Posted on 06/27/2016 8:28:14 PM PDT by dennisw
Volkswagen has agreed to pay up to $14.7 billion to settle claims stemming from its diesel emissions cheating scandal, in what would be one of the largest consumer class-action settlements ever in the United States.
The proposed settlement involving the federal government and lawyers for the owners of about 475,000 Volkswagen vehicles, includes a maximum of $10.03 billion to buy back affected cars at their pre-scandal values, and additional cash compensation for the owners, according to two people briefed on the settlement’s terms.
The cash compensation offered to each car owner will range from $5,100 to $10,000. Both the buyback price and amount of the additional compensation will depend on the cars’ value before Volkswagen’s public admission last September that its supposed “clean diesel” cars had been deliberately designed to cheat on air-quality tests.
Despite the scope of the deal, which would still require the approval of the federal judge overseeing the case, the settlement would cover only a small fraction of the 11 million diesel cars worldwide — most of them in Europe — that Volkswagen has acknowledged contained the cheating software.
But in the United States, “It’s a remarkable deal for Volkswagen owners who were defrauded by the company,” said David M. Uhlmann, a former chief of the Justice Department’s Environmental Crimes Section who is now a law professor at the University of Michigan.
Rather than sell their vehicles back to Volkswagen, car owners in the United States can also choose to have their vehicles fixed to meet emissions standards, although doing so would probably reduce the engines’ performance and gas mileage. And the methods for fixing the vehicles that Volkswagen has proposed are still subject to approval by the Environmental Protection Agency, one of the federal parties to the case.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
How much would the added nitrogen oxides put into the air by these Volkswagen diesels really affect people in cities? In rural areas this is obviously a big fat nothing
Does the money ultimately flow to “Friends of the Earth” or “Planned Parenthood?” Every other fine from this administration seems to have found its way to “0bama-friendly” groups.
I despise this man, greatly. I also despise this Congress, that could stop him, but lets him rape and plunder this country and its businesses for personal gain.
Ouch!!
Wanna-be Fuhrer-chen Angela’s biggest tax cow just took it up the ass.
Due to the same Envirophantasmagoria infecting the EU.
Ouch!!
Can I get me a cheap diesel here?
Part of the settlement goes to La Raza, Planned Parenthood, SEIU, AFL-CIO, The LGBT Alliance, BLM, and ACORN.
This is the real scam.
The real lucky owners of these diesel Volkswagens live in states with no emissions testings. They can just keep driving these vehicles until they fall apart. If they sell they should have good resale value for buyers living in states w no emissions testings. I am so sick of the EPA.
That’s it?
Totally survivable
The devil is always in the details of a settlement, so I am waiting to read the fine print. I lease a 2015 Passat TDI, and would love to be able to buy it at the end of the lease (for a price heavily discounted from the buyout prices in the lease terms.) But it is pretty unlikely that VW (or VW Credit, owner of the leased vehicle) will be allowed to sell the car. So, my curiosity is on the terms of the settlement that apply to the surrender of leased vehicles.
One article from several months ago indicated that they expected leases to be allowed to terminate early without penalty. If that means what it appears to say, then I would keep the car until the month before the lease expires, drive the hell out of it in the meantime, and then turn it in. An alternative that I doubt VW would be allowed to do would be to extend the lease term (at a much discounted rate) and let me lease it for another 3 years. I love the car - regularly get in excess of 42 MPG in mixed interstate and urban driving. I was at the dealership last week getting service and it was news to the employees there that the settlement was going to be announced this week. VW seems to have been dropping the ball ever since this was exposed. Some of their customers are rather pissed about this, and their dealers are looking for compensation for the costs and sales hit this caused.
VW made vehicles that were stated as X emissions compliant, and no consumer actually knew, nor probably cared ...
but
Some gov't piece of paper said VW was lying, and according to the paper they were ... so the consumers who probably liked their cars and didn't know and probably didn't care are now faced with get money or repairs that really aren't necessary .... except for a gov't piece of paper
Am I close ?
