A settlement announced Tuesday over Volkswagen’s rigging of vehicle emissions tests — as clear a case of fraud as you can find — will be good for consumers who, based on VW’s lies, bought diesel cars that secretly spewed unlawfully
A settlement announced Tuesday over Volkswagen’s rigging of vehicle emissions tests — as clear a case of fraud as you can find — will be good for consumers who, based on VW’s lies, bought diesel cars that secretly spewed unlawfully high levels of pollutants and climate-warming gases. The proposed agreement commits VW to buying back or fixing, if a fix is ever figured out, most of the 475,000 noncompliant VW, Audi and Porsche diesel cars in the U.S., as well as paying the car owners up to $10,000 each. The cost to VW: About $10 billion. …
Do the terms of the settlement atone for seven years of fraudulent tests that allowed VW to sell nearly half a million cars that pumped as much as 40 times the legal levels of nitrogen oxide (linked to smog and global warming) into the atmosphere? …
The agreement, reached with the Federal Trade Commission and the California Air Resources Board (a regulatory leader in fighting air pollution), leaves open what to do about 80,000 Porsche, Audi and VW cars with larger and dirtier diesel engines. VW also faces more civil fines under the U.S. Clean Air Act, and the settlement does not preclude future related lawsuits. Notably, it will have no bearing on a criminal investigation being conducted by the U.S. Justice Department.
Unfortunately, the settlement is contingent upon a judge’s approval, which isn’t expected for several months. By the time VW starts buying back cars, some of them will have spent eight years on the nation’s roadways, excessively polluting every mile along the way.
According to the court filing, when California regulators first reported in 2012 that their real-world tests of the cars yielded much different results from those VW had reported, the automaker hemmed and hawed, offering various alternative theories for the divergent readings. It disclosed that the cars had been outfitted with “defeat devices” — the test-cheating software — only after regulators threatened to bar sales of the 2016 model year cars until the automaker accounted for the discrepancy. So first VW cheated, then it lied.
The problem with the cars wasn’t a failure of technology, or bad engineering. In fact, it was quite clever and deliberate. Engineers designed software to track variations in a car’s steering and speed, enabling it to detect when the car was running without a driver — a telltale sign of its emissions being tested on a dynamometer. The program would then direct the engine to operate at “dyno calibration,” or with full emission controls to meet the standards. The rest of the time the software would tell the engine to run on “road calibration,” which improves the car’s performance but blows through the emissions limits. VW installed the software on 11 million vehicles worldwide to evade emissions caps and hide the fact that cars it was marketing as environmentally friendly yet still peppy were, in fact, gross polluters.
Individuals made those decisions. Fines and buybacks affect the corporate bottom line and VW shareholders. But the managers and employees who did this work engaged in an intentional fraud that not only deceived consumers, but also deceived government agencies responsible for trying to ratchet back the amount of climate-changing pollutants that get added to the atmosphere. Such willful acts demand accountability, not just through civil settlements, but in the criminal courts.
— Los Angeles Times
