German Big 3 automakers emissions cheating disaster Master Thread

IS-SV

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One of the worst decisions

Not that it matters, but I view it as a good decision. Porsche’s reason was along the lines of them being a “sports car” company.

Even Lexus (well before the scandal) earlier announced its decision not to pursue diesel.
 

Ian Schmidt

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- VW was caught using weather modification technology at a plant in Mexico, which affected farmers in the surrounding region. This is a huge scandal down in Mexico apparently. I wish I was making this up. Is the VW Group trying to become a real life Bond villain?

This is sadly less Dr. Evil than it sounds like. They're using so-called "hail cannons" which attempt to prevent hail from forming in overhead thunderstorms and generally are believed not to work by meteorologists. They're quite popular with French wine-country grape farmers in spite of that though.
 

CIF

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This is sadly less Dr. Evil than it sounds like. They're using so-called "hail cannons" which attempt to prevent hail from forming in overhead thunderstorms and generally are believed not to work by meteorologists. They're quite popular with French wine-country grape farmers in spite of that though.

From what I read in the news, the major scandal in Mexico is the fact that the hail cannons were running even when there wasn't hail and they weren't needed, which greatly affected the weather cycles in the region, leading to a lot of negative consequences for farmers in the region. Also the area of affect for the hail cannons was much larger than simply the plant's area, another major point of contention with the Mexican locals. The farmers (and the local region itself) had no say in how the hail cannons were being operated.

This is on top of things that maiaramdan mentioned that I wasn't aware of, such as VW doing emissions testing on humans and animals, and stock manipulation.
 

Ian Schmidt

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The hail cannons simply make a loud upward-directed noise (not even as loud as a thunderclap, which is why meteorologists believe they don't actually do anything; hail obviously withstands thunder quite well). There's pretty much no way they actually affect the weather, although I wouldn't want to be around them either :)
 

CIF

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The hail cannons simply make a loud upward-directed noise (not even as loud as a thunderclap, which is why meteorologists believe they don't actually do anything; hail obviously withstands thunder quite well). There's pretty much no way they actually affect the weather, although I wouldn't want to be around them either :)

Well I'm just going by what I've read, I really have no idea how they actually work. Point is, the Mexican locals are very angry with VW, and VW's cannons somehow negatively affected the crops of the surrounding region.