VW have been naughty boys in the USA http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34311819

Share prices have dropped 20% today alone!!

the fact that they created a device to falsify test results won't stand well in court. pretty much fraud

Edited 21 September, 201510 yr by kiran_182

Diesel price dropping...Diesel cars involved in this fraud and I'm sure I heard somewhere that Diesel cars can be banned from big cities etc.

Anyone else see something happening here?

Yea it was the lib dems idea I think they've come up with to ban diesels, they even brought up about ice creams vans being not allowed to run!!

No vans, lorries, buses or US naval destroyers

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/09/seawater-to-fuel-navy-vessels-_n_5113822.html

It'll be interesting to see the fallout from this, especially as the EPA has just said it'll be investigating other manufacturers too. Diesel uptake is low in the US - it's a petrol and hybrid market. This could kill diesel demand, if people stop trusting it. And people will, especially if it turns out Volkswagen isn't alone.

I'm not overly surprised to see this though, the ongoing saga will depend on whether others have been as devious but more careful.

Diesel is an interesting debate in Europe, I think there's been a lot of over-hyping in some corners of the press. But some of it is justified, because diesels have been sold into sectors of the market where they just aren't suited.

For example, carbon-based taxation has created the myth that a city car with a diesel engine and low CO2 is good for the environment. Actually, in town, you'd have been better off in a petrol car.

But the argument ignores the valuable contribution diesels make for reducing the carbon emissions of motorway cars. And it assumes people bought (and buy) diesels because they've been duped. Your average BMW 320d customer is probably selecting it for reduced (company car) tax and fuel costs, then the badge, the comfort and the way it drives in some order below that. I doubt he or she is buying it to be green.

Ultimately if you buy a seven-seat MPV and only use it in town, and you're concerned about air quality, then you've not done your homework. But people do.

I guess the flip side of this will be discovering whether this is a widespread issue - particularly now that Euro 6 emissions standards have set strict limits for diesels. The industry is touting EU6 as the antidote to diesel demonising.

I was speaking to someone recently who said they'd annoyed green campaigners by suggesting a solution to London's air pollution would be to swap all black cabs for petrol Range Rover Sports. Ridiculous? Well a TX4 starts at £40k without tax. The price difference isn't huge. Tongue in cheek, obviously, but it did make me smile.

For example, carbon-based taxation has created the myth that a city car with a diesel engine and low CO2 is good for the environment. Actually, in town, you'd have been better off in a petrol car.

I've been trying to tell people this for years. In heavy start-stop traffic or short trips the average diesel is terrible on fuel. Plus you have that horrible thick black smoke coming out the exhaust as everyone seems to do a full bore start away from the lights.

Also I didn't realise black cabs were so expensive! Swapping them with Range Rover Sports would be a good idea, better seats, no black smoke and the sound of a V8!

Well the cost of compliance is going to kill small diesel cars, even if nothing else will. Meeting Euro 6 can mean an exhaust system full of filters, recirculation systems and AdBlue injection. That all adds to the cost of a Diesel engine.

In a big car, like say an E-Class, the percentage increase on the screen price is small, the mileage is high and the fuel savings are large. In a city car, the business case is harder to make. Hence in the UK there are no diesel city cars any more - Fiat has canned the 500 which was the last one. Or they had last time I spoke to them.

That's filtering upwards. Good petrol engines are now coming close to diesels on CO2, and actually in the supermini segment it's also hard to justify a diesel nowadays. On whole life costs and driver enjoyment, small turbocharged petrol engines are able to cut the mustard.

Actually it's even true of Golf-sized (lower medium) cars. Vauxhall has an Astra with a petrol engine which outstrips the most efficient diesel on company car tax - I think on whole-life costs too. It's cheaper to buy and no more expensive to run.

Interesting thought though. The most efficient petrol engines are usually direct injection units, and the trade off of these is particulate matter. Just like a diesel. Euro 6 limits for particulate matter are identical for diesel and direct injection petrol engines.

Edited 22 September, 201510 yr by Alex

Always seems to me that whatever they do the clean diesel engines is just making another byproduct that needs cleaning.

Get diesel because it's cheaper, increase CO emissions.

Get a cat and direct injection to increase efficiency and cut CO, get particulate emissions.

Get a DPF to catch the particulate emissions, get NOx emissions.

Poor me has just bought a nearly new diesel in february. At the time it was the perfect decision and now a load of diesel hate is coming and tax is gunna rise too, I was thinking of swapping it for a petrol golf or scirocco before it went bad or even a blue gt polo. Thing is with the amount of miles I do I might end up killing a petrol in less than 5 years or reducing its value to nothing.

That's why you buy a car that's worth nothing to start with. The ibiza was worth £700 when I bought it a year ago, 30k on, it still is.

Diesel prices won't collapse overnight. If you cover lots of miles it's still the fuel to have, it's still going to cost you less to run. That's what buyers are after, and it's demand that dictates prices.

That's what I mean when I say it's been blown out of all proportion. Not the Volkswagen thing - that genuinely is a massive scandal - but the banning of diesels. So far it's only London which has said it'll do anything, and the proposal is a hiked congestion charge which also applies to old petrol cars. You'll have sold your diesel car long before it gets banned from city centres.

And another

Found this on the mk1-3 owners Facebook...

These are quality haha

EDIT: that ones actually pretty crap

Edited 24 September, 201510 yr by wizardmanjm

Some stats for you. Not humorous, but still interesting.

In four days this crisis has wiped 26bn off the value of the Volkswagen Group.

To put that into perspective, that's more than twice the total value of PSA Peugeot-Citroen.

It's also the value of Paraguay's economy last year.

Ouch.

Edited 24 September, 201510 yr by Alex

Red Bulls F1 sponsership/buy out deal could be in trouble then Alex ??

I hope that it doesn't put vag in too much trouble...I don't like anything else!

Well the long-term problems are big, Volkswagen has years of settling class action lawsuits in which it hasn't got a leg to stand on. And that's assuming nothing is happening in Europe.

Volkswagen might look invincible but it isn't. If the share price starts to look flakey, investors might start to see the value in selling some of the brands. That starts to put it in a tricky situation, not one where it'll collapse completely but one which could leave it as a much smaller company.

Remember that Ford owned Jaguar, Land Rover, Aston Martin and Volvo ten years ago. Granted, it lost those through a financial crisis but Volkswagen might just have created its own here.

I'd have said they'll be carefully considering their options as far as expenditure is concerned.

That iceberg one is brilliant [emoji23] [emoji23] [emoji23] [emoji23]