To be even fairer, having such overly-strict emissions standards for diesels was a bad idea to begin with. Destroying diesels and forcing everyone into gasoline cars instead saved a little bit of pollutants like soot, NOx, and SOx, sure, but came at the expense of much lower efficiency/higher greenhouse gas emissions.
The worst part is that biodiesel burns much cleaner than dino-diesel, but isn’t compatible with the fancy injection systems and emissions equipment on “clean diesel” engines. If we had let them keep building the same circa-2000 engine tech, we could’ve cleaned up the whole fleet at once simply by switching out the fuel (while still keeping the same high efficiency and reducing GHG emissions to net-zero because biodiesel is part of the short-term carbon cycle instead of the long-term one), but now we can’t because all the new engines (at least, the few remaining on the market in trucks but not small cars) break if you use more than 10% or so biodiesel in them.
To be fair, their reputation for having expensive parts fail right after the odometer ticked past the number on the warranty was earned long before dieselgate.
To be fair, didn’t it eventually come out that pretty much everyone was cheating? VW just got caught first.
To be even fairer, having such overly-strict emissions standards for diesels was a bad idea to begin with. Destroying diesels and forcing everyone into gasoline cars instead saved a little bit of pollutants like soot, NOx, and SOx, sure, but came at the expense of much lower efficiency/higher greenhouse gas emissions.
The worst part is that biodiesel burns much cleaner than dino-diesel, but isn’t compatible with the fancy injection systems and emissions equipment on “clean diesel” engines. If we had let them keep building the same circa-2000 engine tech, we could’ve cleaned up the whole fleet at once simply by switching out the fuel (while still keeping the same high efficiency and reducing GHG emissions to net-zero because biodiesel is part of the short-term carbon cycle instead of the long-term one), but now we can’t because all the new engines (at least, the few remaining on the market in trucks but not small cars) break if you use more than 10% or so biodiesel in them.
At least in North America I think they were the only brand selling passenger vehicles diesel engines.
Which other manufacturers were cheating?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
Check the “Other manufacturers” heading.
Basically all of them.
But this is what happen when you have rules set by people that think they can ignore physical laws and somehow make it work.
To be fair, their reputation for having expensive parts fail right after the odometer ticked past the number on the warranty was earned long before dieselgate.
Dieselgate really worked out for me. The car hadn’t started to break down yet and we were just starting to need a minivan when it all came out.