It wasn’t an Audi dealer. It was a BMW dealership selling a used car. Audi can’t do anything about it.

The tax-related exception to this is an income-capped tax deduction or credit, which CAN alter the equation in some very specific circumstances if your income is just barely pushed above the cutoff. It’s not that you’d owe less taxes directly, but getting a $2000 raise that eliminates your eligibility for a $2500…

What? The cheat mode involves burning fuel LESS cleanly. NOx is a product of a lean, high temperature combustion environment. In order to cut NOx production, the car starts burning more fuel at a lower temperature, generating more particulates and hydrocarbon emissions. But all CARB/EPA care about is one number at a…

Not really shenanigans. GM gets your information from the registration agency, not the dealerships. They have to notify registered owners, and dealers only deal with customers. Taking a car into a dealership for service doesn’t really do much except update the service records.

Why GM doesn’t know the car has been…

I doubt most of that is on Wikipedia. They don’t go into technical detail.

Yes, the Q7 came later, but you’re missing the point that they’re not rebadged VWs—almost everything in the car was engineered for the premium brands and the VW badge gets you hand-me-down hardware at a discount. It exists purely to protect the profits of the more expensive models by increasing the production volume.…

Other way around—the Touareg is the Q7/Cayenne at a steep discount, without some of the performance tuning of the Cayenne or the luxury touches of the Q7. Other than infotainment, it doesn’t have really any VW hardware in it. Just design bits.

And that’s with 20% of the cars banned from sales altogether! Without the stop sale, that number would be even higher. The market is actually reacting somewhat proportionally here...go figure.

What other direction? I just said that most people don’t know what that number actually represents.

Yes, but that statement is equally true in the other direction as well: if you add up all of the NOx from all of the cars on the road, it’s less than a quarter of the US output and has come DOWN by a staggeringly huge amount since the 1970s. Compared to the overall US fleet average of 0.6g/mi (or Europe’s undoubtedly…

Although The Stupid Policies are real, part of the reason you can’t get a large loan for an unusual purchase like a classic car is that the bank can’t actually securitize it on the market with other auto loans. A new car, even though it depreciates like a brick, is both easy to model and easy to dump on an auction if…

Might just be me, but I got the sense from Clarissa’s story that crazy lady was, in her crazy way, giving her a gift to say thanks for putting up with her before she wandered off into the sunset for her next haunt.

It’s a net improvement over a MY2000 car, too. They emit about 20x the test limit and about 3.5x the average car on the road...a large multiple of a vanishingly small number is still a small number.

Boring troll is boring.

Yeah, I can see how reality would seem like a bizarre part of the universe for you.

What are you talking about? The very same study that outed them for having elevated NOx output concluded that they had also beat the particulate limit by >95x. They were more than compliant in the first place with regard to every other kind of emission.

Except that not meeting the standards is not the same as dirtier. VW TDIs beat both the standards and the averages of peer vehicles in every other metric: unburned fuel bypass, evaporative losses, VOC release, total hydrocarbon, CO2, CO, particulate emissions, etc. Plus the whole 30% better fuel economy than standard…

There is no way you can sell a car you bought new for a profit in normal conditions. There is no way you can sell a late-model car at break-even in normal conditions after any significant length of ownership.

So you’ve excluded 97% of the car market right out of the gate...pretty far cry from “every car can be resold for a profit”.