The VW scandal. How far does it go?

[tintin]

If you think that's not good, this is much worse:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VZFP3lW4gU

But please be warned - this is a very strongly worded/extreme (and anti-VW) Aussie piece on the VW scandal, not short of an exaggeration/extreme comparison or two.

As the proud owner of a beautiful S8 which I love to bits (and three VW Beetles from the age of 19 onwards), I find it sad that this is what VW have opened themselves up to.

[homer simpson]

Certainly some huge hatred from VW there. Check out the first reply by 'AutoExpertTV'

[tintin]

From VW or for VW? Homer - it's probably the most extreme commentary I've seen.

[oldnick]

Originally Posted by homer simpson

Certainly some huge hatred from VW there. Check out the first reply by 'AutoExpertTV'

not exactly the most balanced report I have ever seen
but even he had to admit that VAG is just the tip of the iceberg , and for that reason I am sure that his estimation of how hard this will hit VAG's sales and profits is grossly wrong , joe public is fairly easy conned but not to the extent that they believe all the other companies in the industry are as white as snow

and 5 years to correct all the cars ? what percentage of owners will be flashers , not a lot !

[Witchfinder]

Diesel is dying, here comes hydrogen:
http://www.theguardian.com/environme...britains-roads

[David's8]

...and now they are suggesting that petrol cars may be implicated in the misleading of regulatory authorities and buyers.

OMG!!! I bought this 4.2ltr 360bhp car on the understanding that I was saving the world, that it would do 100mpg, bring world peace and save cyclists when i hit them. Have I been mis-led all this time???

Anyone who bought a diesel on the basis that it was cleaner and less harmful needs re-education in the sciences and learn to be a bit more sceptical of marketing ****e. The australian guy is just exercising what passes for normal discussion and argument in Oz. (have you ever watched their parliamentary debates?).

[briang9]

Originally Posted by David's8

...and now they are suggesting that petrol cars may be implicated in the misleading of regulatory authorities and buyers.

OMG!!! I bought this 4.2ltr 360bhp car on the understanding that I was saving the world, that it would do 100mpg, bring world peace and save cyclists when i hit them. Have I been mis-led all this time???

Anyone who bought a diesel on the basis that it was cleaner and less harmful needs re-education in the sciences and learn to be a bit more sceptical of marketing ****e. The australian guy is just exercising what passes for normal discussion and argument in Oz. (have you ever watched their parliamentary debates?).

probably the most sensible comment I have read anywhere on this whole nonsense

[Conquistador]

Uh oh!

[tintin]

Originally Posted by Witchfinder

Diesel is dying, here comes hydrogen:
http://www.theguardian.com/environme...britains-roads

Link here - http://electrek.co/2016/05/23/tesla-...scam/?pushup=1 , text below

Not likely - according to Marc Tarpenning, who's calling hydrogen fuel cells a “scam”. He also said out loud what many in the industry are thinking – that energy companies are supporting the technology for its inefficiency.

Tarpenning is not with Tesla anymore, but he is one of the original co-founders with his long-time friend and business partner, Martin Eberhard. He was on the Internet History Podcast last week to talk about his ventures and he explained in great details the foundings of his two companies; NuvoMedia and Tesla Motors.

"If your goal is to reduce energy consumption, petrol or whatever resource, you" want to use it as efficiently as possible. You don’t want to pick something that consumes a lot for whatever reason, and hydrogen is uniquely bad.

There’s a saying in the auto industry that hydrogen is the future of transportation and always will be. It’s a scam as far as I can tell because the energy equation is terrible. It’s just terrible.

People will say that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but it’s abundant out there in the universe not here. We live on a planet where hydrogen is super reactive – it’s bound up into everything. It’s bound up into water, wood and everything else. They only way that you get hydrogen requires you to pour energy into it to break it from the chemical bonds.

Electrolysis is the most commen method. You put electricity in water and it separates it, but you are pouring energy in order to make hydrogen, and then you have to compress it and that takes energy, and then you have to transport it to wherever you actually need it, which is really difficult because hydrogen is much harder to work with than gasoline or even natural gas – and natural gas is not that easy.

And then you ultimately have to place it into a car where you’ll have a very high-pressure vessel which offers its own safety issues – and that’s only to convert it back again to electricity to make the car go because hydrogen fuel cell cars are really electric cars. They just have an extraordinary bad battery.

Hydrogen is an energy carrier and not a primary fuel source on this planet. Maybe out somewhere in the universe, but not on a terrestrial planet.

When you add that all up, it turns out that the amount of energy per kilometer driven is just terrible. It’s way worse than almost anything else you can come up with – which I always suspected is one of the reasons why the energy companies have long been big proponents of it.

When we were raising money the first time, we had very carefully gone through the math to understand fuel cells because there was a bunch of money going into fuel cells at the time and we also looked at biofuels and ethanols – we sort of went down the whole list to figure out what the most energy efficient system was – which turned out to be battery electric cars"

[steamship]

Originally Posted by tintin

according to Marc Tarpenning, who's calling hydrogen fuel cells a “scam”. He also said out loud what many in the industry are thinking – that energy companies are supporting the technology for its inefficiency.

Isn't that also true for the likes of Wind farms and solar panels? Read something a couple of years back that both technologies are very inefficient in operation, and the likes of Wind farms were just money earners for the manufacturers.