It'll take a trillion bucks to completely repair the highway system. I don't disagree with the analysis, but do you have a source on this?
More like going to jail. When you are actively trying to circumvent the law that requires a higher punishment.
I know in Texas, they were thinking about adding electric car sales tax to recover the money they lose from the fuel tax.
Obviously people with TDIs were significantly misled when they purchased, and the recall "fix" is going to mess with fuel efficiency and performance, not to mention this is significantly going to affect resale value. Any chance that VW is forced to implement a buyback? or is the best TDI owners can hope for is a couple hundred bucks in a class-action (while the lawyers bank)?
If I was a TDI owner, I'd be incensed if they didn't buy back the vehicle. I probably would not participate in a recall repair.
They cheated on 11m cars, and set aside a reserve of $7.2B. That's a lot of money, but spread over 11m cars, that's only $654/car. That doesn't sound like nearly enough. It probably won't even cover the fines, let alone any recall they have to do.
Wow. Probably means that the recall solve is going to be a computer-based fix, which all but guarantees the fix is going to significantly affect performance and gas mileage.
At that point, I think a buyback program is the only fair solution. If you bought a TDI, you were sold a false bill of goods. It can easily be argued that had the emissions numbers been reported accurately, a large portion of people would not have bought the car in the first place.
Yeah, $650/car isn't going to pay for anything more than a software fix, I doubt. But, that's an initial reserve. They could potentially add to the reserve later. This isn't an oil supermajor, so I think drumming up $7B for a reserve was probably pretty hard. They have about $15B cash on hand with another $12B in short-term investments. Their cash from operations for 2014 was a little shy of $11B. So they have some cash left after the reserve, but they probably don't want to commit it until they have to. Doing a buyback for everything is probably not financially feasible for them. For the 482,000 affected cars in the US (which is a small share of the 11m total), if they averaged say $15k/car, that's $7.2B right there, nine months of operating cashflow worldwide just to do a US buyback. Europe will hurt even worse, then the fines and lawsuits. So a buyback is probably right out, imo. They could potentially ship all these cars to some market that doesn't care about pollution and try to recoup a portion of it, but it doesn't look plausible to me. VW owners can only hope for some combination of class-action lawsuit (or compensation fund) and a cheap recall-fix. The US isn't going to want to punish the car owners either though. So, I think they have a voluntary recall that most owners won't participate in, and then some kind of compensation to each owner. They'll drive around polluting our air for a few more years and eventually be scrapped.
I'm still interested in what the actual emissions are. "Clean diesel's" reputation and how long it lasts would depend on it.
It's the NOx emission that's in question here. The clean diesel technology itself is not in question here, VW just cheated. All diesels from all other manufactures have some kind of urea injection system to turn the NOx into elemental nitrogen & oxygen, but for the engines in question here(the EA188 diesels) VW claimed they were able to meet this requirement without the urea injection system. They knew they screwed up even before this scandal, their new EA288 engines added the urea injection back.
As a tree hugger and vegan, this act just flat out disgust me. They should get thrown in jail and get footlongs with Jarod.
this is going back to articles read maybe 8yrs ago, will try to find one and post here later today as far as i understand, CAFE standards didn't increase for the 20yrs prior to 2011 -- when obama made an agreement with most carmakers to start increases (interesting that VW was the only major carmaker that refused to sign that agreement and even put out press releases disparaging it :grin: ) the thing is that the CAFE penalties are miniscule to the carmakers, like $100 on a $45k car, so they're a non-issue…..and the way they're calculated is a joke, based on the footprint and classification of the vehicle, so the carmakers just do the math and skirt definitions to end up with for example, a low fuel efficiency minivan that still somehow fully complies w/ the targets so from 1990-2010 they didn't increase the standards b/c they wanted that steady fuel tax revenue flowing……now they'll transition the tax basis to emissions instead, based on some formula with vehicle and total miles driven…..they'll probably be checking odometers annually at inspection time
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...a-mileage-based-tax-could-be-a-better-option/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/01/oregon-gas-mileage-tax/2608067/ http://lasvegassun.com/news/2013/aug/09/new-use-odometer-determining-tax-you-pay/
German regulators are saying VW may have delayed the release of information and allowed for some insider trading before the news hit the market. Stockholders will likely sue for material omission of risk factors (like 'we might get caught cheating by the EPA and have to pay out billions') in their public filings. And the French government might sue to recover clean energy tax incentives the government paid to incentivize the purchase of clean diesel cars. http://www.wsj.com/articles/german-...en-shares-around-emissions-scandal-1443007423 I just can't stop reading about VW. This was such a monumentally dumb crime to commit. The risks they took, and the number of people who are going to be going after them once they're caught are just ridiculous. And what this will do to future sales. I'm totally dumbfounded at how ill-considered this plan was.
Saw an Audi ad yesterday that said "truth in engineering" Hilarious. I suggest VW stop all advertising but I'm just a pedestrian...
