Earlier this week, VW announced some improvements to its new cars that will reduce emissions by enough to beat existing European targets. It's not the success we're looking for – we're still a long way from that – but there's no doubt about it: a massive part of this is down to half a million Jedi demanding that VW lives up to the green image it paints for itself.
In short, the rebellion is strong and it's working!
And yet, VW could do so much more. The car giant now says it's going to overshoot the European target on vehicle emissions set for 2015 which is ironic – when the targets were being debated, VW and other car makers successfully lobbied to weaken them. As I've said before, you just can't believe what car companies say when it comes to environmental targets.
What VW needs to do is to get behind the future European targets currently being discussed. More than that, it needs to be really ambitious and commit to beating those targets. VW has already shown its engineers have the skill to do better than the minimum required by the law, so it's disappointing that it still refuses to back a target of 95g for 2020.
So the rebellion against VW's dark side continues, until it really is the greenest car company in the world.