Volkswagen executive pleads guilty in diesel emissions case | Hacker News Reader

Volkswagen executive pleads guilty in diesel emissions case

arstechnica.com

44 pointsTomte51 comments

With the US justice system being what it is, he probably didn't have much of a choice. Without the plea, he was facing something upwards of 100 years.

Frankly people like him (if allegations are true) deserve the most time. Yo can't purposefully harm millions of people and expect to just walk away from it. Someone made the conscious decision to manipulate the software /test results.

I wish a lot of bankers in 2008 had been arrested too

There is such a thing as cruel and unusual punishment. Getting 100 years for that "crime" of essentially violating a regulation is preposterous.

P.S. it's a tortious offence at best.

Not if they caused death and disease due to the extra bad gases that they released--probably can be proven statistically. If you grab a gun and kill someone you get at probably life.

So, fine them a a company and jail those responsible starting at the top.

That is not how the distinction between tortious and criminal offenses works.

There is such a thing as personal responsibility. If the potential sentence is announced beforehand, what's the problem? It's not that hard to avoid commiting fraud.

How about 25+ years for defrauding millions of buyers and making our cities full(er) of smog. How many new cases of asthma, sinus infections, cancers...can be traced to this fraud?

"How about 25+ years for defrauding millions of buyers".

Citation needed that it was 25+ years, since, 25 years ago, i don't even believe there were meaningful regulations in the US they would have been violating. I believe the first meaningful regulations by the EPA were in 2007, and by california in 2001.

See, e.g., https://www.dieselnet.com/standards/us/hd.php#pre04

"How many new cases of asthma, sinus infections, cancers...can be traced to this fraud?"

I'll go with: "Probably a very small number"

The vast majority of car pollution is produced by older cars on the road[1], and that's true even when considering the real emissions numbers of these cars. If you would like to provide objective evidence that this isn't the case, i'd love to see it.

[1] Unfortunately, most people cite the EPA averages, which doesn't help. The average is of all cars on the road (they even say this), and unfortunately, the emissions standards are each orders of magnitude better than the last, so the average is not a good way to see what's up.

IE Every car in california sold since 2004 is at least an LEV. Cars operating prior to that are basically huge polluters.

Cars that are marked ULEV are 50% better than current average year models (so they started at 1/2 the emissions, and must stay at 1/2 the emissions of each model year to stay a ULEV).

Cars marked SULEV are 90% better (IE 1/10th the emissions), ditto.

You can see that as cars get newer, and emissions standards tougher, using the average to say "what cars on the road produce" is mostly nonsense, but that's what happens!

Huh? The history of defeat devices and corresponding legislation is much older:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defeat_device

How many years of life did he take with his offense? My suspicion is that it was quite a bit more than 100 years.

Sorry but this sounds incredibly hypocritical to me. Are we also going to send everyone to prison who decides to buy a SUV instead of a car that's more fuel efficient? As long as people in the US are driving insanely oversized trucks, I can't take the outrage about dieselgate serious at all. If people in France, a country where most people drive tiny cars like Renault's Twingo, are upset, that's a different matter.

This was fraud. They lied about the emissions and wrote software to cheat on testing.

This has nothing to do with environmentalism.

I'm really happy that your comment is so highly upvoted. I really wish we modified the system to reduce the sentencing asymetry.

One idea (that has flaws) would be that sentences cannot exceed double the plea offered or something.

Going only after VW and other German manufacturers is protectionism. It began in the Obama era, with Trump now continuing: "The Germans are bad, very bad. Look at the millions of cars that they sell in the U.S. Terrible. We’re going to stop that." (source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-26/trump-bla...).

Meanwhile, the US car industry (exception: Tesla) still only builds crap-quality cars which basically gulp gas. Of course, the political leadership must damage the presence of German cars so that US car manufacturers stand a chance without having to reinvent themselves...

And that the VW exec was threatened with 100+ years of jail time... it's absolutely inhumane and is an extortion. In Germany, even murderers rarely spend over 15 years in prison.

If you cant win on the market, just hold the market hostage.

Capitalism must only be clean and pure, and free of goverment influence if it suits us- else we suit them.

