The Dirty Diesel Deception

A couple of months ago I had a letter from Nissan, recalling my car due to a possible defect with the steering. I took it back to the dealers and fortunately nothing was amiss. Since the car is seven years old, I can't imagine how I would have felt if they had found a fault; relieved  that nothing had happened before the recall probably! While I was there I was buttonholed by one of the salesmen. He asked if I was in the market for a new car, and as it happens, I have been considering it lately. He told me that they had some really good deals on diesels.  Now, when I hear a salesman say they have a really good deal on something, my instinct is to think a good deal for who? Usually it will only be good deal for me if it's an even better deal for them. I told him I would think about it.

It was only a couple of days later that I saw some news about some towns and cities either banning diesel cars or at least imposing charges on their use due to concerns over pollution. Paris has announced plans to ban diesel cars from the French capital by 2020 due to worries about how much pollution the cars cause and apparently London Mayor Boris Johnson has plans to raise the congestion charge for diesel cars by £10 in a bid to cut air pollution. Having digested that information, it wasn't long before the story about Volkswagen fitting their cars with software capable of cheating vehicle emissions tests broke. According to Reuters 8 million vehicles in the EU have been fitted with this software, although the story at first concerned VW cars in the USA.

Volkswagen used allegedly low emissions as a selling point...

...inevitably, the internet had fun with that.

While there is no suggestion that Nissan have been playing  a similar game to Volkswagen, the potential charges for using diesel vehicles and the cheating by the German manufacturer naturally make diesels a somewhat less attractive proposition than they once were. Diesels have long been seen as a cleaner, more fuel efficient alternative to petrol driven cars, so much so that in 2001, the then Chancellor Gordon Brown introduced lower vehicle tax for diesel cars, on the grounds that they were less polluting. Former Labour minister Lord Grayson now says, "We have a much better understanding than we did just a few years ago of the health effects of the products of diesel, and they are literally killing people. It is clear that in retrospect that it was the wrong policy ... we have got to take action really quite quickly." Clearly Nissan, and indeed other dealers, now have stocks of diesels that they want to shift because the long standing benefits of diesel now no longer apply, so "deals" may be their best bet in getting these cars off their forecourts. That said, the depreciation that begins the moment you drive your new diesel away from the showroom might just be considerably worse now than what it was a month or so ago; your deal might not be so attractive when you come to re-sell your car.

In an industry like the motor trade, just as in others like banking, scandals like this are rarely confined to one player. Remember PPI, avoidance of money laundering regulations, fixing interest and exchange rates; it might have been one bank that first hit the headlines with one or another of these antics, but it was not long before it became apparent that others were involved. While Volkswagen remain the only manufacturer implicated so far, one cannot help but think that it is unlikely that all of the others have entirely clean hands.

When the VW news broke, The Financial Times reported that a charity worker in Frankfurt said, "It’s catastrophic. I feel let down. VW and the other (German carmakers) were companies I felt I could believe in, but Volkswagen has ruined that image for me." Volkswagen were, perhaps will be again, a company that people put their faith in, but a reputation built up over many years can be destroyed in a day, by one single action. I imagine that the VW workforce feel let down, well those who were unaware of the scandal until it was reported anyway. I occasionally take part in online surveys, some of which list a number of employers in a certain field and ask whether I would be proud or embarrassed to work for them; I think VW would have been one I would have said I was proud to work for, but would now be embarrassed.

It is the same in any industry. My erstwhile employers regularly banged on about the need for us (some way down the organisational hierarchy) to act with probity, prudence, integrity etc, etc, while further up the food chain there were all sorts of dubious practices going on. But eventually they get forgotten when something else comes along, after all there was the horsemeat scandal a couple of years ago, but the supermarket shelves remain well stocked with ready meals, the provenance of the meat content of which we only have the stores' word for, and people are still buying them if the baskets and trolleys I see at Tesco are anything to go by. 

Diesels however, might not recover so easily, not just because of the VW affair, but because their previous merits have been largely discredited. Prospective London Mayoral candidate Zac Goldsmith was on the radio last week, promoting the idea that electric cars are a better alternative for the future, but while I have seen quite a number of them on the roads in recent months, more than I would have expected, they have some way to go before they become more prevalent than petrol or diesel cars. Last Saturday I drove to Liverpool and back, a round trip of about 380 miles. With a range of 124 miles on a single charge for a car like the Nissan Leaf I would not even have made it all the way there without having to stop and recharge the batteries, and with it taking 8 hours to do so, such a journey by electric powered car is not practical. Some way to go before we are all driving electric cars, I think.

Buy an electric car and you may do almost as much of this...

 

...as this.

A problem we all have, whether it's choosing a ready meal, which bank we use, or the type of car we buy, is that we can only go by the information we have to hand at the time (and our gut instinct). It is incredible to think that, given that we now all know how detrimental smoking can be to our health, in the 1930's right up to the 1950's, smoking, or at least smoking certain brands, was promoted as "healthy," yet they were.The Philip Morris tobacco company advertised their cigarettes with the claim that for people with irritated throats, their brand cleared or improved that irritation, so we should not be beating ourselves up about having previously considered diesels to be an environmentally preferable alternative to petrol cars. 

Hard to be believe, but there was a time when cigarette advertising came with endorsements from doctors, not health warnings.

Meanwhile, I'm procrastinating over a new car purchase, but I think it's fairly certain it won't be a diesel.