The dumbest part is that after I got my car updated (the Passat only needed a firmware update) the fuel economy was not even one MPG worse. It’s been a decade and I’m still regularly getting slightly better than 50MPG on the highway and low-30s in the city. There was no reason to cheat.
I’m currently driving that VW TDI – best car I’ve ever owned in 35 years. Next vehicle wasn’t going to be a Tesla, but perhaps an F150 Lightning if they ever get their head out their asses and offer a regular old e-pickup – I don’t want quad cab and a short bed, just two doors and a regular full size bed would be great. Alas, that’s hard to find in ICE, let alone electric.
I… I’m actually kind of surprised that American cigarettes are an export item. Surely to expats and pro-American Europeans who have lost all sense of taste and smell?
I mainly use it to generate unit tests and it frequently makes shit up that clearly won’t work. Like directly invoking non-exported functions that I deliberately choose not to export, because they don’t need to be exported.
If you work where I work, their solution is to just so they have access to all the functions/variables I painstakingly marked static specifically to prevent them from trying to unit test the internals.
It’s my understanding that the cheat was in all TDI models, but the smaller Jetta was particularly bad because it didn’t have a urea system and the fix for that model was to retrofit one. My Passat may have needed a more robust urea injector and not just software, but I can’t remember now. Either way on my year/model the fix was barely noticeable.