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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.
What kind of testing are they doing that they failed to catch this? What other more dangerous industries are they testing as incompetently?
This is meaningless no matter what. VAG is getting raked over the coals for selling cars that people wanted. There was not even a hint that these cars disappointed even a single owner. And if flashing the firmware was easy, I'm guessing that pretty much every single owner would have installed this code on their own.
This is slashdot, right? Are we still in favor of people overclocking their hardware? How about purchasing pre-overclocked gear? A few days ago, weren't we opposed to WiFi routers locking their firmware to ensure compliance with FCC rules? How are we on the opposite side today?
The amazing thing about this story is that no one has yet found the settlement agreement sloshing millions of dollars into the coffers of communist agitator groups. Or maybe we'll find out later that VAG made a "voluntary" donation to a bunch of them in exchange for the settlement not being even higher.
See that "Preview" button?
It's almost guaranteed that quite a lot of people are dead because of this fraud.
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, and auto pollution double-extra doesn't work that way. 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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"