Volkswagen Executive Faces Jail Time After Guilty Plea (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica: A former Volkswagen executive has pleaded guilty to two charges related to the company's diesel emissions scandal. He is the second VW Group employee to do so, following retired engineer James Liang pleading guilty last summer. The VW Group executive, Oliver Schmidt, was based outside of Detroit and was in charge of emissions compliance for Volkswagen in the years before the company was caught using illegal software to cheat on federal emissions tests.

Schmidt, a German citizen who was 48 when he was arrested in Miami in January on vacation, was originally charged with 11 felony counts. In accepting a plea deal from US federal officials, Schmidt will only plead guilty to two charges: conspiracy to defraud the US government and violate the Clean Air Act, and making a false statement under the Clean Air Act. Schmidt will be sentenced in December. He could face up to seven years in prison, as well as fines from $40,000 to $400,000, according to the plea agreement. After that, Schmidt could also be required to serve four years of supervised release.

Comments

An even better punishment..

[SilverBlade2k]

A better punishment would be to punish the company as a whole:

- Force Volkswagaon to buy back all of the affected vehicles - at their original value, regardless of how old it is.
- Give every customer of an effected car, at minimum, $5000 extra for the inconvenience and deception.
- Every new car off the assembly line must an electric vehicle AND to be sold at the same price as a similar gas powered car. Even if it is at a loss.

Make the company bleed out a little bit. Nothing makes a company act straight other than the threat of losing money.

Re:An even better punishment..

[drinkypoo]

I don't want an EV.

All VWs will be electrified soon, and lots of them will be EVs. VW is spending a bunch of money on a charging network in North America, which should boost EV adoption considerably. Of course, it doesn't take big numbers to get a big increase in the market right now. It's not their choice, but they're going to do it anyway.

It's going to be hard to find a car which is not a mild hybrid soon, because the cost difference is diminishing and the emissions benefits are substantial.

Re:An even better punishment..

[ShanghaiBill]

Every study I've ever read says ...

Vacuously true?

Re:An even better punishment..

[drinkypoo]

In probably 5-8 years, all vehicle will be self-driving EVs (and some hybrids).

The average age of the American fleet is over eleven years and rising. (The average age of cars in the EU is almost eleven years, as well.) The average car is somewhere around $33,000, and rising. Employment is falling worldwide, with a number of nations in full-on crisis and more on the way. Even if we had self-driving EVs on sale tomorrow, and even banned selling anything else new (you can't reasonably ban used sales) it would still take minimum ten and more like twenty years for them to proliferate.

Re:An even better punishment..

[Ol Olsoc]

A better punishment would be to punish the company as a whole:

Nah - if a few CEO's get to spend some time in jail, and if others know this can happen to them, it won't take long at all for companies to have wonderful ethics.

Otherwise, he just gets to shrug his shoulders and lament about that custodian that "caused" the whole problem.

I'd love to see one of these turds get a life sentence. Problem cured in a minute.

Re:An even better punishment..

[Rei]

I have no interest in a charging network. I'm not going to sit around all day, every couple of days charging my car.

You have a strange impression of what charging entails. Fast charging today is half an hour to 80%. Next generation chargers - higher power, and with offboard sources of chilled coolant rather than having cars cool themselves with ambient-temperature coolant - will bring this down. As will next-generation batteries, with higher ion mobility. And unless you drive great distances every day, it's not "every couple days". Even the shortest range Tesla is 220 miles highway range.
  More city range.

In any event electric cars cost way more than equivalent ICE cars

Not against others in their class. The Tesla Model 3, for example, is designed to compete with the BMW 3-series and similar. Comparing base models, it's faster, more agile, more passenger room, more storage room, more standard features (bringing the 3-Series up to the standard features of the Model 3 requires thousands of dollars of options), and cheaper, without accounting for tax credits and the money saved on maintenance and fuel. And it's received rave reviews from virtually every journalist that test drove it thusfar.

They're not targeting a Yaris, they're targeting BMW, Audi and Mercedes. Toyota, Honda, etc are also on their hitlist, but several years down the road (Model 3 is a midrange sedan, while the next release will be Model Y, a midrange crossover, and a Tesla semi. After that they're looking at a pickup, a low-end sedan, and a second generation Roadster)

your electricity bill will cost way more

Driving an EV is vastly cheaper than driving a gasoline car. Do the math yourself - the Model S charges at about 1/4 kWh per highway mile (less per city mile). It of course depends on your local gas and electricity prices; even where electricity is expensive and gas is cheap, it's cheaper to drive an EV; in places where I am where electricity is average priced but gasoline very expensive, it costs 1/10th as much to drive an EV.

and you'll be stuck needing to buy batteries (or new car) much sooner than you'd need to replace major components on an ICE.

