Volkswagen Vs. General Motors Vs Toyota: Who Takes The Cake For The Worst Disaster Ever?

Toyota was bad for drinking their own KoolAid. They honestly believed they were not capable of screwing up.

GM was bad ignoring safety for money and then sticking their head in a hole to hide from the truth

VW was for the shear arrogance of "we won't get caught". They will have the highest tally of lives due to cheating the rules. But they also never know a true cost of lives.

Oh, come on now. Don't add to the hysteria about "40x greater emissions". A: that was the maximum measured on one model (Jetta). The Passat was half that. B: 40 times a tiny fraction is still a tiny fraction. C: NOx has (in some studies) shown to actually reduce one type of smog that was measured in California. No firm conclusions, but certainly interesting.

These cars have only been on the road for a max of 6 years. Yes, they emitted too much NOx, but the amount is still extremely small. Even world wide, the total number of cars in minor compared to all the others, the trucks, the trains, and the ships. I am not defending VW, and I expect them to pay heavily. But this isn't going to make hardly a blip on the international air quality situation.

Yeah, just go to any major European city and then tell me if it is not making a blip in the air quality, if you can still breathe that is. It may be a fraction but it is multiplied by 11 freaking million vehicles, not to mention the other "clean" diesels out there.

009. With all the sources that emit CO2, NO2 and other NOx compounds into the atmosphere how will it be proven that VW specifically killed people? Who are they specifically? With GM, Toyota, Ford, et.al. names can be provided. Not so with VW, Further a single 1000 Megawatt natural gas electric generating plant produces the same amount of NOx as all 400,000 offending VW put together. The issue for VW is that they knowingly disobeyed the law. That is a solid enough case to to go after them on, and win.

vdiv: I've been to London within the past month. That's the extent of my European travels. Even with the enormous amount of diesel vehicles I noticed no particular issues with the air. I rarely caught a wiff of diesel exhaust smell. Outside of London, there was never any diesel smell, even near their city transit buses. My personal observation is that the efforts over the years have made a noticeable improvement, and I seriously doubt a tiny sliver of additional NOx has made a detectable difference.

The followup question is have they learned or should we be prepared for the next disaster?

As long as car manufacturers are listed on a stock exchange - and vehicles cannot be made on a price no object basis for the very rich only - employees will still be charged with the necessity to reduce costs - and increase profits - and to make the cars affordable. And that means that there will continue to be problems - hopefully not disasters - but things will still be engineered to save the company costs.

Software problems will be the star in the future - since as more and more parts of the car are controlled by CPUs, more and more possibilities for conflicts and bugs. However - no matter how much they test new components - and they do so for Millions of miles - they still have problems only identified in the real world. People actually do very strange and stupid things with their cars.

So - the real question should not be whether there will be problems - but - how they will be handled once they are identified. And THAT is where I suspect the manufacturers have at least learned something

Don't forget substantial incidents by Ford Explorers (100's), passenger vans, etc., along with additional safety flawed GM/FCA models and substandard safety performance for years.

Start to checking other company engines and you'll see how many sorprises we can find.

Who takes the cake? That's an easy one.

GM and Toyota, while clearly at fault for not taking immediate action when serious product defects were uncovered (resulting in unnecessary loss of life), are guilty of gross mismanagement and corporate deception.

VW WILLFULLY and DELIBERATELY deceived its customers and government agencies.

Big difference.

VW's plan to intentionally cheat.. is on a completely different level than GM's and Toyota's big blunders.

GM is the worse....hundreds lost life and thousands of injuries over a decade. NO execs in prison for mass murder...paid min. fine and loan back with TARP money.

GM is the worse....hundreds lost life and thousands of injuries over a decade. NO execs in prison for mass murder...paid min. fine and loan back with TARP money.