Is it a good time to buy VW shares or is the company finished? Will the scandal affect Audit, Seat, Skoda, Porsche, Bentley, Lamborghini et al too? Will other manufacturers be implicated. Will those of us unwittingly driving dirty diesel's get fined? Will the German-led EU hammer VW or be soft on it? Will executives get jailed? Should they be if the allegations are correct?

I wouldn't be surprised at all to see VW officials or executives be jailed in the U.S., along with massive fines and penalties.
The (now) home of the free market usually wastes no time in attacking a foreign business that's in direct competition with its own.

All of course in stark contrast to the banks.

What VW has done is obviously going to be treated as fraud and heads will roll but you have to admire the hypocrisy of the yanks.

The top three selling vehicles in August were pickup trucks and in the number two slot with sales of 387,179 in the year to date was the Chevy Silverado which has a six litre petrol engine as standard with a 6.6 litre diesel as an option. Top seller was a Ford with a modest 2.7 litre as one option. Or you could go for 5.0L instead.

Emissions? What emissions!

Is what they did really worth a jail sentence for the top brass at VW?

Surely the fines and penalties imposed will be sufficient, and the dent in the companies profile from here on in enough of a punishment.

VW have deliberately cheated the regulations and defrauded their customers. This isn't just a case of a few maverick traders as he had to have been planned over a long time and sanctioned from the top. Their are sure to be some major class actions against VW.

The software could even involve other companies like Bosch and Siemens!

You should be delighted.Capitalism and GREED at the fore. Customers, who cares, they don't.

A slap on the wrist and business as usual I would have thought. Can't be seen to be punishing the 'wealth creators'.

I bet whoever did it they thought they were doing nothing particularly wrong.

These engine management systems are constantly monitoring they way the car is being driven and altering the way the engine works including things like how much fuel is injected. They will have the engine behaving differently when it is idling then when tanking down the motorway and they always aim to have the engine be at its most efficient for how the car is bing driven.

Altering the behaviour when sat on a rolling road will just have been another mode of operation to some software engineer to program.

What is interesting is who specified the software to do this and why none for the people involved questioned if this was an acceptable mode of operation. It will have been specified, the spec reviewed, coded ,code reviewed, QA people involved the works as it was developed.

Ah but German wealth creators, not American ones. So expect the full reach of the U.S. state agencies to flex their muscles.

And, of course, VW doesn't contribute anywhere near as much to politicians campaigns and parties in the U.S. as others do and have a far bigger union presence. So the crackdown on this cheating, lying socialist organisation will be swift and harsh.

I'm only surprised that people are surprised this has happened. Time will tell but when spot checks are done on other manufacturers' vehicles, we'll probably find that all, to varying degrees, have similar defeat software in their ECUs.

Some USVW execs will probably face jail time because unlike our fawning corporate laws, criminality does not have to come from board level down to be liable. The US EPA is also a very powerful organisation and takes breaches like this very seriously.

Around 15 years ago, I was involved in the vehicle emissions industry and assisted one major truck manufacturer in obtaining a Reduced Pollution Certificate to gain a reduction in VED. The RPC was introduced to encourage early adoption of the next stage of Euro particulate emissions legislation or the fitting of exhaust particulate traps. Particulate was measured by mass and by fitting a simple flow-through catalyst, I could reduce the particulate mass by over 10%, enough to gain RPC. The catalyst did not reduce any soot, all it did was reform the hydrocarbons that agglomerated to the carbon to water and CO2. Definitely not within the spirit of the law but way within the letter of the law