Tesla Model 3 has a 8 year / 100k (or 120k for the long-range) mile warranty on the battery pack. Model S and X have the same 8 years but unlimited mileage. And for the record, the batteries don't just die - the rate of degradation slows over time.

When there is a breakthrough new battery technology

Not needed - the future is now. Heck, even the old weight canard is gone - a Tesla Model 3 weighs approximately the same as a BMW 3-Series.

Re:An even better punishment..

[Rei]

Every study I've ever read says

And in what journal were those zero studies published? Because I've read plenty of actual, peer-reviewed studies, which say exactly the opposite. Which should be patently obvious to anyone who takes half a second to think about it. A typical gasoline car burns its weight in gasoline every year, up in smoke. And the mass of a car gets largely recycled at end-of-life. The more valuable the material in a car, the more likely it is to be recycled.

Oh, and as for the whole "rare earths" canard? Teslas, for example, don't use rare earths. Neither in the batteries nor in the motors. They use AC induction motors - that is, aluminum and copper. The battery cell cathodes are varying combination of nickel, cobalt, aluminum and oxygen; the anodes carbon with optional silicon; there's thin separator membranes and organic electrolytes; and of course, lithium which intercalates in the anode and cathode, of which most is mined in the least environmentally destructive manner imaginable (from drying salar brine - even more to the point, many of the salars flood annually and reclaim the drying ponds every year).

More to the point... nor are rare earths actually rare. Want to know something that's actually rare? Precious metals in your catalytic converter and spark plugs. They don't use much, of course - but they're mined from ores in ppb quantities, so you have to move a lot of ore to get those small quantities.

Oh, and by the way, if you want to raise an issue of copper usage (you can also use aluminum, but we'll ignore that)... ironically Tesla's vehicles may be using less copper than gasoline vehicles. One thing Tesla has been very aggressive about is reducing the wiring harness, which has grown into huge, heavy complicated mass on conventional vehicles. The Model S's was 3km (the average car today is 4km). The Model 3's wiring harness is 1,5km. And they're looking to get the Model Y down to a tiny 100m, and raise the voltage, which means less copper. The thing will weigh almost nothing.

Re:An even better punishment..

[ShanghaiBill]

Oh and Walmart, Costco and Safeway don't mind if the fella who lives in the apartment down the street parks there and charges?

The chargers are not free. You plug in, a sensor identifies your car, and your account is debited for the amount of energy you draw.

Re:An even better punishment..

[eclectro]

Make the company bleed out a little bit. Nothing makes a company act straight other than the threat of losing money.

No. This is useless and false, and does nothing to deter future crimes. Megacompanies think nothing of paying a slap-on-the-wrist fine as they merely see it as the cost of doing business. The deal as it stands is much better as long as the executives actually go to PMIA prison

This is the first time (in a very, very long while) that I have seen a notable example of a white collar criminal doing hard time. The reason why it's so important is that boardroom executives need to see that there is a very real consequence of them going to jail for being criminals and knowingly breaking the law.

The huge problem with the 2007 banking collapse is we didn't see a single banker do hard time. Instead, we saw large fines that were written off by the companies that they worked for and it was given nary a thought. The message is out, you can go ahead and break the law, and get away with it by having your company pick up the tab.

Until now, that is. Though it is a "plea deal" and not a trial, I consider this groundbreaking now not unlike the arrival of EV vehicles even.

If we saw more white collar jail-time prosecution of crime on Wall Street our financial system would be much more stable and better.

He'll walk . . .

[PolygamousRanchKid]

. . . jail is for poor folks . . . as every American Kid says during the morning roll call:

With freedom and justice . . . for the rich . . .

Ordered to take the fall?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

He is probably the lowest level flunky who would still be high enough for PR spin. He will probably be well rewarded for protecting the higher ups who were all in the game.

It is a German company we are talking about. Their level of documentation and verification are phenomenal. Anyone who sold software to VW would know. They store all the results of all the prior use of the software that was used. They rerun the software after every version upgrade. And they demand every difference to be explained.

No way this diesel emission scandal is some handywork of some rogue group or division. Everyone from the very top knew, they approved and they monitored the deception from the get go.

Re:Ordered to take the fall?

[Roger W Moore]

He is probably the lowest level flunky who would still be high enough for PR spin.

