Emissions scandals thread
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Interesting article from ANE:
"BERLIN (Bloomberg) -- Volkswagen Group CEO Matthias Mueller said the automaker will delay or cancel non-essential projects as pressure mounts to slash spending in the wake of the diesel-emissions scandal.
"We will review all planned investments, and what isn’t absolutely vital will be canceled or delayed," Mueller told some 20,000 employees today at the company's headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany. "And that's why we will re-adjust our efficiency program. I will be completely clear: this won't be painless."
Fixing some 11 million rigged diesel vehicles is a costly prospect. The 6.5 billion euros ($7.29 billion) Volkswagen already set aside for repairs won’t be enough to cover fines and potential legal damages as well, Mueller said.
The company is exploring options from a simple software upgrade to outright replacing some cars. Fines may reach $7.4 billion in the U.S. alone, according to analysts from Sanford C. Bernstein.
VW could put a push to gain market share in the North America on hold as long as there is no clarity on the extent of the costs of fixing the cars and potential fines, said Jose Asumendi, a London-based analyst at JPMorgan Chase & Co.
The company outlined plans in March for an investment of about $1 billion to expand its vehicle assembly plant in Mexico's Puebla state. That work could face a delay, Asumendi said.
"It's going to to be tough to find projects they could chop that will actually move the needle," Asumendi said. "What they really need to do is get costs under control."
Labor leaders are pushing VW to reel in research and development spending to protect jobs, while management wants personnel expenses reduced as well, people familiar with the situation said before Mueller’s statement.
Other options include lowering purchasing expenses and reducing sponsorship activities, with the extent of the measures dependent on the cost of the cleanup, said the people, who asked not to be named because the talks are private.
"We will pay extra attention to bonus payments to members of the management board," Bernd Osterloh, a supervisory board member and head of the works council, told employees at the today's meeting. All projects and investments will need to be examined, and “we will have to question everything that’s not economical,” he said.
VW shares rose 1.1 percent to 94.55 euros at 1:27 p.m. in Frankfurt. The scandal has wiped some 29 billion euros off Volkswagen’s market capitalization.
'Incredibly inefficient'
VW may be forced to tighten an “incredibly inefficient” organization and lop funding out of a $17.4 billion r&d budget that was the world’s biggest last year, about equal to the combined figure for Apple and Google, said Arndt Ellinghorst, a London-based analyst with Evercore ISI.
Volkswagen’s r&d spending was higher than at Ford Motor Co. and General Motors combined.
“Where’s the innovation? Obviously not in diesel engines,” Ellinghorst said. “There’s a culture of spending and a lack of focus on efficiency in favor of striving to be bigger.”
Volkswagen’s personnel costs at 16.7 percent of sales are the highest since 1997, while purchasing costs are also at a peak, he said. Half the company’s board is composed of labor representatives, and more than 60,000 people work for VW in Wolfsburg.
Secure jobs
The government of Lower Saxony, where VW is based, also has an unusually strong position of leadership in the company and owns about one-fifth of its voting shares. The government must “work with all its strength to secure these jobs,” Lower Saxony Prime Minister Stephan Weil wrote employees in an Oct. 5 letter.
Discussions over savings at Volkswagen are in early stages as the company focuses on repairs to satisfy regulators, the people familiar with the situation said. The company has until tomorrow to present a plan for fixing some 2.8 million diesel vehicles it sold in Germany.
About 8 million of the Volkswagen cars that had software designed to cheat U.S. emissions tests were sold in Europe, the company told German lawmakers in an Oct. 2 "
I find the comments about high inefficiency interesting. I can't help but think that Porsche and Audi always look so healthy because VW is carry all the costs.. though given they ownership structures I guess that would be an arse about face way of doing it.
"BERLIN (Bloomberg) -- Volkswagen Group CEO Matthias Mueller said the automaker will delay or cancel non-essential projects as pressure mounts to slash spending in the wake of the diesel-emissions scandal.
