This is actually a brilliant idea because they don’t want to work on 100K mile, 10-year-old cars. That’s clear to me. The crappy pseudo-legal bullshitese in the contract is just that—pseudo-legal to sound important.

They are scaring off the customers they think are bad customers or at least people with bad cars and…

You must be young, because pickup baseball games were the order of the day even in the Seventies and Eighties. You didn’t 18 to play, just a few guys in the field, a pitcher and someone to bat. With too few guys, the batter would shag the passed balls/whiffs.

Don’t rewrite the history of my youth.

Also, frats and…

No manufacturer does it because they can’t make money on it. This one, for the prices mentioned, attracts kit car buyers willing to make huge compromises to safety, convenience, comfort, luxury and reliability to go fast, not to mention compliance.

To get all of those things lacking into a production car would require…

Real world mileage in EcoBoost trucks is nowhere near what Ford says it is.

Correction: What was Oldsmobile?

For the love of all that is holy, please stop the myth that GM’s shitpile Oldsmobuick diesel engine “turned people against diesel.”

From the VW Rabbit diesel in the Seventies and with Mercedes-Benz selling a rather large percentage of its U.S. fleet with oil-burning engines will into the Eighties, the U.S. market…

My guess is that one of his minions shared the info with another carmaker to drop the dime on VW to the EPA and CARB. He is a crafty and very clever SOB.

He is probably both waiting to be called in to the rescue as well as buying up all of the deflated shares he can get his grubby mitts on.

Come one, you guys are clever and probably not a one of you was alive when the actual Watergate scandal first broke. Come up with something better than DieselGATE.

The government just took away almost a fifth of their income. All of this follows a slow-but-steady decline in sales and brand satisfaction.

Came here to post this and saw that somebody beat me to it.

Why? Just why?

The Infiniti Q50 platform would make a great wagon, but a crossdressing utility vehicle? With almost no useful cargo space? BMW already makes a bunch of those that nobody truly wants.

They’re going to consult with their “clergy?” Really? Really?

You could have filled the top 10 with just Smokey Yunick cheats. And it would have been a better list.

Well, they are required to meet the letter of the law, not necessarily the intent.

Well, the independent group also tested an X5 diesel (xDrive35d????) during the same California-to-Seattle run that outed the VW, and it performed as promised, in terms of emissions. So, there is that. Also, it has the urea injection, like the newer VWs that are allegedly not running the cheater software.

I would say that having a specific algorithm in the ECU that detects when being tested and turning on the emissions controls is cheating, particularly when the standard operating conditions mean that the car emits up to 40 times the NOx and particulates it is supposed to.

Somebody, somewhere at VW coded this thing and that code was signed off on by someone above him. I find it hard to believe that something as egregiously illegal at this was not sent way up the ladder.

As for US companies separating boards and executives, their was a minor shareholder revolt at ExxonMobil a few years…

But VW didn’t “build to the test.” They found that they couldn’t do that without drastically raising the expense of their entry-level diesels and instead just rigged it to cheat the test. That’s quite a bit different, though I see the point you are trying to make.

BMW and Mercedes-Benz and GM built to the test. Their…

Well, at least Apple might be able to help them with the software, right?

In the U.S., Jetta sales have trounced just about everything else since the late 1980s. I know, we’re backwards compared to the rest of the world, but either people don’t buy or salesmen don’t know how to sell hatchbacks in this country.