And CO2 is not only sin:

When the road load test procedures were drafted 30 years ago, no-one expected carmakers to adjust the brakes, pump up the tyres, and tape up all the cracks around the doors and windows to reduce the air and rolling resistance. These practices are now commonplace, with testing facilities being paid to optimise the results of the tests. There is no evidence that carmakers are breaking any formal rules - but they don’t need to - the current test procedures are so lax there is ample opportunity to massage the test results.

Testing undertaken by an independent laboratory has found that for older vehicles, road load results in realistic tests – e.g. using regular production vehicles - were on average 19% higher than the results obtained in official tests. For more modern vehicles the average difference was 37%, supporting other evidence that the manipulation of the road load part of the test is increasing. These differences would result in around a 12% reduction in measured fuel economy.

Results are also being polished up in laboratory tests by, for example, allowing the battery to discharge during the test; minimizing the weight of the car; using special lubricants that are not supplied with the production vehicle and testing in unrealistically hot temperatures. Once the results have been compiled the current procedure also inexplicably allows the CO2 results declared by the manufacturer to be up to 4% below the measured results.

Independent laboratory tests, using the official drive cycle but with regular production vehicles and without using all the loopholes in the rules, show on average 12% higher fuel consumption and CO2 emissions than official figures reported by the carmaker. In total, the independently executed tests lead to 19-28% (average 23%) higher CO2 emissions and fuel consumption than the official figures reported by carmakers.

http://www.qualenergia.it/sites/default/files/articolo-doc/Real%20World%20Fuel%20Consumption%20v15_final.pdf

@RRRR

Yep, yet media only bite ass of one criminal.

@karl

I suggest to send to jail politicians who implemented constantly tight measures openly declaring how easy and cheap is to meet them, same guys forced all people to upgrade making piles of perfectly functions cars.

Proper solution for warm countries was to allow normal family to have single small and simple, modular electric car, and have special car trains for long distance travel.

@Vitaliy_Kiselev Since it's the politicians that make the laws, it's unlikely that they will introduce laws that send themselves to jail.

In any endeavor where money and prestige are at stake, people will cheat. Witness the situation in cycling, and now in Contract Bridge, where the worlds' top pair has now been accused of sending unauthorized signals by turning cards one way or the other. Until recently, it has been assumed that most competitors were honest. We have now discovered that that assumption will not hold up.

Officials will do almost anything to avoid bad news. This is not a character flaw - it is sound political instinct. It is up to other outside interested agents to point out the problem. That is what happened with the bridge champions, Fantoni and Nunes. Other expert players noticed an astonishingly consistent pattern in how they placed their cards on the table when playing.

If the problem is so bad that everyone cheats, as in cycling, and now, apparently in auto emissions, someone with an impeccable reputation and the resources to do it, such as Consumer Reports, could step up and do it.

EPA threatened to not certify next year's cars, so VW owned up and will recall the defective cars. Their stock has tanked as a result. This seems to me to be an excellent example of government doing its job.

Besides that, big companies are afraid of negative buzz. An outside testing company with a good reputation can force them to come clean.

Volkswagen is embroiled in one of the worst auto industry scandals to date — and it's all thanks to a team of researchers at West Virginia University that have been waiting more than a year for the revelations to go global. The group published their findings in spring 2014 detailing how Volkswagen diesel-powered vehicles were emitting far higher emissions levels in standard driving conditions than during testing cycles required and regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Volkswagen admitted to using so-called "defeat devices," software algorithms that artificially lowered emissions output during testing, to bypass US environmental regulations only after the EPA approached the company with West Virginia University's findings.

Look how carefully media select defect sheep and avoid all else.

@ Vitaliy_Kiselev - At VW, the stock is down and CEO has resigned. This morning, an article in NY Times suggests that auto makers should have no input in testing. The Guardian reports that France, Germany, and the UK all inhibited truth in emissions testing. It is exactly this kind of publicity that forces corporate change. Now that it is out in the open, this issue will not blow over.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-22/dear-volkswagen-was-your-biggest-mistake

I believe the big three US Automakers (GM, Ford, Chrysler) have a history of fighting VW and their diesels being imported into the USA. Something that happened back in the 1980s and the Carter administration. I don't know the specifics. Diesels make up less than 3% of the cars on the road here today. The VW "clean diesel" has been changing that. Some VW dealership reported 30% of their sales are TDIs, others say 20%. The 2015 models looked really good, have the urea emissions controls, and now VW TDI sales are shut down in the US. Just in time to turn off the flow of the 2015 model TDIs that only started to arrive in July of this year.

I am not saying what VW did is right, just that I agree there is a definite political edge to this, that no one is reporting in the USA. Slowly the US media are making the connection that the car companies shouldn't be solely relied upon to do their own emissions reporting. I am sure they are not the only one cheating.

Disclaimer: Owner of a 2002 VW TDI estate car that wasn't subjected to this higher emissions standard of Dieselgate.

@VK I think another issue is that economic cars are easy to build- but don't have supercharges - or turbos- or sexy styling.

A little digging on this issue and I found a 2004 ban on TDI in the US state of Maine: http://www.solarhouse.com/resources/040102diesel.pdf

About 2.1 million Audi cars have the software that is at the center of the Volkswagen AG emissions scandal, a spokesman for Audi AG said Monday.