staffordian wrote:I assume it's because all those VW owners are such caring environmentalists that they have all suffered mental health issues because they have been emitting more noxious gases whilst driving their cars than they believed they would, and therefore need a bit of compo.
Well, yes, a bit of that I suppose. Driving a diesel Golf used to be one of the easier ways to earn an environmental halo, but the realisation that NOx emissions were (
somebody remind me, seventeen?) times the US limit was a shock of sizeable proportions to the virtuously inclined.
But let's have a bit of history here. Drivers were (initially) worried that the residual value of their cars would be trashed by the scandal, unless they had them revamped by VW in a way that reduced their already slightly soggy performance.
But there were bigger financial worries in store. The official VW dieselgate fix had the unfortunate effect of speeding up any pre-existing weaknesses in various expensive engine parts, such as EGR valves, fuel pumps, injectors, or especially particulate filters. (A full account of the story is at
https://www.hypermiler.co.uk/dieselgate ... res-are-up.) And the retune that came with the fix was pretty damn drastic.
So, all over Europe, drivers with cars that had worked perfectly well until the VW diesel fix were now grinding to a roadside halt because their EGRs had suddenly failed. And
that in turn created a shortage of spare parts that affected everybody.
My wife's diesel Golf, which
hadn't had the fix, lost its EGR one day because of other/natural causes (mileage and old age), but our independent garage couldn't get a replacement part for eight weeks, because every single EGR unit in Europe was going straight to the VW dealers, who all had huge queues of customers wanting priority. That was a pretty convincing demonstration of how drastic VW's diesel fix had had to be.
Seven years after dieselgate, the wife's 13 year old TDI is still running just fine without the troublesome official fix. And its secondhand value is none the worse for being untouched. And its VED is still only £30 a year.
BJ