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Comment by PhantomGremlin | Hacker News Reader

The damage to the VW brand is enormous, if not fatal.

GM recently admitted that a defective product of theirs was responsible for over 120 deaths:

   General Motors agreed to pay $900 million as
   part of a Justice Department investigation
   into its failure to fix a deadly ignition
   switch defect blamed for more than 120 deaths.[1]

Nobody seems to care, except for a few lawyers and the victims' families. GM is still in business, current market cap $47 billion.

It would be a tragedy if the cost to VW of their negligence is more than the cost to GM of theirs.

And in response to those who say that increased pollution could kill a lot more, I acknowledge the hypothetical. But in my mind, the death of 120 identified people with names, children, friends, aspirations, etc, is far worse than the increased NOx from VW's cars.

[1] http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2015/09/17/gm-justi...

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You're missing some important context. GM is long-established in America. (So is Toyota.) VW's current market penetration in America is pretty minimal. And all Volkswagens are sold with a premium sales pitch, if not premium price points.

Now all VW diesel cars sold during a certain period will have their resale value greatly reduced. Non-diesel VW resale values will be tainted at least slightly by association. Even if VW recalls the cars and replaces them with a completely overhauled diesel drivetrain -- very unlikely -- there will still be a massive class action lawsuit, because the car will not be working as advertised in some way. This will keep potential buyers away from showrooms.

It's really not hyperbole.

VW's current market penetration in America is pretty minimal.

That's true, but it's not because they aren't "long established". E.g. I personally owned the 1966 version of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagon_beetle so that's 50 years right there.

I'm sure it goes back quite a way further than that, but, after a quick scan of that Wiki, I couldn't find the original date that imports started.

There are model year 1948 Beetles in the U.S. These may have been shipped outside a dealer network.

Calling this negligence is way too nice.

opening scenes of "Fight Club" pretty much explain that there is no "negligence", there is only "cost"

The GM issue was enormous for literally years. Further the GM issue -- where key assembly had less torsion than expected, leading to the possibility of heavy keychains or unintended hits turning off the vehicle -- was never shown to be anything more than an isolated engineering mistake by a few engineers, who then actively covered up their own mistake. GM wasn't profiteering by having less tension than expected -- it didn't sell them cars, and it didn't save them money. The malice was not profiteering or circumventing. And for that they paid a $900 million dollar fine, and will pay out billions in lawsuits in virtually any case where the key turned off, even if it was actually operator error.

GM is in no universe blameless, but considerations that hold it like murder are irrational.

VW actively and intentionally misled consumers and regulators to sell cars promising mileage and power levels they don't actually achieve without actually cheating the system. They sold hundreds of thousands of cars -- at the cost of significant air pollution (some 200,000 Americans, and millions worldwide, are estimated to die from air pollution yearly) -- based upon these essentially lies. They actively promoted their eco-friendliness, and their great fuel economy, neither of which are actually true in concert.

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