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Volkswagen Agrees To Record $14.7B Settlement Over Emissions Cheating (cnn.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the time-to-face-the-consequences dept.

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.

19 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. If no one goes to jail, it means nothing... by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

    1. Re:If no one goes to jail, it means nothing... by bloodhawk · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The CEO didn't get squat, he resigned over this scandal last year so he definitely isn't still being paid and by all reports he didn't actually know anything about this but took responsibility for it anyway by resigning. Supposedly he also ensured the investigation into it was kicked off properly before he resigned. Not everything that happens in a company is because the CEO is an evil bastard.

    2. Re: If no one goes to jail, it means nothing... by bloodhawk · · Score: 3, Informative

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

    3. Re:If no one goes to jail, it means nothing... by Orgasmatron · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

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    4. Re:If no one goes to jail, it means nothing... by yoshi_mon · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Cars are not routers. Trucks are not CPUs. I can't run over someone with my overclocked desktop. I can't go at such an unsafe speed that I lose control and crash into others with my modified router.

      Your analogy is wrong. We treat vehicles very differently because of what they can do. "We" the Slashdot crowd that understand that are not opposed to modifying things that can't go at speeds that can kill someone if operated wrongly. "We" instead understand that vehicles are something that need to be well regulated due to their nature.

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    5. Re:If no one goes to jail, it means nothing... by ichthus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I can't run over someone with my overclocked desktop. I can't go at such an unsafe speed that I lose control and crash into others with my modified router. Your analogy is wrong. We treat vehicles very differently because of what they can do. "We" the Slashdot crowd that understand that are not opposed to modifying things that can't go at speeds that can kill someone if operated wrongly.

      Have you even been following the story? You do know that this has little to do with the cars being able to run at *cough* dangerous speeds, right? Just checking.

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      sig: sauer
    6. Re:If no one goes to jail, it means nothing... by silentcoder · · Score: 2

      > You could argue that goaling people to perform causes them to act this way, but the reality is just about every company goals people to perform.

      And if the performance you reward cannot reasonably be achieved while following applicable laws then management ought to be culpable for de facto inciting criminal actions. There is a similar problem here in South Africa in the gold mines. A team of mineworkers can in theory, mine about 5 tonnes of earth a day. There are huge bonuses paid if they make 15. They aren't paid very well to begin with (considering the danger of the work they are actually paid a pittance), and without consistently making those bonuses most of them would starve. So since almost every team makes the bonusses almost every day - why not just pay them at that rate and simplify the bookkeeping, it's what they cost anyway, what motivates the companies to disguise 2/3rds of their pay as bonuses - clearly the 5 tonne level isn't actually accurate.

      Actually it is. The only way to go beyond that is to basically ignore all safety measures and regulations. So in order to survive financially mineworkers need to forego virtually all their protections from dying today. Not letting the sprayers run properly for example, which all but guarantees breathing in mining dust that causes silicosis (but waiting for the sprayers takes a chunk of time that is needed if you want a yield over 5 tonnes).
      The result is that mining accidents alone kills numerous miners every year, nearly all of them are entirely avoidable and would not have happened if the regulations were followed. But the companies get to say they provided the right equipment and the official rules require the workers to follow the regulations - it's not their fault if the workers broke the rules.
      The fact that they made it almost impossible to follow those rules without starving really OUGHT to make them culpable for those deaths. The legislature may not agree but so far at least, it looks like the civil courts might - the court recently gave permission for a suit for causing silicosis to become a class action suit, which is likely to have many thousands of members. The case will take some time yet to come to trial but the companies fought very hard to try and prevent it becoming a class action case. Their arguments were that silicosis can be almost entirely prevented it safety measures are followed and they already pay a care fee to miners that get sick - so any cases out there now that are actually legitimate would be a few individuals where it happened despite the regulations being followed. The court rejected that argument and held that, if they are in fact responsible, they are responsible for all cases - and allowed the class action.

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    7. Re:If no one goes to jail, it means nothing... by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
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  2. What happened? by penguinoid · · Score: 2

    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?

