Dieselgate!

As you may have heard in the news, Volkswagen has "cheated" emission control in the US. I may be a little late to the party here, but I'm going to write about it anyway. 

So, what essentially happend, was that VW faked emission control on a majority of their cars delivered to the US to get away from the strict emission laws in the US. These weren't regular VW's, but diesels or TDI (Turbo Direct Injection), as their called. 

But how did they do it, you may ask. Well, it's kind of clever actually, (well, it's german engineers what did you expect), the car senses when it's on the road and when it's in emission control. When cars are emission tested, they are put on a dyno or a rolling road which messures the power output the vehicle puts to the ground. When they put the cars on the dyno, the car "de-tunes" it self down from about 140 hp to 115 hp, same with torque. This makes for lower CO2 emissions. 

Volkswagen Golf 2012

The reason VW did this, was to save from 5-10 billion US dollars. This wasn't the smartest move, since they now have to pay a 18 billion dollar fine to the US government. That is just the fine alone, think about how much it will cost to recall 11 MILLION cars!! That's one bill I'd want to stay out of. What VW has to do, is replace the catalytic converter in the car, which is made from zeolite. When this metal heats up, it releases more toxic gasses and is harmfull for the enviroment. What they will most likely do, is recall all the vehicles, and replace the catalytic converters with others made from Palladium. There isn't alot of this here on earth, but VW has already bought around 15 tonns of Palladium. These prices are going to go straight through the roof! 

When this scandal happened, The CEO of Volkswagen, stepped down from his position. To take his place was the CEO of Porsche. This isn't a bad thing since Porsche has done very well over the past years and if he passes that on to VW, it will not be so bad. 

Many have said the VW will go bankrupt, but having a 225 billion dollar revenue will hold up pretty nice. 

Source (for the catalytic converter part): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jQ3Swai4Ts