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Volkswagen Agrees To Record $14.7B Settlement Over Emissions Cheating (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNNMoney: Volkswagen's deliberate cheating on emissions tests will cost it a record $14.7 billion. And that's just the start of its problems. The settlement is only a preliminary step in the case; the automaker still faces possible criminal charges, as well as civil penalties for Clean Air Act violations. The Department of Justice is investigating possible criminal charges against both the company and individuals, said Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. Up to $10 billion of the funds will be paid out to owners of the 487,000 affected diesel cars in the U.S., sold under the VW or luxury Audi brands. How much an owner gets will depend on whether an owner chooses to fix their car or just have VW buy it back -- they have until May 2018 to decide. Repurchasing the cars will cost VW between $12,500 to $44,000 per car. The $14.7 billion settlement estimate assumes that all the cars are repurchased. Owners who elect to get their vehicles fixed will also get a cash payment of between $5,100 and $10,000 to compensate them for the lost value of the cars, as well as for Volkswagen's deceptive promise of "clean diesel." Most of the buyers paid extra for a car with a diesel engine. In addition to the customer payments, Volkswagen will pay $2.7 billion for environmental cleanup and $2 billion to promote zero-emission vehicles. The clean up money will be used by individual states to cut other diesel emissions by replacing older, government-owned trucks, buses and other diesel engines now in use. Volkswagen is betting big on electric vehicles after this emissions scandal. It plans to deliver 30 electric plug-in models by 2025.
Without people being held to count for this, then it is meaningless...
The current people who agreed to this are giving away shareholders money, not their money. What does it matter to the CEO who still gets paid, cheat and get rewarded, lied and still get something...
Large companies will not stop doing these things just because of a fine...
Put 70k miles of 40+ MPG driving in a large sedan.
And now I get back basically 2/3 of the price I paid for the car brand new.
This is fantastic. Greatest car purchase decision I made.
Most megacorps only get a slap on the wrist no matter how nasty a thing they do. Maybe that's only a privilege for local megacorps?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
There has been lots of discussion over at tdiclub.com. Some people are happy with the amount offered, many others are not. It depends a bit on how good a deal you got on the car originally, how much you spent on aftermarket stuff to modify the car, how many miles you drive.
Did you hit your head in the tub?
We're waiting.
Someone better check under the hood to make sure they don't have a internal combustion engine hidden somewhere.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Did you hit your head in the tub?
And if you haven't, would you mind doing so now?
So Volkswagen was forced to pay an actual amount of taxes that a company should be paying based on profits without the benefit of a offshore haven. Good.
(I didn't actually run any numbers, I have no idea how much they should be paying).
What kind of testing are they doing that they failed to catch this? What other more dangerous industries are they testing as incompetently?
http://www.reuters.com/article...
Now should BP oil have paid 10x more or VW less?
This is talked about as the biggest settlement ever, and it certainly is bad what Volkswagen did, but nobody died because of this. I think there are some messed up priorities in the system.
What a trumped-up post.
In addition to the customer payments, Volkswagen will pay $2.7 billion for environmental cleanup and $2 billion to promote zero-emission vehicles.
Oh, so -now- the US -is- interested in the environment. When its about being at the receiving end, caring for the environment is just dandy, ain't it?
The clean up money will be used by individual states to cut other diesel emissions by replacing older, government-owned trucks, buses and other diesel engines now in use.
So the older, government-owned trucks, buses and other diesel engines now in use will be replaced by newer VW vehicles? Good for sales, at least!
/MC
There goes your raise, your bonus, etc.
Given that the cars are not fit for purpose, customers should have the right to return them for a full refund however old they are.
Easy.
They can't charge too much or the US might see Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Ducati, Lamborghini, MAN, Neoplan, Porsche, SEAT, Scania, Skoda, and Volkswagen vehicles no longer being sold there.
This whole prosection is only happening becaue VW and its shareholders are from Europe. American car makers have done a lot worse and gotten away with far smaller fines.
VAG is getting raked over the coals for selling cars that people wanted.
No they are getting raked over the coals for selling cars that they claimed were what people wanted when in fact they fraudulently were not.
There was not even a hint that these cars disappointed even a single owner.
Bull droppings. 20 seconds on Google would clearly establish that there are a lot of owners that are very disappointed in these cars now that they know they are not what they were claimed to be.
And if flashing the firmware was easy, I'm guessing that pretty much every single owner would have installed this code on their own.
Flashing firmware on a car IS easy if you have the right equipment. That doesn't mean people want to do it on their own. First, doing so can void the car's warranty. Second, doing so can result in a vehicle that performs worse or not at all if something goes wrong. Even the car companies don't mess around with the firmware on a production vehicle unless they absolutely have to. Third, just like with PCs, many people are uncomfortable screwing around with the internals even if they are smart enough to do it.
The last estimate I saw suggested some 40 people may have died because of the additional NOx pollution, although pollution doesn't work that way
When you are talking about large populations it actually does work that way. They can't tell you which 40 they are and there are some meaningful error bars around that number. But it's not impossibly hard to show how a given source of pollution impacts the health of a population. Doing it right is just a lot of work. You compare the heath outcomes to a control group and control for variables. Typically when they cite these studies they are talking about models rather than retrospective data analysis which is usually where things go off the rails. If they are talking about a computer model which has not been checked against real world data then yes you should be suspicious. But just because there are bad models out there doesn't mean it is impossible to do it correctly.
Because the vehicles produced more NOx, they also consumed less fuel and they produced less soot, HC, and CO2. They went ahead and calculated the additional deaths from NOx, but they didn't subtract the reduced deaths from soot and HC, nor from the reduced impact on climate change.
Just because there might be offsetting deaths doesn't mean the effects of the NOx aren't real. You might (stress might) be right about the fact that the overall mortality rate might not change much but that doesn't mean a specific cause can be ignored. If more people die in car crashes then fewer will die from heart disease. That doesn't mean the car crash problem can be ignored or discounted.
It's worth considering though - that the odds right now is that Volkswagen will not exist much longer.
Unless the German government decides to let VW fail it will not go anywhere. Yes there will be substantial financial fallout but I doubt a VW liquidation is likely. The government of Lower Saxony owns 20.2% and German law requires an 80% shareholder agreement on any major decisions. As large shareholders they are unlikely to let VW cease to exist.
This is the first penalty - and almost 15 Billion it's a huge one
VW has around $48 Billion in cash an equivalents. Furthermore with the government as a shareholder it potentially can tap into lines of credit. It's going to suck but VW has a pretty strong balance sheet to weather the storm.
Actually, in theory, people did die.
Marginal increases in air pollution potentially caused marginal increases in deaths, mainly due to assorted respiratory ailments.
Just because we don't know who they are doesn't make the theoretical victims any less dead.
Let's not go touting your theory as fact, now. After all, this is Slashdot. We know better.
Every car producer lies... Why it's only hitting VW?