This is the stuff that burns to breathe and leaves those with breathing disabilities gasping for breath or sometimes on life support.
To put it in perspective, each of the cheating VWs was equivalent to 40 of these:
or these
blasting around. And they sold almost 800,000 of them. (Cheating I4s + cheating I6s).
This wasn't a nothingburger pollutant like CO2.
Most states will not allow them to renew their registration unless they’ve complied with the recall.
Negative. VW made vehicles that they claimed were compliant, then went on HUUUUUUUUUGE marketing campaigns claiming that these vehicles were suuuuuuper clean and that they weren’t the old polluting diesels of yore. Hundreds of thousands of people were conned into buying the cars on the basis that the cars were ‘clean.’
Here’s just one of the many VW ‘clean diesel’ ads they ran for the better part of a decade:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNS2nvkjARk
Here’s part of one of the print ads:
http://www.brandchannel.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/volkswagen-clean-diesel-tdi.jpg
They committed consumer fraud on a massive scale.
What a disgrace. What crap!
Look into the history of why that’s the law as well as what VW *actually* did and you may change your mind on that. Would you want an un-fixed Pinto or one of the brake-hydraulics-catching-on-fire Fords parked in your garage, or next to you when you’re stuck in bumper to bumper traffic and can’t move?
It’s also worth noting that when an American company tried to use the same tech solution that VW was using (and lying about the results to the EPA) with, they were unable to bring their diesel engines into compliance. They were hit with a multimillion dollar fine, the company almost went out of business and literally thousands of people were laid off. Hundreds of engineers were besmirched by the failure (”Ha, ha, VW is smarter than you!”) and many were forced out of the industry.
Turns out that VW lied, and Americans were *directly* harmed. People lost *everything.* It seems you *can’t* meet those emissions standards with just an EGR system. (There was a competing system called DEF that does work and is what everyone else adopted.) Being proved right won’t restore Navistar’s industry position, it won’t get their people their jobs back, and it will take years for their engineers to get their rep back, if they ever do.
Think VW needs to be allowed to get away with it?
Keep reading the replies - this is not something that can or should be dismissed.
The question instead should be, do I even believe current EPA standards are necessary?
The answer is no. Yep, VW lied straight up and down... to get around EPA regs.
I’ll get on board with taking VW down as long as we take the EPA down with them.
Let’s put this argument in another perspective:
Car engines have been burning substantially clean and efficient in this country for decades now. We’re as clean as we need to be. We need cheaper cars and cheaper gas. Not more environmental regs.
So this is a case of law vs ethics vs morality.
Law broken?
Yes.
Ethics broken?
Only so far as the direct advertising to consumers. The cars themselves are very desirable and have good specs.
Morality violated?
Christ would never approve of lying, even to a corrupt government, even for a good cause.
So... who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?
If we want JUSTICE out of all this, then we need to equally address the EPA regs that don’t allow us to have efficient diesel vehicles at the same time we slap VW down for deception.
Otherwise, it’s the greater evil shaking down the lesser evil for money and political power. There’s no long term gain for any normal person from that.
Thing is, every other diesel car maker in the US market successfully managed to comply with the standard. Mercedes, GM, Chrysler, Fiat, Nissan, Toyota - all of them. Every diesel truck maker successfully managed to comply (though, in the case of Navistar, it did take a while - it would have been much worse if the EPA hadn’t given them extra time to comply and the multimillion dollar fine would have been billions.) VW did not comply and in fact is documented as having been contemplating cheating as early as 2006.
There is an argument to be made for some pollutants in auto exhaust that we don’t need to regulate it further. CO2, for example. Oxides of nitrogen isn’t one of them.
Again, EVERYONE ELSE met the specs. VW didn’t. We *do* have efficient diesel vehicles that comply with the law. They’re just not Volkswagens.
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