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Comment by mizzao | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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