Guest Post by Eric Peters
This could kill VW – until recently (until last week) the world’s largest car company.
But unlike say the exploding Pinto fiasco this is not a story about defective cars. It is a story about defective public policy.
None of the VW cars now in the crosshairs are unreliable, dangerous or shoddily built. They were simply programmed to give their owners best-case fuel economy and performance. Software embedded within each vehicle’s computer – which monitors and controls the operation of the engine – would furtively adjust those parameters slightly to sneak by emissions tests when the vehicle was plugged in for testing. But once out on the road, the calibrations would revert to optimal – for mileage and performance.
Now, the hysterical media accounts of the above make it seem that the alteration via code of the vehicles’ exhaust emissions was anything but slight. Shrill cries of up to “40 times” the “allowable maximum” echo across the land.
Well, true.
But, misleading.
No comments:
Post a Comment