Makes me question that if you feel this way why do you own a car in the first place?
Shoe leather = cruelty to cows, man.
Of course I own a car, I'm not some mad Eco-hermit living off moss and dolphin friendly tuna after all.
I work in an industry that is considered to be one of the most polluting in the UK, and am forced to drive in a vehicle deriving from the only sector whose pollution is worse. My carbon footprint is the size of a yeti because I live in a nation whose infrastructure has been shaped by and developed with the car in mind at the expense of all other transport types. In a less enlightened era we decided that personal transport was King, and devoted vast swathes of the national GDP to creating space for cars, simultaneously binning much of our established rail and water transport capability. Now we are paying the price for it in heavy air pollution, traffic, and automotive lobby's so powerful that they can directly influence and steer the regulatory bodies that are suppose to reign them in.
But, I'm under no illusions that the people who made the cars and sold them to me were motivated by anything other than £notes, or give even the tiniest **** about the environmental impact beyond what it costs them per unit to meet the regulations (be they environmental, fiscal, or even work and pay conditions regulations) that allow them to get product out the door and continue making money. A more cynical group is hard to imagine outside of the tobacco, petrochemical, arms or nuclear industries.
If VAG (or indeed any automaker) were genuinely serious about emissions control and minimising the effect of their products on the environment, then things like GPF wouldn't ever be needed. Internal combustion engines in cars would have died out decades ago, or be radically different to the things we have in our cars today.
If you really want to go green, do what I did and build yourself an electric pushbike. It leaves much to be desired in terms of weather protection, refinement, comfort, and the freedom to drive to the south of France on a whim. It doesn't have nappa leather or apple car play, and at 30mph it's like wrestling a wild boar, but on the plus side it costs pence to run, and the ability to ride it up a flight of stairs if the mood takes you opens up a vast array of alternate routes. It begs the question though; If I can build an EV with a 100 mile range In my shed with nothing more than a soldering iron and a pile of bits from eBay, why the hell cant Audi make a decent electric drive A3/S3?
They can of course, it's easy. But they won't make as much money so they'll keep punting out oil burners with incremental updates to keep public demand up until regulations make electric cars cheaper to make and more profitable than IC cars. After all, if you can make the same engine/car very slightly prettier, faster, more economical, more adorned with chrome/carbon/bubble wrap (what the Citroen are up to with that is anyone's guess) for a development cost of 15pence and sell 30,000 more of them, why would you go to the trouble of advancing society and saving the planet?
An example of "Green" transport, built by a bloke in a shed. More dangerous than anything else bar riding a chainsaw to work, less fun than an S3, probably still ultimately powered by coal, and despite having lots of carbon and massive six-pot drilled disc brakes, it's about as fashionable as herpes;
