If that’s it, then you might see a huge black market for loading or reloading the original cheating software, in the name of restoring performance. If it’s hardware, that’s a little trickier, but not much.
You betcha.
It crossed my mind that if the EPA really does level the full $18 billion fine, it might make more sense for VW to say “Screw it” and abandon the US market. On this side of the pond, they’re kind of a second-string player anyway.
The New German Empire… err… the European Union might be willing to enact some kind of shielding legislation to protect them from US-based lawsuits. (Perhaps a bankruptcy process that leaves all liabilties with an “Old VW” and all the assets with a “New VW”).
That’s crazy talk, particularly because VW recently announced that this affects 11 million vehicles, which means that these shenanigans were done on a worldwide level. The EU and Asia will want their piece of VW’s hide.
Okay, now we’re down the rabbit hole. That sort of speculation is just silly.
Other companies have pulled that dodge to survive bankruptcy. Why not them too?
the amount of the fine will (in my sort-of-educated opinion) hinge on what it costs VW per car to come up with a compliant, satisfactory remedy. if- worst case- they have to spend $5,000 retrofitting all of these cars with AdBLue systems, that’d cost them about $2.5 billion and the resulting fine on top of that might be fairly small at least in relation to the numbers we’re talking about.
if they can’t feasibly bring all of those cars into compliance, well, holy shit.
They’re not going to be bankrupt. They have something like $25 billion in cash and liquid assets, and turned a $13 bn profit last year. If this was Jaguar or Tesla, it would be game over, but VW is the largest automaker in the world and has more than enough money to pay every fine and lawsuit and refit its vehicles.
jz raises a good point; if they don’t have a way to refit those vehicles, they’re fucked. But barring that (unlikely) circumstance, this is very bad news for VW but nothing approaching the end of the line.
Is there a way that car owners can be forced to submit their cars for a recall? Most recalls are in the immediate selfish interest of the car owner - they cost nothing, and make the car safer or more reliable. In this case, though, the recall will probably hurt the performance and economy of the cars in question. There could be a lot of owners who prefer not to submit to this change. I’m pretty sure that in California you can’t sell a car with an outstanding recall, but what about owners who keep their cars for a long time (and wouldn’t this create an incentive to keep your unrecalled VW as long as possible?).
I agree that this is unlikely to kill VW, but there will be costs to the company other than the fines and recall costs. One of the biggest will be loss of sales. The company’s reputation just took a huge hit. They lied to everyone about what they were selling. Would you buy a VW today?
In CA and the other states that have adopted CA regulations you can’t get an inspection sticker if you have outstanding recalls.
Problem with that is, if you want to drive your car out on the road, it has to be registered with the gubmint which, it turns out, makes it really easy for them to know who is driving what kind of car and deny reregistration for certain cars that haven’t been recertified to be pollution-control compliant.
As Rick noted on the first page of this thread:
If i interpret this correctly, it means that all affected VWs in California will be subject to a recall to have these emission issues fixed, and you won’t be able to renew your car’s registration without proof that you’ve had it done.
Rick’s post notes that the state does not always require such proof, but you can bet your bottom dollar that they will in this particular case.
VW will survive, the German government won’t let them go bust.
And because these cars are technically not street legal now, any state could refuse to allow you to register an un-remedied car.
It seems they are actually street legal for the time being; the EPA says it will allow VW to keep selling new diesels while it works out how to fix the issue.
Sure.* Just not a diesel. 
In all seriousness, we just found out GM has been lying to the NHTSA about recalling vehicles with faulty ignitions that have actually killed people. Toyota lied about the Prius’ fuel efficiency. Ford admitted that the police model Crown Vic had a fuel tank issue that resulted in a high risk of fire and that it didn’t do anything about it until the NHTSA ordered it to; they also admitted that the 90s Explorer had a high rollover risk, but didn’t bother to do anything substantial to correct the problem until the Firestone blowout controversy.
Honestly, I don’t trust most manufacturers’ claims about anything. I am slightly less concerned about VW’s problems simply because they are not safety-related. Though of course there might be other stuff going on.
*I drive a VW now, and I am not altogether thrilled about the fact that my car has a well-documented water pump failure problem that VW failed to issue a recall for until about three years after it came to light.
I can’t figure out how the VW thing went undetected for so long. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of cars sold over several model years… and not once did any gummint agency, university, competitor or just plain curious mechanic ever do a road emissions test and notice the considerable difference from the static emissions measurements?
Not once?
I think that’s mostly so the EPA doesn’t turn public opinion against itself by telling 500,000 people they have to park their cars. Plus, they’re blocking the import of 2016MY cars. Dealers could still sell their remaining 2015 TDI inventory but VW of America has ordered a stop-sale to its dealers, probably as something of a “good faith” gesture.
I can’t imagine Germany would allow anything too severe to be leveled by the EU. VW is absolutely in the “too big to fail” category for them.
Still, the worst bite of all might come from China. Beijing has some of the worst air pollution on earth, so I expect that their reaction to this might be… severe.
VW sells an entirely different lineup in China. I don’t think any of them are diesels.
This really does seem to be a problem solvable by re-flashing the control firmware and little else. The solution need take no more than ten minutes a car, with no parts needed; it’s the fallout over performance and mileage that is going to cause the problems.
That’s like saying you can solve an accidental gunshot by taking out the rest of the bullets. Well, yeah, but the guy you hit is still bleeding over there.