Daily Pulse: A Really, Really Bad VW Bug, Apple Car — Coming To You in 2019? Google's Miserable European Adventure

NEIN! NEIN! NEIN! ... ja … I called Volkswagen “Fargenaughty” last week when the story about their emissions standards deception first broke. That mild admonition doesn’t begin to cover it.

Jack Ewing of The New York Times is reporting that VW pointedly denied all to EPA for nearly a year before fessing up — and then only when the agency threatened to block the German automaker from selling any 2016 year models in the United States.

This is a hot mess with no end in sight: Shares in the company plunged 18.6% in Europe and 17.1% on Wall Street, VW has told dealers to stop selling some 2015 diesels cited by the EPA, Germany’s transport minister expressed concern about the effect of this scandal on his country’s entire car industry.

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"You will understand that we are worried that the justifiably excellent reputation of the German car industry and in particular that of Volkswagen suffers."

— German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel

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"This disaster is beyond all expectations."

— Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer, head of the Center of Automotive Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen

What could possibly be worth taking such an enormous risk? It cut to the core of VW marketing’s value prop for diesel cars. Per the Times’ Jack Ewing:

The company was evidently concerned that actually meeting the federal emissions standards would degrade the power of the engines, which it marketed as comparable in performance to gasoline engines. Meeting the standard would also undercut the fuel efficiency that is one of the main selling points of diesels.

Yes, nobody died. But VW's behavior is the sort of anti-consumer scheming that is difficult to explain away in an industry whose reputation for hedging the truth and the no-holds-barred-hard-sell is already beyond a cliché.

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Apple Car Accelerates: I often say that in tech, five years means “never.” So a report that Apple hopes to ship the electric vehicle it has not yet confirmed by 2019 got my attention.

Daisuke Wakabayashi is reporting in The Wall Street Journal that Apple’s Project Titan is a “committed product” and that the 600-person project has been “given permission to triple number of people working on it.”

It still may be five years (or never) until you are behind the wheel of your Apple Car. As Wakabayashi writes, this is hugely aspirational and not even Team Titan thinks it’s realistic:

In Apple's parlance, a "ship date" doesn't necessarily mean the date that customers receive a new product; it can also mean the date that engineers sign off on the product's main features. It isn't uncommon for a project of this size and complexity to miss ship-date deadlines. People familiar with the project said there is skepticism within the team that the 2019 target is achievable.

France Fries: Google lost an appeal in the European “right to be forgotten” saga that sounds almost too preposterous to be truly enforceable: France’s data protection regulator has upheld a directive that Google honor requests to scrub searches not only on its French service, but on all Google servers anywhere in the world.

If that holds up, it would mean that search results in the United States will be censored under French law which, with all due respect, will never happen.

But we are far from the endgame of this ludicrous dramady, which, one might recall, isn’t even about actual web pages that a person might object to being published, but a messenger’s ability to efficiently locate them. In this Monty Pythonesque sketch, crack French regulators discovered that, as Nick Stat writes for The Verge, “even after search results are successfully removed, they are still easily located by switching to the version of Google accessible in another country.” Hence the need to escalate, bien sur.

Google continues to comply with the original order. "But as a matter of principle, we respectfully disagree with the idea that a single national data protection authority should determine which webpages people in other countries can access via search engines."

How will this end? Anybody’s guess. According to Glyn Moody at Ars Technica the next phase could be that France fines Google — as much as $2.5 billion — which would enable the search giant to move the case out of bureaucratic hell and into the judiciary. There it would be able to “argue its case in detail” before France’s Supreme Court. 

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Speaking of Greece: Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras survived a snap election he had called to bolster his hand implementing austerity measures that are part of a gigantic Eurozone bailout. Turnout was low and his ruling majority is smaller, reports the BBC, but Tsipras said his left-wing Syriza party has a "clear mandate" and hailed a “victory of the people.”

It was the third time this year Tsipras put himself at the mercy of the voters. For some wonky whys, check out this BBC primer.

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First, the Good News: Apple release Watch iOS 2 after a mere five-day delay. The bad news: Apple is cleaning up the app store after “the first large-scale attack on the popular mobile software outlet,” as Jim Finkle puts it for Reuters.

How did this happen in the carefully-curated app store? A malicious program called XcodeGhost was “was embedded in hundreds of legitimate apps” by nasty people who managed to convince developers to use their malware, masquerading as a legit tool called Xcode.

#Stat

5

The number of malicious apps discovered in the Apple App Store — among 1.5 billion — until this attack.

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What you may have missed on LinkedIn — and real must read:

• Richard Wang: Even the lowest-level jobs require a college degree. Here's why this needs to change. 

• Marcus Samuelsson: Can You Spend Less Money on Food and Improve Global Poverty? I Think So.

• Cindy Fornelli: Millennials Fear Cyber-Attacks (and Other Investor Takeaways)

• Trish Regan: By refusing to budge on interest rates, the Fed just told the world that it's reached a state of paralysis.

• Robbie Friedman: This is how most of my calls with potential investors start: Other Person: “So Columbus, Ohio. Why Columbus? You a Buckeyes fan?”

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• Missed the last update? Then check out Isabelle Roughol's 'Kickstarter Won’t Sell or IPO, Viola Davis Makes Emmy History, Volkswagen CEO Apologizes'
• Twice a day we share the news professionals need to know. Never miss one again: Download the Pulse app.

Cover Art: Two goats walk through dried up ricefield at Manggara Bombang village, Maros district on September 21, 2015 in Makassar, Indonesia. Indonesia's national disaster management agency has declared that the majority of the country's 34 provinces are experiencing drought caused by the El Nino weather phenomenon, the worst drought in the past five years. The dry season forces villagers to walk long distances to find clean water. (Photo by Agung Parameswara/Getty Images)