10 years of the Volkswagen dieselgate scandal

These days, the news is that it has already been 10 years since one of the biggest scandals in the automotive industry, damaging the German industry forever. Basically, Volkswagen was selling its diesel cars as premium cars, with good performance and reliability. Back then, Volkswagen got good reviews in all tests and reviews, and sold their cars as clean (do you remember the clean diesel badges?) What could go wrong?

To get those good results and pass the anti-pollution tests, they installed a hidden software that changed the behaviour of the cars while they were tested in the lab. They could know when the car was being tested because some patterns only happen when the car is being tested, for example full throttle acceleration and erratic driving, outside the normal. When this was detected, the software changed the engine behaviour to pollute outside the norm. However, in normal daily use, the pollution levels were several times over the norm.

They thought that they were very smart and no one would test the emissions while driving normally. However, an American NGO treated that and the scandal exploded. Wolkswagen had to pay several compensations to the owners and launch plans to buy back the cars, especially in the USA, but as far as I know, it had to pay nothing in Spain. But also the image was badly damaged in many countries.

To try to improve their image, they had to improvise, a thing that Germans don’t do well, and big old companies like Volkswagen even less. They launched the ID line like ID4, which pretended to be the future of the brand; however, this has been a huge failure. Also, the need to do something fast and get results in the short term affected the whole European industry.

Politicians in Europe launched absurdly strict anti-pollution regulations, punishing all the European car makers. They introduced low-emissions areas, and at least in the case of Spain, it was absurdly designed because it took into consideration the year of the car and the pollution standard (Euro 5 or Euro 6, for example), introducing bans on some cars. This could sound good for the environment, but you are pushing the owners of a bit of old cars, normally workers who use them to commute, to buy another car, which they probably cannot afford. Also, in many cases, public transportation is not realistically possible.

For me, the huge crisis and challenges of the European car industry started at that moment, and it is Volkswagen’s fault. And also, it is part of the reason why almost all cars in Europe are SUVs, without personality that look and behave like washing machines. Nowadays, the new generation is not interested in cars, and if they like cars, they would like things like Tesla. Even could be nice, the quality and durability of the nowadays cars are not even close to old cars in the eighties, nineties or early thousands.

I guess that we will have to adapt to the new times, even though that doesn’t look interesting., I feel that I am not going to buy a new car for a very long time. Just enjoy your car until it is banned or you get broke. And if you are affected by some kind of ban or low-emissions area, remember that the origin of today’s bans and regulations is Volkswagen. If you are interested in this topic, I recommend the episode of the Dirty Money show, which can be found on Netflix.