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Comment by emcrazyone | Hacker News Reader

Curious, are you going to return the vehicle for any recall notices? You realize once they "fix" the emissions issue, the performance of the car is probably going to tank. I have to imagine you will no longer realize the ratings as advertised on the Monroney sticker?

I was thinking to myself, I would avoid the recall but then I think there is fine print that states the OEM must be able to service your vehicle to maintain said warranty.

Interesting pickle. How stupid VW is.

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The impact of flashing the fix to the ECU remains to be seen - my instinct is the loss would be in the 10% - 20% range (I have an older TDI VW, with a different engine). Given that these vehicles are typically getting 50 - 55mpg, that still wouldn't make them useless. Obviously disappointing though. I wish we could get Toyota diesels in the US...

41MPG is the rated highway MPG that is shown on the sticker for the VW Jetta in the year range from the article. I have a 2011 and I would average between 40-45 on the highway and 30-35 in town. 50-55 is not typical for these specific cars.

I average 51mpg in an unmodified 2013 Jetta TDI on the highway, usually at exactly 65mph.

I have a Golf TDI and I get 38 mpg average. I'm skeptical that any of these cars are typically getting 50-55 mpg.

My old 2009 VW Jetta TDI averaged over 50MPG highway on a cross-country road trip, 38MPG in combined highway/city driving in the Canadian winter. If you're keeping it to highway driving, it's totally doable.

But definitely not typical.

A lot of fuel efficiency is due to how one drives their car.[0]

[0]http://www.wikihow.com/Hypermile

http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/realmpg/volkswagen/golf-vii-2013 (A site where people submit their MPGs)

The Golf VII 1.6 TDI can easily achieve 55 MPG for combined. The 2.0 TDI, obviously worse, around 47-52 MPG.

These are obviously UK/Euro models. I'm not sure if/how they differ from any other markets.

I imagine a lot of customers will avoid getting the "fix" in order to maintain the performance of their cars. There's not much that they can do to force these people to bring their cars back.

tend to agree. In Michigan, there are no laws requiring owners to pass an emissions test. There use to be in the 80s but they were dissolved in the late 80s. I believe states like California still have them and I know, at least, Illinois has them. In Illinois, it's a simple matter of a test center pulling data from the ODB2 port.

> There's not much that they can do to force these people to bring their cars back.

Uh. In any place with emissions tests I presume these things will instantly fail without the upgrade, so you won't be able to preserve your registration without it.

Are you expecting places to implement specific exceptions for these cars? Because presumably they've been passing so far. So, jurisdictions would have to put in specific blocks for these cars, and then have some way to test for the fix. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

FWIW, my county doesn't do emissions tests on diesels.

The whole point of this discussion is that the car detects it's being tested, then specifically alters the engine's behavior to pass the test. So, no, they won't fail the test without the fix.

You would have to assume that by 'automatically failing', the test would involve checking the software version, and if it's not updated, the car instantly fails the test.

I can't imagine a test centre knowingly passing a car which has been shown to cheat on tests.

There are already aftermarket firmware flashes you can get for a TDI that improve performance and efficiency at the expense of increased emissions--basically an extreme version of the VW cheat mode.

Honestly flashing the ECU would likely reduce driving dynamics (horsepower and torque) but it might push fuel economy up. I'm excited to find out.

In California it will be unavoidable due to CARB-DMV coordination. If your vehicle hasn't been fixed they won't allow you to register it.

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