But why is this VW issue newsworthy? Because they set out to purposefully cheat regulations. Maybe if you find out that another company purposefully designed a flaw into a vehicle, that should be as newsworthy, but my feeling is that the above-mentioned issue isn't it. There have been many cases of cars having flaws where companies tried to cover up and not fix. I also get the feeling that some cases aren't as bad as the hype makes it sound.
There are lots of cases where loopholes are clearly exploited to circumvent an unreasonable regulation. Like Ford importing Transit Connects from Turkey with rear seats bolted to the floor so they can be considered a passenger car and thus avoid the 25% import duty (aka "Chicken Tax") on trucks, then at port of entry the seats get removed and tossed out.
Or even more granular things like our new shop's parking lot that requires a certain percentage of handicapped accessible spots, and as soon as the final city inspection is rubber stamped, those spots got striped over as regular ones (and doubles the parking spaces). Or the giant ventilation system they made us put in the shop, that MUST run the entire time the shop is in operation, and therefor they made it be wired up to come on with the lights. The electricians simply prewired in a "defeat switch" in the breaker panel, and as soon as the city rubber stamped us... you guessed it, the electrician came back out and put a switch on the ventilation system. We've been in operation since January 1, that system hasn't been turned on once, and nobody here has gotten sick because of some "fumes"
. And now we have a giant $28k ventilation system mounted on the roof that we don't use. The roof that had to be structurally uprated and cost itself an extra $60k. And the electric feed that had to be uprated for another $10k. And the natural gas service that also had to be uprated (because it preheats the air for use in winter) for an extra $12k. So, for $110k, the city got us a giant, ugly, useless albatross of nonsense bolted to the top of the roof. To keep us all "safe"
You should see the size (and I'm sure the cost is equally huge) of the stormwater reservoir the gov't made the car dealer I worked at put in when the new Lexus store was built. Imagine three olympic sized swimming pools set in the ground under the parking garage...
just to be able to hold rain water in case of a once-every-100-years type of flood happens.
But you know what they did? They built it as a lower level of the parking garage, so as soon as the ink was dry for the business, they could add ramps at each end and actually USE it for something. BTW, maybe 100 years from now there'll be a bunch of cheap brand new water damaged Lexus models for sale cheap
.
Unreasonable regulations make people and organizations and companies seek out and exploit any and all loopholes they can. It won't ever change. I think what Volkswagen did was stupid, but I can at least understand the drive to do so. I only hope, although I very much doubt it will happen, is that the regulatory bodies can see the standards put in place may simply be TOO stringent and Volkswagen's chicanery will have brought this to their attention. I really think all the money in trying to make 100+ year old technology "clean" would be better spent in pursuit of replacement technology to eventually offset and ultimately replace the piston engines anyways.