"We will review all planned investments, and what isn’t absolutely vital will be canceled or delayed," Mueller told some 20,000 employees today at the company's headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany. "And that's why we will re-adjust our efficiency program. I will be completely clear: this won't be painless."
Fixing some 11 million rigged diesel vehicles is a costly prospect. The 6.5 billion euros ($7.29 billion) Volkswagen already set aside for repairs won’t be enough to cover fines and potential legal damages as well, Mueller said.
The company is exploring options from a simple software upgrade to outright replacing some cars. Fines may reach $7.4 billion in the U.S. alone, according to analysts from Sanford C. Bernstein.
VW could put a push to gain market share in the North America on hold as long as there is no clarity on the extent of the costs of fixing the cars and potential fines, said Jose Asumendi, a London-based analyst at JPMorgan Chase & Co.
The company outlined plans in March for an investment of about $1 billion to expand its vehicle assembly plant in Mexico's Puebla state. That work could face a delay, Asumendi said.
"It's going to to be tough to find projects they could chop that will actually move the needle," Asumendi said. "What they really need to do is get costs under control."
Labor leaders are pushing VW to reel in research and development spending to protect jobs, while management wants personnel expenses reduced as well, people familiar with the situation said before Mueller’s statement.
Other options include lowering purchasing expenses and reducing sponsorship activities, with the extent of the measures dependent on the cost of the cleanup, said the people, who asked not to be named because the talks are private.
"We will pay extra attention to bonus payments to members of the management board," Bernd Osterloh, a supervisory board member and head of the works council, told employees at the today's meeting. All projects and investments will need to be examined, and “we will have to question everything that’s not economical,” he said.
VW shares rose 1.1 percent to 94.55 euros at 1:27 p.m. in Frankfurt. The scandal has wiped some 29 billion euros off Volkswagen’s market capitalization.
'Incredibly inefficient'
VW may be forced to tighten an “incredibly inefficient” organization and lop funding out of a $17.4 billion r&d budget that was the world’s biggest last year, about equal to the combined figure for Apple and Google, said Arndt Ellinghorst, a London-based analyst with Evercore ISI.
Volkswagen’s r&d spending was higher than at Ford Motor Co. and General Motors combined.
“Where’s the innovation? Obviously not in diesel engines,” Ellinghorst said. “There’s a culture of spending and a lack of focus on efficiency in favor of striving to be bigger.”
Volkswagen’s personnel costs at 16.7 percent of sales are the highest since 1997, while purchasing costs are also at a peak, he said. Half the company’s board is composed of labor representatives, and more than 60,000 people work for VW in Wolfsburg.
Secure jobs
The government of Lower Saxony, where VW is based, also has an unusually strong position of leadership in the company and owns about one-fifth of its voting shares. The government must “work with all its strength to secure these jobs,” Lower Saxony Prime Minister Stephan Weil wrote employees in an Oct. 5 letter.
Discussions over savings at Volkswagen are in early stages as the company focuses on repairs to satisfy regulators, the people familiar with the situation said. The company has until tomorrow to present a plan for fixing some 2.8 million diesel vehicles it sold in Germany.
About 8 million of the Volkswagen cars that had software designed to cheat U.S. emissions tests were sold in Europe, the company told German lawmakers in an Oct. 2 "
I find the comments about high inefficiency interesting. I can't help but think that Porsche and Audi always look so healthy because VW is carry all the costs.. though given they ownership structures I guess that would be an arse about face way of doing it.
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Just stop diesels and pump your R&D into reducing petrol CO2 even further. It's already pretty impressive compared to where it was ten years ago and the NOx levels are much more suitable.
The way modern turbo petrols are being geared is not too dissimilar to a turbo diesel in mid-range urge on family car engines anyway.
The way modern turbo petrols are being geared is not too dissimilar to a turbo diesel in mid-range urge on family car engines anyway.
