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.

Comments

Re: If no one goes to jail, it means nothing...

[bloodhawk]

PS: Winterkorn and other execs are actually under criminal investigation to see if they did actually have any involvement or negligence in this matter.

Re:And yet nobody died

[drinkypoo]

TL;DR it's hard to put an exact figure on but it's high, in the millions.

No, FUD-spreading liar, it is in the thousands at worst. Further, it cannot be even that number, because the study was actually shit.

The study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters on Thursday, concluded that most of the 59 premature deaths were caused by particulate pollution (87%) with the rest caused by ozone exposure (13%). Most of the deaths were estimated to have occurred on the east and west coasts of the US.

The number of deaths was reached by looking at the amount of extra pollution emitted between 2008 and 2015 by the VW cars fitted with the defeat devices.

But that is garbage, because the software also caused the vehicles to use less fuel, which means while they produced more NOx, they actually produced less PM2.5 particulates, which are the kind that cause cancer. These particulates are increased when modern diesel emissions systems are used. Gasoline cars put out just as much black carbon as diesels, and nearly all of it is PM2.5, so if those cars had not been purchased and gasoline cars had been purchased instead, a lot more harmful particulates would have been released.

At most, thousands more people died from NOx-related effects, but no one is even trying to tell us how many less people died from PM2.5 soot causing cancer, how much less unburned HC was released due to so much less HC being injected (a 20-25% fuel savings!) and from people buying diesels when they could be buying the competition — non-plug-in hybrids. Such vehicles get no better mileage than diesels, they emit more PM2.5 than diesels, and they have two whole power systems which raises the production energy cost. Battery electrolytes are still not recycled, they are incinerated or landfilled which costs more energy, so a diesel is still superior to a non-plug-in-hybrid.

TL;DR: You're full of shit.