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Which will Dieselgate hurt more, Volkswagen or US diesels?

The most damning response to the news Volkswagen skirted emissions regulations for its diesel models may have actually come from the Los Angeles Times. On Saturday, the Times published an editorial titled "Did Volkswagen cheat?" The answer was undoubtedly yes. When you can't drive down Santa Monica Boulevard without seeing an average of one VW TDI per block, the following words are pretty striking: "... Americans should be outraged at the company's cynical and deliberate efforts to violate one of this country's most important environmental laws." VW has successfully cultivated a strong, environmentally conscious reputation for its TDI Clean Diesel technology, especially in states where emissions are strictly controlled. A statement like that is like blood all over the opinion section of the Sunday paper. The effect on VW's business, even Germany's financial health, was already felt Monday when the company's shares plummeted 23 percent in morning trading. The statement on Sunday from VW CEO Dr. Martin Winterkorn says "trust" three times. That probably wasn't enough in nine sentences. Writers over the weekend have compared VW's crisis to one at General Motors 30 years ago, when it was the largest seller of diesel-powered passenger cars until warranty claims over an inadequate design and ill-informed technicians effectively pulled the plug on the technology at GM. In a sense, VW is in the same boat as GM because it has fired a huge blow into its own reputation and that of diesels in passenger cars. And just as automakers like Jaguar Land Rover, BMW and, ironically, GM, were getting comfortable with it again in the US. VW of America was already knee-deep in its other problems this year. Its core Jetta and Passat models are aging and it needs to wait more than a year for competitive SUVs that American buyers want. The TDIs were the only continuous bright spot in the line and on the sales charts. Even as fuel prices fell and buyers shunned hybrids, VW managed to succeed with diesels and show that Americans actually care about and accept the technology again. Fervent TDI supporters might actually lobby for that maximum $18 billion fine to VW. I've personally convinced a number of people to look at a TDI instead of a hybrid. Perhaps not so much for stop-and-go traffic, but I know buyers who liked the idea that a TDI drove like a normal car and wasn't packed with batteries.

YouTube's Super Bowl commercial buzz list dominated by automakers [w/videos]

After Sunday's big game, YouTube will be the place to watch every commercial that you missed when you left your seat for an emergency guac refill or, as we say in Cleveland, took the Browns to the Super Bowl. That makes YouTube the nation's water cooler on Monday, and it's got some preliminary stats to share in the lead up to kickoff.
As you know, Super Bowl advertisers, particularly automakers, like to endlessly tease their big budget commercials in the weeks before the game, many times revealing them outright days in advance. Because of this, YouTube can tell us which commercials have been viewed the most so far, and their top five list is all automakers.
Kaley Cuoco appears to have been a good investment for Toyota, as her ad for the RAV4 has garnered the most YouTube views - six million and counting - among Super Bowl commercials so far. Second place goes to Mercedes-Benz, though not its actual Super Bowl commercial, but rather the teaser for it. You know, the one with Kate Upton and the car washing, which is up to 5.6 million views. Third place is Audi's Prom commercial (3.3M views), fourth goes to Volkswagen's slightly controversial Get In, Get Happy ad (3.3M views), and the fifth and final spot is bookended by the teaser video for Kaley Cuoco's commercial (3.2M views). You can watch all five in order below.

VW invests in QuantumScape for potentially fireproof, long-range EV batteries

VW might be getting ready to push its plug-in technology in a big way thanks to an investment in the battery startup QuantumScape. Key point: the solid-state battery is said to be fireproof and will offer tremendous range advantages. Details are not abundant yet, but according to Bloomberg, VW of America bought a five-percent stake in QuantumScape (and has an option to raise its holding). The tech could "more than triple" the EV range of VW, Porsche and Audi plug-in vehicles as soon as the middle of 2015, according to unnamed sources that Bloomberg talked to. Former Stanford University researchers started QuantumScape in 2010. The bare-bones QuantumScape website (there's nothing there other than some contact information) doesn't offer many hints about what's happening at the company, but GigaOM's Katie Fehrenbacher notes that QuantumScape is licensing tech from the "All Electron Battery" project at Stanford a few years ago. It certainly sounds amazing: [It's] a completely new class of electrical energy storage devices for electric vehicles that has the potential to provide ultra-high energy and power densities, while enabling extremely high cycle life. The All-Electron Battery stores energy by moving electrons, rather than ions, and uses electron/hole redox instead of capacitive polarization of a double-layer. ... If successful, this project will develop a completely new paradigm in energy storage for electrified vehicles that could revolutionize the electric vehicle industry. If that's what's coming in a future e-Golf or E-Tron, sign us up.