Wow, man! Deep. Communism ftmfw.

lol I'm not sure where you got communism out of my post but I thought it funny all the same.

Actually, it may not be such a bad idea turning back to riding horses. lol

Methane for power generators. Nitrate for fertilizers.

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RhHuW2gglw"]How Poop Will Power The World - YouTube[/ame]

The thing would be there would be too much methane for power and too much nitrate for fertilizer.
To replace every vehicle with a horse would not be a straight one for one exchange (that would be bad enough really). Every passenger car woul require either one horse per person or two horses to pull a buggy. Small trucks would require teams of 4 to 6 and heavy trucks would need even more. On top of the number you would not be looking at the nice small riding types but the big heavy mothers that suck up resources like crazy.
The plus side is they could be eaten when they no longer can work.

We should do that with people. Soylent green is people!

According to what's been reported so far:

• VW diesels were tested in 2013, and found to emit up to 40 times as much pollution (well over legal limits) when being driven normally. The resulting study was published in May 2014.
• VW denied it in 9 meetings specifically about this issue. At the 10th meeting (earlier this month), they "ran out of excuses" and finally admitted that an algorithm was implemented to run more cleanly during emissions tests.
• This issue affects ("at least" or "up to", depending on the source) 11 million vehicles sold in various markets since 2009.

If the above is accurate, then this is what should happen:

1. VW offers owners these options:
   • a full refund
   • a non-diesel loaner vehicle until it fixes the problem
2. VW fixes (or scraps) the affected vehicles.
3. VW updates the MPG and engine output ratings of affected vehicles.
4. VW is fined significantly.
5. The individuals that knew about it are punished (fired and possibly jailed).

The PR machine has begun spinning.

"“The test manipulations are a moral and political disaster for Volkswagen. The unlawful behaviour of engineers and technicians involved in engine development shocked Volkswagen just as much as it shocked the public."
Berthold Huber, the acting head of VW’s supervisory board.

From The Guardian.

The head of the Supervisory Board blames engineers and technicians, but not management. And then talks about VW as a entity separate from them, one which was shocked as much as the public was.

It will come down to this: DID the engineers comply with the requirements presented to them OR did they falsify the test results?

Engineers live by requirements BUT there is some leeway in how higher level requirements are interpreted. This "interpretation" is called derivation.
It is typically the systems engineer that get to determine how to word the derived requirements in ways that are verifiable by the test engineers.

If done properly the test engineers have a set of requirements that are simple and "not open for interpretation".

My bet was that the design engineers were presented with one set of requirements, while the test engineers were presented with a similar set of requirements with different wording.

It would be the management types in the middle (systems engineers are often management level) that did the massaging of the requirements as they went from the design stage to the test (verification) stage.

In the UK car road tax is based on emissions. So if the same issue becomes the reality here then is tax under payment to be recovered? Or are we, BRZ and GT86 drivers getting a rebate???

My FRS is literally the only "new" thing I own. We bought some nice kitchen appliances a few years ago because I love my wife and prefer marriage to an old stove.

I could see the drastic move towards disposal in the early 90s when I worked as a consumer electronics tech for a major retailer. In a few years we went from a healthy business doing component-level repair to replacing circuit boards to sacking techs.

The push for consumerism feels like a desperate landslide to me.

Strict adherence to design process may be the norm in aerospace but it's not nearly as well controlled for the automotive and trucking industry. That being said, I am amazed they attempted much less managed to keep their little secret for this long.

It is upsetting how we've moved towards a disposable mindset for damn near everything.
Particularly when a good chunk of the world would love to get our handmedowns

One article I read said that it has to do with DMCA. It's dangerous to reverse engineer encrypted systems, or something. I dunno. Bullshit either way.

That much is true but people talk and, undoubtedly, there were many involved in making the decision and committing resources to develop it.