I previously owned a VW, but swore on my life that I'd never buy another one after the emissions cheating scandal. There are plenty of reasons why a VW likely wont be my next choice, but I'm softening my stance a bit. What they did was absolutely reprehensible, but I later learned that the more accurate story is that they bore the brunt of media attention for something that nearly every auto manufacturer was later fo…
Regardless of what you think they did was right or wrong, it was pretty clever.
Voltswagen of America
491–500 of 632 posts
Re: Voltswagen of America
#492Re: Voltswagen of America
#493This is funny, yet ridiculous :-)) Their brand is so tainted in the US that they're renaming it. I imagine it's going to be the only place they'll do it.
It's also going to look really silly in 20 years when every auto manufacturer is doing electric vehicles. It'll be like Ford boasting that they run on unleaded gasoline.
Re: Voltswagen of America
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
the VW ID4 is a great family car, imo its worth the wait.
Europe here. I have been driving an ID3 nearly every day since a month or so (don't own it) and I absolutely adore the car. It's both simple and full-fledged at the same time. Voice-control is hot garbage but other than that it's fine. Disclaimer: I never drove a Tesla Model 3 before, but a few other EVs like the BMW i3. The VW ID3 feels like a genuine high quality car - as if the Golf simply reached a new era. BMW's…
Can you actually use it on the Autobahn like a "normal" car, i.e. drive over 130 km/h with AC or heating, while still getting reasonable range?
One of my major gripes with EV was always that the range on paper is good, but only if you drive like a truck speed-wise and turn off every comfort - which is honestly not what I want to do when investing in an (usually) pretty expensive car. Would be pretty awesome if VW managed to get that right.
Re: Voltswagen of America
#495Re: Voltswagen of America
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
The pointless out of band emissions testing of an emissions compliant truck (that easily passes the tests) having to go in for a test because it smokes a bit under hard acceleration and someone called it in for "rolling coal" is very much a nuisance to the truck owner and a waste of time/resources for all parties involved. An older diesel engine can smoke a decent bit under hard acceleration and still be entirely emi…
My stance is that diesels should only be permitted if they satisfy the EPA 2008 diesel PM standards or better. No older engines should be permitted unless they are retrofitted to comply with the standard and pass regular state tests. We could have a "cash for clunkers" type program to incentivize them to be lawfully scrapped. I appreciate that you are as annoyed as the rest of us at the coal rollers. I think we need…
A decently maintained heavy road engine (tractor trailer) is a million+ mile motor, easily. A medium truck engine (think your typical toolbox work trucks, tow trucks, International boom trucks, etc) will do 300k-500k miles, and depending on how much the truck is used, that may be 20-30 years of operation. Same for the light diesels - they tend to have a practical service life of decades. My 24 year old truck is starting to be a little bit more rare on the roads out here, but I still see plenty...
If you know what to listen for, you can identify a lot of diesels by sound - and the International T444E (mid-90s design, the Ford 7.3 Powerstroke is that engine with a few tweaks) has a very distinctive snap at idle from the single shot injectors. There are still an awful lot of those on the road, and the youngest of them is almost 20 years old.
"Destroying 30-50% of the diesel fleet on the road" is not something I'd be particularly excited about - especially since new vehicle production isn't particularly environmentally friendly either. If you're specifically focused on the PM emissions, there may be ways to retrofit those older engines (at the cost of likely a substantial increase in fuel burn from the backpressure), but if you're going to hold them to the newer NOx standards, there's just no way to do it. They don't have the injection pressure and EGR systems in place to do it.
As of right now, they'd just be replaced with new diesels, because there are no electrics meaningfully on the market that solve the problems a large diesel engine solves right now. Plenty have been announced, very few are actually shipping, and of those announced, everyone is silent on their towing capabilities (I don't care if you can tow 15k lbs on a receiver mount, that kind of trailer weight should be on a gooseneck or 5th wheel hitch, and everyone is really, really silent on how their announced electric trucks fit either of those).
I also very much dislike "Cash for Clunkers" type programs in that they're one of the most nastily regressive programs one can possibly create. That program ruined the bottom end of the used car market for most of a decade, and permanently destroyed a lot of vehicles of a particularly easy to maintain and cheap to operate era (low pressure single point throttle body injection, not a ton of luxury features). It was a nice little handout to the next couple tiers up, but if you were operating in the "$100 car" realm (which were a thing at the time, I've owned 4 sub-$400 cars in the 2000-2010 era), it was absolutely devastating to your ability to find cheap cars. That sort of effective floor on vehicle prices for a while, followed by the hollowing out of anything below that price in the market... eh. Let's not do that again.
As far as coal rollers, though, the best thing that could happen is that everyone stops getting worked up about them and ignore them. They do it for the attention, and I'll suggest that it works really, really well. If you see one, get the plate, call it into your local emissions enforcement hotline if that's a thing, and move on with life. Everyone getting all wound up about them on the internet is exactly what I expect a lot of them enjoy about it anymore.
Re: Voltswagen of America
#497This is the dumbest shit I’ve read all week. I had to read it twice and slap myself to believe it.
Re: Voltswagen of America
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
Europe here. I have been driving an ID3 nearly every day since a month or so (don't own it) and I absolutely adore the car. It's both simple and full-fledged at the same time. Voice-control is hot garbage but other than that it's fine. Disclaimer: I never drove a Tesla Model 3 before, but a few other EVs like the BMW i3. The VW ID3 feels like a genuine high quality car - as if the Golf simply reached a new era. BMW's…
> ID3? No issues here. Can you actually use it on the Autobahn like a "normal" car, i.e. drive over 130 km/h with AC or heating, while still getting reasonable range? One of my major gripes with EV was always that the range on paper is good, but only if you drive like a truck speed-wise and turn off every comfort - which is honestly not what I want to do when investing in an (usually) pretty expensive car. Would be p…
Re: Voltswagen of America
#499Re: Voltswagen of America
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
My dad used to joke that if you wanted sneakers that were not made by child labor, your best bet was whichever manufacturer last got into trouble for it because of all the extra scrutiny. That this level of fatalism about immoral acts exists is a failure of society as a whole. I suspect that all of those who got rich either knowingly or being willfully ignorant about emissions cheating walked away completely unpunish…
Fair and I mostly agree, but there are exceptions. New Balance for example makes a lot of it's shoes in the US.