I was quite shocked to discover that VW, after misleading everybody about their motor vehicles, has now finally decided to offer some gift cards to all the owners that have been affected.  It is outrageous, after they have been involved in the fraud, they suddenly want to offer $500,00 or $1 000,00 to people to let them off the hook.  You will recall that they had basically cheated on their emission tests with more than 500,000 Volkswagens in America alone failing emission tests, and that would relate to countries around the world.  The exhaust fumes in fact emit up to 40 times the nitrous oxides allowed by law and of course this relates to a whole number of vehicles manufactured by VW which would include Porche as well.  

To give people $500,00 or $1 000,00 is simply disgraceful and it is akin to what happens with the train authorities in South Africa – PRASA - when people are injured by the trains.  Apparently, the resale values of Volkswagens with 2 litre diesel engines have already fallen 13% since mid-September and basically people around the world that bought Volkswagen manufactured vehicles based on fake emission tests.  In many respects the cars don’t even comply with the rules of their country.  The VW brands also of course include Audi, Bentley, Lamborghini, Porche and of course Volkswagen as well as Ducati motorcycles.  The fraud was so bad that essentially what Volkswagen did was to put in a software code in their diesel models which had what they call a defeat device coding that as soon as it detected that an emissions test was being conducted, the vehicle would alter emission controls for better compliance, but once it started driving normally the emissions would go back to the much higher levels.  The company has already issued a profit warning saying that it has set aside $7,27 billion to fix up the fraud – but while there will be some desperate people who will jump at the gift cards, they are going to face so many legal cases around the world that one has to wonder whether $7,27 billion is going to be enough to cover it, because people are going to suffer real losses as the full impact of trying to resell Volkswagens on a second-hand market is eventually realized.