VW Tsunami: Falsified Emissions Push Company to Limits

[unhappycamper]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/falsified-emissions-scandal-push-volkswagen-to-limits-a-1055897.html



Volkswagen is struggling to come to terms with the vast emissions scandal of its own making. Lawsuits, official inquiries, a potential ratings downgrade: The company is facing myriad risks. The ultimate price tag could be in the tens of billions.

VW Tsunami: Falsified Emissions Push Company to Limits
By Dietmar Hawranek, Christoph Pauly and Barbara Schmid
October 02, 2015 – 05:59 PM

Tuesday saw the first piece of good news in quite some time for Volkswagen. The company's board of directors was meeting, under the leadership of freshly installed CEO Matthias Müller, and developers were reporting on how they planned to equip 11 million vehicles with law-abiding emissions filtering systems.

That task is VW's most pressing as it seeks to confront the vast emissions scandal of its own making. Germany's Federal Motor Transport Authority has given Volkswagen a deadline of Oct. 7 for submitting plans as to how it proposes to solve its emissions problem. If it doesn't, the vehicles in question could be declared un-roadworthy -- meaning their owners could no longer drive them. That would be the greatest possible disaster for the automobile company.

But on Tuesday, VW engineers were optimistic that more than half of the vehicles in question needed nothing more than a software update, which would cost a mere €60 per automobile. Other models would require a greater effort, with retrofitting costing several hundred euros per vehicle. In total, though, fixing the problem might not be quite as expensive as originally feared, the VW developers said, to the great relief of the board members.

Since Sept. 20, when then-CEO Martin Winterkorn admitted that VW had cheated for years on emissions tests with the help of illegal software, Europe's largest automobile company has been in crisis mode. Company managers don't know what tasks to handle first. "It's like we have been hit by a tsunami," says one VW manager.

[TDale313]

1. Good. The consequences should be enormous.

This was intentional, high level malfeasance and they should become a cautionary tale.

[d_r]

2. I don't think a software fix

is going to prevent the hardware from doing what it does. It will just prevent the software from lying about it. The resale value of the cars will be damaged and people who thought they were buying less polluting cars will still be polluting more.