When I was buying a car, I noticed that the dealer talked on and extended warranty for a few grand from some third company. I figured it was mostly profit for him, and did not mention it at all during our negotiations. I pushed him on price as low as I could, then pushed him on trade in value as high as I could. When…

Of all the nitroget claims, that’s the one I hate the most. “Air expands when it gets hot, nitrogen does not”

My approach would have been

Ok, since more info on this situation came out, I can’t claim that what they did is anything other than cheating. However, to illustrate my original point, I’ll use a different example.

Depends on how you define efficiency here. If you consider that a vehicles purpose is to move you, and moving itself is purely incidental, a motorcycle is doing pretty good.

Yep, wrote that before it was clear what they were doing. In this case, I agree, they were subverting the purpose of regulation. Fine em.

Doing more reading, the rules actually said “do not spit out more than this NOx during the time of of the test” which they technically passed (and it’s really lousy rule making).

I’m sorry, I don’t work in the auto industry, and can’t understand all the abbriviations. I did find this at the LA times site.

I found this

Of course, if I put bleach and ground up rotten rodents in my cookies, claims of gross cheating would be fair.

No, and I wouldn’t buy a vw. But I’m not ready to fine you for cheating until I know that there is some cheating going on. Meeting all the technical requirements while running afoul of the spirit of the rules isn’t cheating, it’s bad rule making (since the spirit of the rules is whatever the reader wants it to be). I…

Latest internet rumor is that the ECU switched modes only when it was hooked up to monitoring systems. If that’s true, its pretty damning.

I still have no idea what it is that VW did that constitutes cheating. I’d wager that niether do you.

Do you know that is what the cheat consisted of, or are you guessing?

Without knowing exactly what “sophisticated algorithms” mean, it sounds like they met the technical requirement. How is that cheating?

a 100lbs tv is unlikely to kill you. But it would be an unpleasant moment.

a 100lbs tv is unlikely to kill you. But it would be an unpleasant moment.

I think we can start a whole new thread on the subject of “Inventions that found new life in applications their inventors never thought of”. It will be rather fascinating. In fact, dear op who might be reading this, can you make that happen?

The diffs aren’t tricked. They are just a bunch of gears, so they can’t be tricked. The ABS system detects an undesirable lack of traction, and generated required traction between the wheel and the car body, this allows the differentials to work as intended.

How is that a cheat?

Do we know how VW computers knew when they were being tested (and what they did in response)? All I managed to find so far was that it was a “sophisticated algorithm”