If you somehow missed the full story, there is a great up-to-the-minute summary available here on CNN Money. Essentially, the bottom line in this: If you drive a VW TDI vehicle (2009-15 Passat or Jetta or Audi A3), you have been cranking 10-40 times as much nitrous oxide into the air than VW led you to believe.
And the rest of us have been breathing it.
We know it's not your fault. You thought that diesel, which is known to burn very dirty, could burn at acceptable emission levels because Volkswagen told you that they'd unlocked the secret to clean burning diesel and were happy to sell you a car that could do it. You're not a mechanical engineer, and you're not a scientist. Why would you ever question a big, international conglomerate like Volkswagen? There's just no way that a company that's been around since 1937 could have survived for 78 years if it was engaging in dishonest practices.
And besides, half a million VW TDI units had passed emissions tests in the US alone. So obviously, VW cracked the code. Right? Right?
Wrong. And now you know - big corporations cannot necessarily be trusted to do as they say and say what they do. Shocker.
Okay, okay, enough sarcasm and negativity. I tried not to go there, I really did... but this travesty makes VW such an easy target right now.
Instead of taking a longer stroll down Negativity Lane, let's look on the bright side. And make no mistakes - for electric car advocates, this situation has a lot of bright sides.
Not only did VW lie... they lied about the feasibility of accomplishing something that would slow the immediate urgency of moving towards electric cars for the masses. If you're a big oil advocate, then you gotta love diesel. What could be more thrilling than using every single grade of the crude oil that is extracted from the earth? It just doesn't get any better.
But now we find it's all a lie. Diesel is a nasty fuel and it burns in such a way that you don't need to be a Californian to despise. No folks, this won't save us from running out of gasoline in the next 70? 100? whatever! years. It's time to move on and one of the directions we clearly need to move is cleaning up the grid, speeding up the electric car charging process... and putting battery power at the steering wheels of the masses.
Volkswagen has been ordered to clean up the problem and fix every one of the over 1 million cars worldwide that are belching their filth into our atmosphere. But the company may not survive. In addition to the cost of the recall, which hasn't even begun but is estimated to total about 7.3 billion dollars, there will be the fines - and the lawsuits. A lot of people will get rich over this but it's unlikely that these people will work for Volkswagen. What I'd really like to see (and I'm certainly not alone in this) is the investment of the fines paid by VW into cleaning up the damage that has been done to the environment or, better yet, beefing up the charging infrastructure around the globe. Can you think of anything more poetic?
Well, maybe this...a 1970 VW Bug that's been converted to be an electric car.
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