Actually, it sounded more like he was the only one they could get their hands on quickly. I suspect that others may well be the subject of extradition requests or at least they are now going to have far more restricted travel itineraries since they will have to avoid everywhere which has a suitable extradition treaty...and that's assuming that local EU authorities don't end up throwing them in jail first for the same crime.

Put him with Pharma Bro

[PopeRatzo]

Any time a corporate executive is jailed, for whatever reason, it's good for everyone.

I subscribe to "broken windows theory" when it comes to corporate crime. If you let one get away with even a minor crime, the rest will think it's OK to do something a little bigger, until we end up with what we've got now.

Better to make an example of a few executives. Don't put them in any country club prison, either. Use public stocks, heads on pikes, I don't care. Just let them know they are not the masters of the universe.

Shoulda Worked in Finance Instead...

[BarneyGuarder]

Those guys never do time

Re:Making it easy to profile

[edjs]

The US indicted 6 VW execs for breaking US law. Schmidt had the misfortune of being in the US when the indictments came down. Presumably the other 5 are avoiding getting anywhere near US soil.

Oh come on...

[WolfgangVL]

This guy is not going to prison. He's gonna pay a big fine. That's all.

If on the off chance that he does go to prison, he's gonna go to country-club prison and probably collect his entire salary as hush money when he gets out anyway.

If any of this was real, it would be for more than the one guy who happened to be on vacation in the US when they decided to make an example.

I don't buy this theater for a second.

Re:Oh come on...

[Snotnose]

If on the off chance that he does go to prison, he's gonna go to country-club prison and probably collect his entire salary as hush money when he gets out anyway.

Country club prison is still prison. This guy will lose the lifestyle he's used to. He'll eat shitty food when told to. He'll sleep when told to. He'll wear shitty clothes, and let outside whenever the guards decide he can go outside. Library privileges will be limited. TV is limited. Phone calls are limited. Internet? Yeah, about that. Cell phone? More prison time if caught.

If you live in the ghetto country club prison may be no big deal. Make a 6-7 figure salary? I'm pretty sure it sux ass.

Amazing

[Squirmy McPhee]

Amazing to me that TWO Volkswagen execs have been found criminally liable for this, and only one exec from ALL OF THE BANKS was found criminally liable for any of the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis. Other commenters are saying that they're going to jail because they cost people money, but what Volkswagen cost people is peanuts compared to what bankers cost people, so that doesn't really square with me.

Not much better and not helping car owners.

[jbn-o]

Those are the kind of things that won't make a company change its practices, only retreat further into finding new ways to hide cheating software while simultaneously not helping the people who get cars (VW was hardly the only car manufacturer to engage in this cheating).

Freeing the car software by distributing complete source code and build/install instructions under a free software license plus making cars that use the same or compatible software would help the car owner far more. This is entirely reasonable to demand on its own sake as an affected vehicle owner and precisely because this case highlights the unjust power over everyone's need to breathe cleaner air. As a minor practical matter, car owners who aren't so technical could take a copy of the software to someone they trust for inspection, modification, and reinstallation (just as car owners take their cars to garages, detail cleaners, tire shops, and any other specialist firm to get work done). It's worth noting that my call is not a call for "open source" or "opening" anything. The open source development methodology is quite content to throw aside its own message if that development methodology gets in the way of business desires for control over the user (as is the heart of the case both in this scandal and in this discussion thread). The older free software social movement has the right take on things: demand respect for users' software freedom to liberate users from the control of proprietary software.

Software freedom (respecting a computer user's freedoms to run, share, and modify software at any time for any reason even commercially) is valuable for its own sake and the car manufacturers know it. That's why they're willing to pay some money or send a small number of people to jail now. Those steps protect their ability to cheat again leveraging the power of proprietary software (user-subjugating software) when they think they can get away with it.

Bankers left room to wiggle

[Roger W Moore]

What Volkswagen did was really easy for almost everyone to understand and so very hard to wriggle out of. The problem with bankers is that the laws they violate are amazingly complex and very hard for juries to understand. This gives them a lot more wriggle room to weasel out of criminal charges.

Defence lawyers know this and use it to fiddle the jury pool. My uncle was a UK bank inspector and sometimes had to sit in on trials for bank managers he caught on the fiddle. He always used to claim that jury selection was often done by which newspaper the prospective jurors were carrying: "The Sun", "Daily Mail" or equivalent were fine but show up with "The Times" or, worse, "The Financial Times" they would hardly be in the room before some objection to them was found. After that, anyone with a university degree was the next target for removal because if you can't really understand the crime because it is so complex then there is bound to be reasonable doubt that someone committed it.