Perhaps Volkswagen was hoping they could get away with cheating long enough to dump more antiquated ICE (internal combustion engine) inventory onto a naive/complacent public. But the gig is up. A district court in Düsseldorf, Germany this week found that Volkswagen’s software fix for vehicles affected by its 2015 Dieselgate emissions cheating scandal actually contained another cheating device. See Volkswagen’s Diselgate software fix has another cheat device: German court:
With this development, the carmaker could face a new wave of claims from hundreds of thousands of car buyers whose vehicles were supposedly addressed by the Dieselgate software fix. This could also result in an equally large number of Volkswagen diesel owners receiving compensation over the company’s newly-discovered emissions manipulation efforts.
Emissions fraud has been a Modus Operandi of most of the major ICE automakers in the past decade, and environmental and air quality harm with related illness and deaths have been the cost. Fortunately, electric vehicle (EV) technology is now sufficiently evolved to provide another alternative and sales are growing exponentially while conventional vehicle sales slump worldwide. In Norway, as an example, sales of some diesel car models are down more than 95% over the last six years. See: Diesel Car sales plunge in the world’s hottest EV market:
For instance, Volvo’s top diesel models – the V40, V70 and XC60 – dropped from close to 9,000 units sold in 2013 to around 400 in the first half of 2019.
On average, the market share of diesel and gasoline vehicles stood at 60% and 29%, respectively, in 2013, but fell to just 32% and 17% in the first half of 2019.
Major automakers are finally getting the memo. As shown below the number of EV and plug-in hybrid models on offer in Europe is set to triple over the next 16 months alone.
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