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Volkswagen To Pay $10.2 Billion In Emissions Lawsuit (bbc.co.uk)
Reader Khashishi writes: Slashdot has been following the story of Volkswagen manipulating diesel emissions tests for some time now. The control software contained algorithms which reduced emissions during testing but not during normal driving. Well, now Volkswagen has agreed to pay $10.2 billion (alternate source: BBC) to settle the case, according to Associated Press. This is higher than the $430 million damages estimated in this story. It appears that vehicle owners will have the choice of fixing their cars or selling them back. Most of the money will go towards fixing the cars, buying them back, and compensating owners.
They brought the smoke-filled room to the consumer. Hope they choke on their fine.
When they cheat, we're all defrauded out of our right to clean air. Obviously you're part of the problem.
Better to just dump that $10 billion dollars in to a non profit electric car research institute.
How much better batteries can you design on a $10 billion dollar budget?
The Tesla gigafactory cost $5 billion, for an idea of how much $10.5 billion dollars in research would buy you.
moox. for a new generation.
The government would get money.
Because the government never does foolish things with the money they receive.
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
So a few months ago, because I could not find the information anywhere on the entire internet, I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation to estimate how much more polluted the air in the U.S. is as a result of the VW emissions cheat. The answer is that the air is about zero percent more polluted because of that cheat.
The reason for that is that baseline emissions of diesel exhaust pollutants in the U.S. is so enormous. Commercial diesel tractor trailers emit pollutants at a much higher rate than do VW cars because the engines are so much larger and consume fuel at higher rates. The trucks run many more miles per years than the cars. There are many more diesel trucks than diesel cars. (There a lot of trucks and VW diesel cars are not huge sellers in the U.S.) So the net percentage increase in pollution because of that cheat calculates out to about zero.
VW is worth a lot of money and has not much political clout in the U.S. so this turned into feeding frenzy for lawyers. Penalties of this size are entirely unjustified by the degree of harm.
There should be a price for polluting, based strictly on the types and volumes of pollutants, and it should be applied to all, regardless of the type of vehicle or its nation of origin, or its owner. The right solution here is to tax vehicle exhaust emissions at a single universal rate and let manufacturers and buyers decide what to make and what to buy.
What we have instead is sanctioned pillaging.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
I'd wager that these VW vehicles would still comply with the the emission limits of, say, five years ago. Yet, baby seals weren't jettisoned out of the earth towards the sun then.
Needs -1 Asshole mod.
You own (lack of) progeny aside, you don't care about the general survival of the human race or stewardship of this one and only home we call Earth?
Obviously not, so here's something your shallow, selfish interests can grock: the known emissions problems for these vehicles will probably make them un-registerable in the United States, unless you get the performance-crippling ECU "fix".
BP paid for screwing up. Could they have been smarter about how they drilled? Sure. Were they negligent in following industry safety practices? Probably. But the bottom line is that the Deep Horizon spill was an accident - something BP didn't want to happen, but did.
VW is paying for deliberately contravening the law. They wanted to make non-compliant cars look like they were compliant. This goes beyond negligence, where you don't know or don't care that what you're doing could cause harm. It's malfeasance. They knew what they were doing was wrong, but did it anyway. It's the difference between carelessly putting a box of rat poison on the shelf above the stove, and it accidentally falling into the soup you're serving the restaurant customers. And deliberately putting melamine into pet food knowing full well that it'll cause harm.
This supersedes how much damage was actually caused by their cheat. VW isn't paying for the damage their cars did to the environment. They're paying for deliberately flaunting the EPA's rules. And I say this as someone who supports VW's push for more diesel cars - they should be made to bleed for what they did.