I was so happy to have bought this car. I bought it used on Ebay with only 14K miles on it and have owned it for almost 5 years now. This has been the 1st car I truly LOVED. Having visited Germany on many occasions and rented turbo diesels, I loved the combination of the diesel engine and standard transmission. So I wanted to have that same experience here in the states.
I personally couldn't care less about auto emissions, but I bought the car knowing I'd get stellar gas mileage (which is no joke!) and extraordinary torque. The car is absolutely amazing to drive. But these promises were baked into my understanding that the car I'd buy would be able to easily pass VERY strict California emissions compliance.
Then the LIES surface.
After selling these cars for years based upon faulty engineering, software coverups, and corporate arrogance, we TDI owners are now left with cars (in California especially) that can never be legally registered because they will never pass emissions mandates of CARB. There are fixes being proposed, but frankly none will actually solve the problem without impacting mileage, performance and upholding the promises that were originally made and have been promoted since 2009.
I have never been so shocked by the level of corporate deception than I have by what Volkswagon has done. I can accept a mistake in data or a faulty mechanical part, but when it comes down to deliberate and deceitful lies, this can never be justified. How long did they think they could get away with lies of this scale? How arrogant can a company be to allow something like this to propagate? Finally, having been exposed to the corporate work ethics of many German companies like I have, I'm even more mystified that this could happen. I expected much more from my German friends; what Volkswagen allowed to happen is truly capitalism at its worst (and this is coming from someone that appreciates capitalism).
At this point, I don't even trust VW to "fix" the problem. Since they are so interested in their bottom line, it would make more sense from their perspective to sabotage my car to get it off the road, and how better to do that than by introducing a destructive patch to my ECU. But they wouldn't do that? Would they? Now I'm not so sure. It sounds pretty conspiratorial to propose that. However, it sounds just as conspiratorial to propose that a company would try to cheat the world for years because they couldn't live up to their promises, so they decided to cheat and deceive to cover it up.
VW got caught. But then I started to wonder, how many others are doing similar things. We'll see.