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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.

11 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 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.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  2. 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.
  3. 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?

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

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    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"