of a few maverick traders as he had to have been planned over a long time and sanctioned from the top. Their are sure to be some major class actions against VW.

The software could even involve other companies like Bosch and Siemens!

You should be delighted.Capitalism and GREED at the fore. Customers, who cares, they don't.

A slap on the wrist and business as usual I would have thought. Can't be seen to be punishing the 'wealth creators'.

I bet whoever did it they thought they were doing nothing particularly wrong.

These engine management systems are constantly monitoring they way the car is being driven and altering the way the engine works including things like how much fuel is injected. They will have the engine behaving differently when it is idling then when tanking down the motorway and they always aim to have the engine be at its most efficient for how the car is bing driven.

Altering the behaviour when sat on a rolling road will just have been another mode of operation to some software engineer to program.

What is interesting is who specified the software to do this and why none for the people involved questioned if this was an acceptable mode of operation. It will have been specified, the spec reviewed, coded ,code reviewed, QA people involved the works as it was developed.

Ah but German wealth creators, not American ones. So expect the full reach of the U.S. state agencies to flex their muscles.

And, of course, VW doesn't contribute anywhere near as much to politicians campaigns and parties in the U.S. as others do and have a far bigger union presence. So the crackdown on this cheating, lying socialist organisation will be swift and harsh.

I'm only surprised that people are surprised this has happened. Time will tell but when spot checks are done on other manufacturers' vehicles, we'll probably find that all, to varying degrees, have similar defeat software in their ECUs.

Some USVW execs will probably face jail time because unlike our fawning corporate laws, criminality does not have to come from board level down to be liable. The US EPA is also a very powerful organisation and takes breaches like this very seriously.

Around 15 years ago, I was involved in the vehicle emissions industry and assisted one major truck manufacturer in obtaining a Reduced Pollution Certificate to gain a reduction in VED. The RPC was introduced to encourage early adoption of the next stage of Euro particulate emissions legislation or the fitting of exhaust particulate traps. Particulate was measured by mass and by fitting a simple flow-through catalyst, I could reduce the particulate mass by over 10%, enough to gain RPC. The catalyst did not reduce any soot, all it did was reform the hydrocarbons that agglomerated to the carbon to water and CO2. Definitely not within the spirit of the law but way within the letter of the law

I suppose we can all look forward to a whole new set of marketing calls -have you been missold TDI ?

As it seems that EU and UK politicians (among others) were (allegedly) aware of all this it shows the hypocrisy at both political and business level in exploiting "green" concerns. I always take the attitude that most businesses who promote their green credentials are shysters and this scandal supports my prejudice. IMO he Germans promote a green political agenda via their EU power to benefit German manufactures - eg wind turbine makers and I guess via this scandal? So lets have a few politicians as well as VW employees facing the music (it ain't going to happen).

Whereas we have a government that pre-2010 were promoting themselves as the greenest ever. While in partnership with the LimpDems, they were restrained from ditching their superficial environmental credentials entirely.

Since May, they have had no such restrictions and have gone balls-out to show just what they really think of the environment. This is epitomised by that economic illiterate Osborne's decision in July to tax cleaan power stations at the same rate as dirty ones. That decision led to DRAX losing 1/3 of its value and the cvompany announcing that it was withdrawing from developing Carbon Capture & Sequestration technologies.

Green tories my 'arris

Meanwhile back in the good ol' US of States, GM have announced the specs for the 2016 Chevrolet Silverado, the country's second best selling pick up truck. You can either have it with a modest 6 litre Vortec V8 or a slightly bigger 6.6 litre Duramax V8 turbo diesel.

They are ALL cheating the regulations. As is usual with high-profile cases involving the state vs a major international corporation - the alleged infringement is insignificant next to the politics surrounding it.

No different to the EU's incessant targeting of IT companies such as Microsoft and Google.

No one seriously believes the EU is motivated primarily by the customer's interests. It's all politics.

Pick up trucks rule in the USA. They could run on uranium and spew weapons grade plutonium from the exhaust and it would be legal.

The latest ford focus runs with 5 times the maximum NOx, compare that with the shady VW golf (2013 flavour) which was only 4 times more, the golf also achieved much closer to its stated mpg www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34425306 As above, they're all at it, just that one got caught and will of course be made to pay big time whilst the others will get off relatively Scot-free if punished at all. It's all massive red herring with regard to pollution anyway, getting people out of cars and walking/cycling more with less use of motorvehicles should be the goal.

The latest ford focus runs with 5 times the maximum NOx, compare that with the shady VW golf (2013 flavour) which was only 4 times more, the golf also achieved much closer to its stated mpg www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34425306 As above, they're all at it, just that one got caught and will of course be made to pay big time whilst the others will get off relatively Scot-free if punished at all. It's all massive red herring with regard to pollution anyway, getting people out of cars and walking/cycling more with less use of motorvehicles should be the goal.

Quote ="knockersbumpMKII" It's all massive red herring with regard to pollution anyway, getting people out of cars and walking/cycling more with less use of motorvehicles should be the goal.'" Vehicle usage is largely irrelevant compared to veganism vs meat eating freakonomics.com/2011/11/16/agno ... -not-cows/ and that's without factoring in extra calories to be consumed if replacing motorised transport with physical effort.

Quote ="knockersbumpMKII" It's all massive red herring with regard to pollution anyway, getting people out of cars and walking/cycling more with less use of motorvehicles should be the goal.'" Vehicle usage is largely irrelevant compared to veganism vs meat eating freakonomics.com/2011/11/16/agno ... -not-cows/ and that's without factoring in extra calories to be consumed if replacing motorised transport with physical effort.

Indeed. If only the population of Ludhiana would switch to nut cutlets, the place would be like a forest glade

Quite apart from all the hysteria, finger pointing and basically "throwing a dead cat on the table", surrounding the VW revelations, is the stupidity in expecting engine emissions recorded on-test to be replicated in "real-world" driving conditions.

When an engine is submitted for Type Approval emissions testing, it is tested on an engine dynamometer, programmed to replicate different drive cycles. The test is a multi-thousand stage programme and although different stages are included for different vehicle types (passenger car, commercial vehicle, bus etc), it is common and standard across different engine manufacturers. It is not there to show what actually comes from the tailpipe in "real world" application, it's there to provide a minimum standard to achieve and also to make comparisons, so that consumers can make a more informed choice.

The problem with "real world" testing is that one "real world" is never the same as another.

This whole charade is based around comparing apples with oranges

The CEO of VW US has appeared before a Congressional Committee and claimed the problem was the fault of "a couple of rogue software engineers". Absolute, total garbage.

Having worked with and for Daimler Benz, I can categorically state it is not within the German industrial culture or even the German psyche, to allow such a situation to ever occur. No software engineer would be ever allowed to make such a decision without various managers approval, probably reaching to those directly below board level, if not higher

Oh don't worry a German leader in a sector of the global market that the Americans don't dominate won't be able to get away with the same kind of lies and bull excuses that the banks were.

There aren't enough ultra wealthy Americans heavily tied up with VW for them to be given leniancy.

These "lone nuts" have a lot to answer for ...

Indeed.
Let them produce the rogues, and even if said rogues were heavily rewarded in secret to fall on their swords and cop the blame,
I bet very simple procedural checking of production processes would show quickly that they couldn't have done it unnoticed and as soon as two becomes three etc the game's up!

You conspiracy theorists should be locked up.