http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/12/news/companies/epa-emissions...

the tricky question: did anybody figure out how to do a clean enough diesel engine without cheating?

i think its funny that European countries were pushing Diesel engines just because they emit less CO2, disregarding the NOx problem.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/dec/05/vw-diesel-c...

Yes. It is just more expensive in terms of maintenance because the urea-based cleaning liquid ("AdBlue") needs to be refilled by the dealer a lot more often if the exhaust scrubbing doesn't cheat and disable it half the time.

If you are interested in the details of the topic, I can recommend this CCC conference talk from last month:

https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7904-software_defined_emissions

European nations aren't "western"?

Actually European nations is what it originally meant. Western European.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world

The term originally had a literal geographic meaning. It contrasted Europe with the cultures and civilizations of the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the remote Far East which early-modern Europeans saw as the East. In the contemporary cultural meaning, the phrase Western world includes Europe, as well as many countries of European colonial origin with substantial European ancestral populations in the Americas and Oceania.

Europe was the West, then you have the Middle East, then the Far East (China, Japan). That was the whole world to them pretty much. When the Americas were discovered they were known as the New World, and eventually became known as the West as well (Due to the fact that most of our culture comes from Europe, eg. Western Culture).

I suspect Rome (or some other city in Italy) is the centre of these terms, but I haven't looked for evidence of that.

But have you driven behind a diesel that floored the gas pedal? Have you seen that smoke? It's a good thing that diesel is on its way out due to hybrid technology. And VW makes great gas engines as well.

For the record, I absolutely do not work for VW or indeed in the automotive industry in any way, and I neither gain nor lose any value whatsoever if they flourish or go bankrupt. To repeat: I wasn't astroturfing, I was trying to express my own personal opinion on why they may see these sales in spite of their negative press about cheating emissions controls.

I agree that I could've made that more clear in the OP though, had I not just typed it as a stream of consciousness during my lunch break. I can't edit this disclaimer into the OP or reword it, though, so it will have to remain here instead.

I closed out my post with the criticism of the Vauxhall to give contrast to my experience with two contemporary cars. I drive a '98 Camry at home, so I don't have experience with cars younger than ~20 years normally. This gave me a good chance to experience them and it highlighted how different the two vehicles were, especially since they were both hired out by Europcar as the same category of vehicle.

Also please note that I was trying to praise the vehicle, not mate a statement about VW themselves. Per the above, they were wrong for cheating emissions requirements. Regardless of whether it was achieved legitimately or not though, my post was trying to put into words why I find it unsurprising that many people are buying VW vehicles if the Polo was an example of what they're producing.

I said that I'm not sure whether their cheating of emissions is the reason why they can produce a compelling car, not whether it is an 'advantage'. It's undeniably an advantage - if nothing else, cheating on that helps to illegitimately sell cars to people who want 'greener' cars. What I am saying, however, is that I don't know if that translates to their ability to produce an all-round compelling car that appeals to a large market enough to explain significant increases in sales (i.e.: because it is the differentiator between a car with rubbish/good fuel efficiency, or rubbish/good performance). I simply don't know, which is why I said that.

When I post on HN, I consider whether my input could add to the discussion. The article was about VW seeing higher sales volumes than Toyota, yet the discussion was focused purely on their cheating of emissions requirements. I felt my comment could add to the discussion by providing one anecdote about my experience with their car and how, more generally, that might translate to why consumers are buying the vehicles.

The reality is that I can't come show you in person my boarding pass for my holiday there and my booking receipt from hiring the car. I can't show you my employment history or bank accounts showing no financial incentive to say what I said. There's no way I can convince you of any of it unless you decide to convince yourself that I'm not a shill by going through my post history or something, and I suspect you have no desire to do that whatsoever so there's simply nothing I can do short of trying to explain the rationale behind my post as my defence. The reason I'm trying to do that is because, per above, I legitimately try to contribute meaningful input to HN and so being called a lying shill runs counter to that.

edit: For what little it's worth, I didn't downvote you, though I just saw you have been. I think there's a valid place for you having called me out because you've done it fairly respectfully and some level of scepticism is always warranted. Certianly you made me explain myself which helps others who read it gain a better understanding of what I was trying to say (evidently badly) in my OP.

They might not be in jail, but they got charged:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/business/volkswagen-diese...