How dare they go after some members of a cartel?[0] To be fair, they've also gone after Jeep & Ram diesel trucks recently[1], but I don't know the status of the lawsuit after they certified updated emissions controls on current models. Most manufacturers at this point realize lying to and impeding an EPA investigation on top of the collusion for the defeat devices would yield the sort of charges that Oliver Schmidt plead guilty for[2]. I mean, they formed an engineering task force to conceal the defeat device wrt the ICCT study & regulators.

>“VW employees determined not to disclose to US regulators that the tested vehicle models operated with a defeat device,” says the criminal complaint. “Instead, VW employees pursued a strategy of concealing the defeat device in responding to questions from US regulators, while appearing to co-operate.”

While Trump is unquestionably protectionistic, that doesn't mean the case isn't without merit and other countries & regions wouldn't have done the same. The EU is hampered from action because only the member states have the authority to do so as well as the politics of it all[3].

For the record, South Korea was the first country to jail a VW executive regarding the scandal[4].

[0]: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-cartel-collu...

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-23/u-s-files...

[2]: https://www.ft.com/content/04aa04aa-d648-11e6-944b-e7eb37a6a...

[3]: https://phys.org/news/2017-02-eu-pains-vw-dieselgate-scandal...

[4]: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-southkorea-idUS...

Just in case:

https://longtailpipe.com/2015/10/02/differences-in-us-and-eu...

it is not like here in Europe people drop down dead like flies because the Nox allowed is more than 5 times that allowed in the US and the PM 4 times (besides any cheating).

The Volkswagen (and Audi, etc.) guys lied, broke the Law, and those found responsible should be adequately punished, but it is not like they are responsible for the death of tens or hundreds of thousands of people and of accelerating the extinction of the humanity.

The estimations (to be taken with more than a pinch of salt) by some MIT researchers is of 60 (sixty) premature deaths in the US:

http://news.mit.edu/2015/volkswagen-emissions-cheat-cause-60...

and a later (frankly IMHO hard to believe) one about Europe:

http://news.mit.edu/2017/volkswagen-emissions-premature-deat...

calculating the amount of premature deads in 1200, which is of course a very high number in itself but - even if actually proved/provable - nothing compared to (say) the number of deaths by fire or road accidents that could be prevented.

The good news from all this is that the CEO is pushing hard for electric vehicles (and plugin hybrids)

“The CEO is pushing forward with his plan to build 2 to 3 million all-electric cars a year and unveil 30 new models by 2025 within all of Volkswagen’s brands. It’s among the most aggressive EV goals from legacy automakers.”

https://electrek.co/2017/08/02/vw-ceo-electric-cars-backlash...

Having read the book about this scandal ("Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal"), I'm going to predict that this is nonsense. The company is still run by insiders, and nothing has really changed. Also it will be either bankrupted or near bankrupted by the scandal in the end and won't be in any position to research new technologies.

You really think they will be bankrupted or even come close? Should Germany allow that?

yeah of course and 1.5 million from 2 to 3 will be bought by vw itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C_F45g1yZE (german only)

I think diesel gate executive personal assets should be frozen as a result of the emission scandal.

Thousands will die due to the dirty air pollution caused by these cars.

Is this actually the case? I haven't seen any hard numbers on pollutants. I was under the impression that even with the rigging, each car released far less emissions than that of heavier diesel engines.

I should clarify. Regardless of how polluting they are, I agree that assets should be frozen.

In case of NOx, this is not true. NOx can be cleaned fairly well from the exhaust by injection of AdBlue, it's just that cars don't carry a large enough supply and car manufacturers did decide that hey don't want customers to be bothered by filling that up. Trucks however trept AdBlue as a consumable that needs to be refilled like fuel and don't suffer from that particular issue. (Though some are apparently rigged to not use AdBlue to save money)

5000 persons will die per year in the EU due to diesel cheating. 15000 persons will die per year due to excess Nox emissions i.e. the result of selling in "clean diesel" by the car industry when in effect it is very dirty.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/15/diesel-e...

I'm not trying to defend their actions. It just seems that if NOx emissions were such a threat, that we'd eliminate those that produce mass qualities of them. How can it be determined whether people died from these emissions of those of cargo ships?

Particulates from cargo ships aren't a major concern for human health. They're not long-lived in the atmosphere, so when emitted over the open ocean, they're removed from the air long before they reach populated areas.