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To be fair to Porsche and Audi, they both operate in much more profitable sectors of the market. Making cars is proportionally more expensive when cars are cheap, and you have to sell a lot more of them to make the numbers work.
A VW Up costs little less than a Golf to make - it's about three quarters the weight of a Golf, which in simplified terms means it uses three quarters of the materials, and takes broadly as long to make (for simplicity's sake, 100% of the labour costs of a Golf), yet VW has to sell it for half the price because of its market class.
Whereas Audi gets to enjoy the economies of scale of something like the MQB platform - even if it co-develops the platform and the engines, its costs are shared by VW, Seat, Skoda etc - but it can instantly bung £3k on the price of an A3 compared to the equivalent Golf. That £3k is, to all intents and purposes, pure profit.
Porsche does a similar thing. A Cayenne or a Macan isn't massively expensive to make in the greater scheme of things - a few nicer materials here and there, a largely bespoke engine rather than a VW parts bin thing now and then - but it can sell them for nice healthy price tags. And of course, offer a long and expensive list of options that add very little to the bottom line for Porsche but can see the customer paying ten or twenty grand extra... and you can see where they make their profits.
I think the mention of "inefficiency", and the following comment about slashing R&D budgets, more likely suggests that VW wasn't really breaking the mould with anything it was developing. Beyond some electronics here and making an engine incrementally more powerful and fuel-efficient there, when was the last time they came up with something game-changing? I like the XL1 for example, but an aerodynamic diesel hybrid is hardly an earth-shattering concept...
Much as I'd prefer to see (and smell) petrol cars to diesel ones, turbocharged diesels do still have much greater real-world efficiency than turbocharged petrols. Few cars meet their official consumption figures, but some of the current petrols are chronically bad at doing so, whereas diesels merely miss the mark.
Better are the naturally-aspirated petrols found in small, light cars. Any of the three-cylinder city cars on the market right now - VW Up, Toyota Aygo, Smart Fortwo, Hyundai i10 etc - will get a fairly easy 60mpg in regular driving. No, they're not particularly quick, but they're proof that a the simple formula of a small engine in a lightweight car works.
Personally - and I know this is unlikely to happen - I'd like to see how far VW could advance electric vehicles, if they plugged the same sort of money into those as they have into diesels over the last few decades.
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This, to my mind, is one of the biggest bugbears with current economy testing. It's not that turbocharged gasoline engines are not economical. It's just that they're so well-engineered to pass testing regimens that there's very little benefit to driving better than the official test cycle.
Whereas with the aforementioned three-pot economy cars, exceeding the relatively conservative economy ratings is rather easy.
I wish economy testing would cover the full spectrum, from hypermiling to lead-footing, aside from the "realistic" drive cycles.
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Wrong thread
Last edited:
Danoff
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VW investigating older gen EA288 engines for the cheat software now:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34601593
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34601593
- 20,681
- TenEightyOne
- TenEightyOne
They're effectively the same cars... the scandal affects many cars or commercial vehicles branded as Volkswagen, Skoda, Audi and Seat.
Oh dear
Seems it doesn't affect Euro models though.
I know! Did you think that I didn't know that Audi is actually a rebranded VW with some differences?
I was talking about their gasoline cars and the oil consumption of these cars, you know the 2.0 TFSI, and not the diesel (dieselgate) VW's. That's why I said that it's not really on topic.
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- TenEightyOne
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Truer in some cases than others, the common platform doesn't always mean that the entire build is the same with different body panels.
The motoring press continues to speculate that there are a number of petrol engines involved, as I'm sure you're aware. I'd presumed that you were nominating one and that you were unaware that VW group makes several brands. Apologies.
Thank you very much. No need to apologize. Appreciated though.
The engines, suspension, electronics are almost the same for all the cars from the VW group, except for Porsche ofcourse.
