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Largest Auto-Scandal Settlement In US History: Judge Approves $15 Billion Volkswagen Settlement (usatoday.com)
A federal just has approved the largest auto-scandal settlement in U.S. history, a $14.7 billion settlement concerning Volkswagen Group's diesel car emissions scandal. USA Today reports: U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco approved the sweeping agreement between consumers, the government, California regulators and the German automaker in a written ruling a week after signaling he was likely to sign off. He said the agreement is "fair, reasonable and adequate." The settlement comes about a year after Volkswagen admitted that it rigged 11 million vehicles worldwide with software designed to dodge emissions standards. The company is still facing criminal investigations by the U.S. Justice Department and German prosecutors. The U.S. probe could lead to additional financial penalties and criminal indictments. About 475,000 Volkswagen owners in the U.S. can choose between a buyback or a free fix and compensation, if a repair becomes available. VW will begin administering the settlement immediately, having already devoted several hundred employees to handling the process. Buybacks range in value from $12,475 to $44,176, including restitution payments, and varying based on milage. People who opt for a fix approved by the Environmental Protection Agency will receive payouts ranging from $5,100 to $9,852, depending on the book value of their car. Volkswagen will also pay $2.7 billion for environmental mitigation and another $2 billion for clean-emissions infrastructure.
I'm genuinely surprised this story has been on the front page this long: a) without a comment, and b) without a comment from someone making a snarky remark about global warming being fake and how its killing businesses. Good on you Slashdot.
I own a 2014 model... Less than 40k miles. Basically, I can turn my car in, and walk away with $30. According to them anyway... No restitution for sales tax and fee's paid when I bought it, no restitution for my lost time and the anguish of having to go to a car dealership and buy something else. Hell, I'm not sure they're even going to cover the sales tax to turn it in. I've moved states since buying it, and I think this state will want to collect taxes on the buyback...
If you skip the fix, you won't pass emissions now that they know about it. You can either sell the car back to VW or accept the fix and compensation for lost performance.
Nobody is regulating anybody out of business. Go look at VW's stock performance up until this broke. There's just such a thing as too much coming from your tailpipe. If you ever lived in LA during the 60's, or hell, even up through the 90s then you'd understand.
Presumably the fix would be to have the car always run in "cheat" mode, rather than removing the cheat. The cars are clearly capable of generating fewer emissions or the cheat wouldn't have worked in the first place.
The result will be lower performance, of course, but the vehicles will have emissions ratings in line with what everyone was led to believe.
=Smidge=
And yet other companies manage to stay in business without committing fraud.
The reasons for emissions regulations are so that when consumers make the cost/performance tradeoff when buying a car, they don't externalize costs -- which is an economist's way of saying make other people pay for their choices. A car would be cheaper and perform better if it didn't have a catalytic converter (just dump your partially burned hydrocarbons on everyone else), EGRs (just dump your NOx on everyone else), PCVs (spread engine oil over everyone else) and mufflers (dump your noise on everyone else).
All of that stuff you'd be dumping on everyone else costs everyone else. You can argue about precisely how much it costs them, but it is certainly not zero.
So let's turn your little rhetorical device around: How dare you fraudulently make the public subsidize your business?
Here's the thing about markets: they're not about making everyone happy. They're about efficient distribution of resources. If costs go up producers are unhappy and some of them go out of business. That makes the owners and workers unhappy, but it is a rational response to costs going up. Dumping those costs on others and pretending they don't exist isn't rational; it's hysterical.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
To me this VW emissions scandal, and many others, kind of shows just how difficult if not impossible it is to set standards that apply at all time under all conditions in the real world. The only way to monitor emissions in real-world conditions is to monitor them in real time as we drive. Every car across the planet, and then relay that information to some central location. And then what I think you'll find is that most engines don't meet the strictest standards a lot of the time. And it will vary as much on people's driving habits as anything. Punch it off the light and you're going to emit a lot more particulates than cruising. Drive it hard while cold and you'll pollute regardless. And even gasoline engines likely emit much more particulate pollution than we thought before, especially with direct injection.
That's not to say pollution standards aren't good. A car that meets standards under controlled conditions is going to be a lot cleaner under any circumstances than an engine that didn't meet those standards under controlled circumstances.