Presumably into the sea. Is that a problem or is it a non event?

Not sure! It's way, way better than emitting it in a place where millions of people will breathe it, but I'm sure it's not harmless.

To be fair, they will die prematurely where it is not specified just how prematurely that will be.

Seriously, screw that argument. The maritime industry produces vast more environmental damage than anything car related.

In fact, the 15 biggest containerships together emit as much SOx and NOx as all cars on the planet combined (source: http://www.industrytap.com/worlds-15-biggest-ships-create-mo...). Add the rest of the cargo fleet and cruise ships... even outright banning of cars would be only a dent in the emissions chart.

You could ban all the container ships in the world and the NOx level on your local city streets would still be above the limit. Not all emission is created equally.

c.f. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/03/pariss-first-a...

Yeah but a few cars here or there with lower NOx emission won't make a difference, not for the next 10-20 years given car life times.

What needs to be done is creating an efficient replacement for private transportation: public transportation which is actually worth the name, connects to shopping locations and especially also available during night times and on weekends/holidays as this is usually what keeps city people from discarding their cars.

Screw this argument. Particulate emissions in the middle of the ocean just aren't that important.

They are - greenhouse gases do affect the entire planet.

These aren't greenhouse gases.

Funny story: I had a '09 Audi with a diesel gate engine. It was "fixed" during a service, and of course being European, there was no customer compensation. Just today I went to get a new car (looking for a '16 or '17 model) and would have preferred a gas car over a diesel, but found not even 1 in 100 cars on the market were non-diesels. In the end I reluctantly bought a '16 diesel.

A VW.

You can't have looked very much.

Just under half of new cars sold in Europe are petrol, with just over a third being diesel. The rest are electric or hybrid.

http://www.acea.be/statistics/article/trends-in-fuel-type-of...

A lot of 2018 models are petrol here too, but it was barely even an option on the models from recent years. I'm only looking at full size wagons (5-series, A6, V70, Passat, etc), only 2015-2017 and only in Sweden. It's seriously about 99% diesel.

You were looking for an used car then, in which case your number makes far more sense.

New petrol cars are widely available, but they aren't just as popular as diesels, so there aren't many of them on the secondary market.

> > looking for a '16 or '17 model

> You were looking for an used car then

Yes exactly (new/current ones are, at least '18 models). What I'm complaining about is that there were more or less a decade now that we taxed the hell out of CO2, leading to every car being a diesel (with known results).

These things will rattle on forever and end up in third world countries rattling on forever. Emitting more and more pollution over time.

> but found not even 1 in 100 cars on the market were non-diesels

I think you're exaggerating a little bit. I spend way too much time on mobile.de and I always have the "gasoline" checkbox checked and not the "diesel" one when filtering for engine types. There are lots and lots of gasoline models available.

Later edit: Saw your other comment about you filtering for station wagons. Yeah, those come mostly in diesel configuration because they mainly target a very price-conscious segment of the middle class, but the writing is on the wall that sooner rather than later all diesel models will be banned from major cities, and I think that that ban will then extend to smaller cities. As such I think part of this demographic will migrate to hybrids (petrol + battery + some sort of regenerative breaking).

> I think you're exaggerating a little bit.

I wish I was. Here are my results currently for '15-'17 full size wagons:

Audi A6: 1 gas, 548 diesel Volvo V70: 7 gas, 597 diesel

etc...

(Source: blocket.se)

Note that Sweden is very exceptional here, and not at all like Germany or Norway or others.

Edit: there is an exception which is the Passat which comes with a weak 1.4L engine that is around 5% of the available cars, but that engine is a bit weak for such a large car, so I opted against buying it.

What I'll do is get one of the 18 or 19 models in around 2-3 years. That will be hybrid or gas.

What about that infamous "rogue engineer" sneakily modifying all of VW's 2009+ cars to cheat?

I called that well ahead of time.

https://jacquesmattheij.com/volkswagen-and-the-blame-the-eng...

Funny how much pushback that got back then.

I just finished this book which is pretty interesting: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/039325450X "Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal"

thanks, usa. from a german customer.

>He could face up to seven years in prison, as well as fines from $40,000 to $400,000

That's bullsh*t. He's taken off well more than seven years of people's lives and he's made well more than $400k in performance bonuses.

And he won't get the maximum fine.

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