Audi says it is a TFSI and VW calls it a TSI but these engine are basically the same. I'm saying this to let you know that I'm aware that Audi, Seat, Skoda, VW, .... are practically the same cars, with some differences ofcourse.
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@AudiMan2011 I've got my eye on you and your emissions. 
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Oh dear
Seems it doesn't affect Euro models though.
I don't really trust them saying it does not affect Euro models. My family car is a 56 Reg Passat 2.0 TDI so I am expecting an announcement at some point saying that even Euro models will be affected
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EA288 diesel engines don't have the cheat software:
http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/news/vo...ns-scandal-ea288-diesel-engines-not-affected/
It still won't do much for VW's reputation.
http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/news/vo...ns-scandal-ea288-diesel-engines-not-affected/
It still won't do much for VW's reputation.
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So now GM has some anomalous readings to explain...
"In testing of the Opel Zafira 1.6 CDTi, performed at the Bern University of Applied Sciences, GM’s diesel engine passed NEDC cycle NOx tests performed on a two-wheel (single-axle) rolling road but emitted two to four times the Euro6 limit for NOx when the same test was performed on a four-wheel rolling road. This strongly indicates that a software “test mode” exists for this engine, although Opel insists that “The software developed by GM does not contain any features that can detect whether the vehicle is being subjected to an emissions test.” But, says International Transport Advisor Axel Friedrich, “I have no normal, technically plausible explanation for the emission behavior of the Opel vehicle.”
Linky
"In testing of the Opel Zafira 1.6 CDTi, performed at the Bern University of Applied Sciences, GM’s diesel engine passed NEDC cycle NOx tests performed on a two-wheel (single-axle) rolling road but emitted two to four times the Euro6 limit for NOx when the same test was performed on a four-wheel rolling road. This strongly indicates that a software “test mode” exists for this engine, although Opel insists that “The software developed by GM does not contain any features that can detect whether the vehicle is being subjected to an emissions test.” But, says International Transport Advisor Axel Friedrich, “I have no normal, technically plausible explanation for the emission behavior of the Opel vehicle.”
Linky
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- SanjiHimura
The big difference could rely on which dyno can provide 4WD emissions testing. There is really no real standard in emissions testing as far as the dyno selection is concerned.
And for the record, since I live in a town which rides along three sides of a county line, emissions testing in Texas is done for smog, and the testing for such can be administered on a county by county basis for 24 years from a car's model year +2 years. In Tarrant and Parker Counties (I actually live in the former), they do test for smog, unlike Wise county they don't.
Diesels, ironically enough, are automatically exempt from smog testing in the state. Smog testing is only for petrol fueled engines.
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One way to eliminate dyno-to-dyno discrepancies is to simply run the 4WD dyno both with the rear wheels on the rollers and off of them... you should be able to adjust the rear roller position so that they sit away from the rear tires... this minimizes the differences.
But in the end, yes, there really is no standard requiring a certain type of dyno, so any testing done this way should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Many cars have (non-cheating) fail-safe modes that restrict power if there isn't enough airflow over the radiator, or if the discrepancy in wheel-speed is too great... just because there's a difference in emissions doesn't mean there's a cheat device, so it's best to proceed carefully in this case... especially as the discrepancy was found between dynos, and not between the dyno and real world driving.
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I really fail to see why it is so hard to stick a probe in an exhaust, plug in a laptop to the obd and go for a drive.
And to keep the car makers from cheating, announce that there will be secret spot checks with cars taken from dealers.
And to keep the car makers from cheating, announce that there will be secret spot checks with cars taken from dealers.
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True. We mustn't forget that engines are machines. The test could differ by as much as 30 bhp from real road conditions. Does that mean that car makers are at fault? No, I blame our respective governments and HOW they test emissions. If the standard is to be applied at the dyno, the test is really rigged at the start because there is no real world data to tell how much of an impact any government's CO2's reduction efforts have on the environment, especially in respect to international treaties.
