Volkswagen Settles Diesel Emissions Lawsuit Right Before Trial Set To Begin (theverge.com)

Volkswagen settled a major diesel emissions class action lawsuit brought by hundreds of vehicle owners right before the case was set to go to trial. "The German auto giant's U.S. division settled the lawsuit brought by a North Carolina man and over 300 other owners of diesel cars who allege fraud and unfair trade practices," reports The Verge. From the report: The trial could have featured testimony from current and former VW executives and would likely have caused a spate of bad press for the automaker regarding the Dieselgate scandal. Since it first broke in 2015, the controversy has led to the resignation of VW's CEO, seen a handful of executives sentenced to jail, and resulted in billions of dollars in fines and settlements. VW is being sued by some consumers after it admitted to using software to cheat on diesel emissions tests, sparking the biggest scandal to hit the auto industry in decades. David Doar, the North Carolina man along with more than 300 other U.S. VW diesel owners, rejected settlement offers from a 2016 class action that would have reimbursed them for the value of their vehicles. Nearly all U.S. owners of affected VW vehicles agreed to take part in a $25 billion settlement in 2016, which included buyback offers and additional compensation for about 500,000 owners. But according to Reuters, some 2,000 owners have opted out, and most are pursuing separate claims seeking additional compensation.

Comments

Re:Europeans

[Solandri]

There are a lot of factors at play here, going both ways, making the situation a lot more complicated than such a simplistic analysis.

• The diesel cycle is more efficient than the Otto cycle used in gasoline engines. If you want to produce the most energy possible via combustion from a given amount of fuel, dieseling (pressurizing fuel until it auto-ignites) is the way to do it.
• Diesels produce more nitrous oxides. However, it is not an inherent property of diesel fuel. It is a consequence of the reaction temperature. Even an engine burning pure hydrogen at a high power output will produce nitrous oxides. NOx is produced when atmospheric nitrogen combines with atmospheric oxygen using excess energy in the reaction chamber. Because the diesel cycle is more efficient, it results in higher combustion temperatures, which results in more NOx production. That's the unfortunate trade-off here: Higher fuel efficiency (less CO2 emissions) comes at the cost of increased NOx emissions.
• The strategy employed by newer diesels is to inject a measured amount of diesel exhaust fluid (DEF, marketed as Ad-blue). It's basically ammonia, and combines with NOx to convert it into nitrogen gas and water. The process is patented by Mercedes, and licensed by other diesel engine manufacturers. VW's former CEO hated it and demanded VW engineers come up with a way to make VW's diesels compliant with emissions regulations without using DEF. Someone somewhere in VW made a decision to lie and pretend they could do it, rather than admit that they couldn't.
• When you refine oil, it naturally wants to break down into a certain amount of gasoline and a certain amount of diesel (the diesel hydrocarbon chains are longer). You can break down diesel into gasoline with further refining, but it's energy-intensive. It's virtually impossible to convert gasoline into diesel. Consequently the most efficient use of oil is to simply use gasoline and diesel in the ratio in which it's most easily refined. The U.S. with its larger travel distances and large trucking industry uses about the right ratio of diesel (trucks) vs gasoline (cars). Europe, with its smaller travel distances and greater prevalence of rail transport tends to use less diesel than is refined. So they end up with excess diesel, lowering its price relative to gasoline, creating an incentive to produce cars which run on diesel. (This is also why diesel prices go up in the winter. Home heating oil is virtually identical to diesel, so the supply of diesel for transportation fuel is reduced during the winter.).
• Diesel is a denser fuel than gasoline. It's about 12% heavier than the same volume of gasoline (there's 12% more "stuff" in a given volume of diesel). So the MPG figures you see for diesel are a bit overstated since we measure these fuels by volume, rather than by mass. It's still got a higher energy density though (about 3% more energy per mass). And the higher combustion efficiency means cars/trucks still get more distance per unit mass of diesel than gasoline. It's just not as much as the MPG would suggest.
• Particulate emissions (mainly carbon soot) are higher with diesel, but newer diesels simply capture it in a filter and burn it off (converting it to CO2) at regular intervals. Despite this additional CO2 production, diesel's CO2 production per vehicle mile is still lower than gasoline's.
• The emissions standards are a moving target, gradually becoming more stringent over the years. For example, the EPA limit on NOx emissions was 1.25 g/mile in 1994, lowered to 0.07 g/mile in 2004, and in 2017 lowered to 0.086 g/mile of NOx + other non-methane hydrocarbons. So while VW's emissions far exceeded the 2004 limit, the cars actually would've complied with the 1994 limit. In particular, the 2015 VW diesels actually complied with the EPA limit, they just slightly exceeded C