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

VW is a Nazi company. Never forget that.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm German, and I know very well, where VW came from. The corporate culture did not magically change since back then. They're still the same pieces of shit. And if you want to work there, you either are like that, or you won't. Corporations are like lifeforms, in that they don't just change their personality either.
And remember: Nobody of nearly all employees needs to be a piece of shit himself, for the company to be one. It's enough for everyone just "doing his job", and saying "it's the rules" (which Germans LOVE, by the way. Hence the red pedestrian lights jokes.).

And German cars might have had a very good rep over in the US, but here in Germany, we're so used to them, that they are just normal. So with our always-complaining German attitude, you can bet that we bitched the fuck outta them. It might look like we disliked your cars in favor of ours. But it was more like us just hating ALL the things, and you hearing more about yours.:)

So I'm sorry to say that, but us finding our own companies sleazy lying manipulative pieces of overpriced shit with boring-as-fuck design and the personality of a chartered accountant who doesn’t even want to become a lion tamer, doesn't make American cars one bit less gas guzzlers that can't drive anywhere but in a straight line, with outdated technology and low build quality. ;)

(We Germans are very straightforward. VERY straightforward. Doesn’t mean we don't like ya.)

___
For the record: For some time, Japanese cars were considered the best in reliability and quality around here. (That time seems to have passed.)

Re:Europeans

[drinkypoo]

Diesels produce more nitrous oxides. However, it is not an inherent property of diesel fuel. It is a consequence of the reaction temperature.

No, it's a consequence of running lean. If you run rich, like gasoline cars do — modern ones actually run rich at WOT, and rich-lean-rich-lean (switching back and forth) at all other times — then you don't produce NOx. When combustion chamber temperatures are highest, they are running rich (WOT under load) so they don't product NOx. Except wait! Direct-injected gassers run lean most of the time, like diesels, and they can produce NOx too. So they have to be carefully tuned to avoid it, which means injecting more fuel than you need. That either means increased exhaust valve temperatures, or more load on the catalyst; either way it means more wasted fuel. Meanwhile, DEF injection all but eliminates NOx output, and it's not like it's expensive either.

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.

They could, but they could not simultaneously make the cars sporting. The power output from a clean diesel without DEF is anemic. Mazda tried it, and they decided that they couldn't actually do it while making the car fun to drive. They wondered, in fact, how VW had managed it. The answer, of course, was that they hadn't. Mazda took their diesel engine research and applied it to gasoline vehicles, and they claim to have invented the first practical compression-ignition gasoline engine. They haven't, and are liars; It's actually spark ignition. They claim the spark is used to "moderate" the reaction, but that's totally false, and they know it. It's there to initiate the reaction at a specific time, which is called spark ignition. The technology is actually analogous to CVCC, not compression ignition. It's just an unwieldy and complex way of doing what Honda was doing with intake design and carburetors back in the seventies.

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.

This is also wholly incorrect. Gasoline vehicles simply produce finer, more hazardous soot than diesels. Alas, the trap filter does nothing to reduce the amount of soot that comes out of a diesel. It's not actually a filter, it's just another catalyst. The soot is burned in the "filter", resulting in... finer soot. The most dangerous soot is PM2.5, aka particles under 2.5 microns. Soot particles smaller than cilia (which are about 1.8 microns or larger) cannot be efficiently swept out of the lungs by them, which is what makes them dangerous. Instead, they lodge in the epithelium of the lung, where they are irritants which can cause cancer. Without a trap filter, diesels produce soot well over PM2.5, which means that you can reasonably cough it up.

TL;DR: Diesels make NOx because they run lean, not because they are hot. Diesels with filters and gasoline engines both produce more hazardous soot than diesels with no filters. The soot is less dangerous specifically because you can see it. Gasoline cars are simply sneakier killers, and most of what you C&P'd is wrong.