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Oh, what a mess the diesel engines have left.
Not in the air, not with soot, but all over VW's face.
We've got a big problem with diesel gate.
I'm Brian Cooley, here with my top five things VW has to do Clean it up.
Number five, find someone to run VW America.
The guy they had lined up to be the new boss in the states just bailed.
He said his wife didn't want to move here.
Can you blame her?
She might run into someone from the Sierra Club.
And apparently VW had no backup exec lined up.
Now I put this down at number five because VW has to keep making progress on number four through number one, whether they have a leader in the U.S. or not.
But companies tend to do better with less chaos.
Number four, get to the bottom of all this.
Who knew?
When did they know it?
And was there a C in their job title?
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Those are all key when it comes to the severity of fines and the depth of firing that are coming.
Now VW America's current boss, Michael Horn, told Congress a couple of engineers were responsible for this whole cheating tech.
This was a couple of software engineers who put this in for whatever reason.
That tells me either the Wizard of Oz is his favorite movie, or VW is the worst overseen engineering company in the world.
Neither prospect seems encouraging.
Number three, compensate stakeholders.
Everybody has their hand out, many of them rightly so.
Start with VW owners who now find themselves making monthly payments on a question mark wrapped in a stigma riding on four wheels.
It took just hours for class actions lawsuits to crop up all over.
Then there's stockholders, they saw 40% of their value wiped out in 30 days.
That's like a tech stock.
Interest in cars is killing the dealers.
Kelly Blue Book reports VW interest lost 18%.
True Cars says VW diesel interest off over half.
Automotive News says dealers aren't happy about either number as you can imagine.
And the Federal Trade Commission is out there on behalf of all Americans saying that VW lied.
Deceptive ads with all those clean diesel commercials.
Analysts put a rough price tag of $40 billion on cleaning up this whole mess, when everyone pays.
Number two, get TDis back on the road.
Let's not forget, VW diesels were hot.
Accounting for 24% of their U.S. sales in 2014.
So they gotta bring them back.
Now the 09 to 15 cars have known cheating software, but the 16's also have software the EPA believes is at least Suspect.
So all of them are in quarantine in the port or to VW plan in South Carolina.
A combination of new software, new fuel injection hardware under the hood and possibly new urea injection gear under the chassis, look like the complex messy path by which TDIs will come back to market.
And will you even like your car after that?
Early test by consumer reports found that power and mpg suffered noticeably when they took some cars and tricked them into running clean.
Number one, fix the cars we already own.
This matters most because current owners spent real money on what turned out to be a lie, that may not work as well when, Is fixed, it may be worth less when they want to sell it, it's gonna make them uninterested in recommending one.
In the car business, everything starts and ends with happy customers.
The U.S., the Europeans, and California have given VW a variety of 2,4 2015 deadlines.
To at least get the fixes designed and then plan a recall.
And nobody yet has ruled out a massive buyback if the fix makes the car kind of crummy.
It's gonna be a busy remainder of the decade for what's shaping up to be none the less The world's largest automaker.
More top five lists await the car lover.
Go to CNETOnCars.com, click on Top 5.
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