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  3. About those electric cars... by Chewbacon · · Score: 4, Funny

    Someone better check under the hood to make sure they don't have a internal combustion engine hidden somewhere.

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    Chewbacon
    The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
  4. Govt officials should go to jail too by schwit1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What kind of testing are they doing that they failed to catch this? What other more dangerous industries are they testing as incompetently?

    1. Re:Govt officials should go to jail too by amiga3D · · Score: 2

      The software was set up to detect if it was a real world or test environment. Given a test environment it would go into shitty running EPA mode. In real world it went into great motoring fun mode. Real slick until you get caught. They should have realized that sooner or later someone would catch on. You can't run any scam forever.

  5. And yet nobody died by jader3rd · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:And yet nobody died by swm · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Actually, people did die.
      Marginal increases in air pollution cause marginal increases in deaths, mainly due to assorted respiratory ailments.
      Just because we don't know who they are doesn't make the victims any less dead.

    2. Re:And yet nobody died by ichthus · · Score: 2

      Marginal increases in air pollution cause marginal increases in deaths, mainly due to assorted respiratory ailments.

      Really? How many more? Quantify it.

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      sig: sauer
    3. Re:And yet nobody died by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    4. Re:And yet nobody died by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      No, FUD-spreading liar, it is in the thousands at worst.

      You are linking to a study about deaths attributed to VW. I was talking about the number of people who died or had significant health issues due to air pollution from all sources.

      I would accuse you of setting up a straw man argument, but I think you were just triggered and flew off the handle with range, without actually realising your mistake.

      Seriously drinkypoo, you seem really quick to anger these days.

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  6. Re:Full refunds on all VW cars by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

    Firstly, this is not about all VW cars, but only those fitted with one specific type of engine (EA189) and then only those sold in one specific country.

    You are wrong on all points here. There are multiple engines involved, and German authorities say that VW cheated in Europe, too.

    Plaintiffsâ(TM) lawyers brush aside the distinction being drawn by Volkswagen. âoeThe issue of whether or not it is a defeat device amounts to very little in a legal sense,â said Bozena Michalowska Howells, a partner at the London law firm Leigh Day.

    âoeTheyâ(TM)re going to remove it and fix it, and for regulatory purposes, itâ(TM)s being deemed a defeat device,â she said.

    So in fact, this is about a broad range of cars sold in multiple countries, and you have no idea what you are talking about. Why not step aside, and let the adults speak?

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    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  7. Re:Full refunds on all VW cars by jittles · · Score: 2

    Firstly, this is not about all VW cars, but only those fitted with one specific type of engine (EA189) and then only those sold in one specific country.

    You are wrong on all points here. There are multiple engines involved, and German authorities say that VW cheated in Europe, too.

    Plaintiffsâ(TM) lawyers brush aside the distinction being drawn by Volkswagen. âoeThe issue of whether or not it is a defeat device amounts to very little in a legal sense,â said Bozena Michalowska Howells, a partner at the London law firm Leigh Day.

    âoeTheyâ(TM)re going to remove it and fix it, and for regulatory purposes, itâ(TM)s being deemed a defeat device,â she said.

    So in fact, this is about a broad range of cars sold in multiple countries, and you have no idea what you are talking about. Why not step aside, and let the adults speak?

    I was traveling abroad shortly after this scandal broke. I had gone on a guided tour and had dinner with a German family afterwards. The father liked my camera and was interested in getting my pictures from the trip. We chatted for hours and he gave me his business card. It turned out that he is the head of "Risk Management" for a large car manufacturer. I asked him of what he thought of the situation with VW. He made two claims to me that I (for obvious reasons) cannot verify. He said that he was personal friends with his counterpart at VW and that the company did make the decision to cheat at a high enough level that his counterpart was involved. He also claimed that VW only broke the law in the US despite the fact that it cheated emissions tests in multiple countries. He said that it was only the US that would be able to hold VW accountable as a country. Whether or not these statements are true, I cannot say.