As an individual, you make one wrong statement to the FBI, and you are hauled off to jail. The company lied over 500,000 times to the government, and gets off by paying a paltry fine. No wonder companies continue to do this: there is no consequence to the employees who do this shit.
You may wish to search for "Dieselgate" on the web, to better familiarize yourself with this case.
The German government is actually investigating the ex-VW Germany CEO, although I don't know if that means potential jail time.
Further, there have been serious consequences at VW. Top management has effectively changed in both Germany and the US. The future product roadmap has changed radically in both the US and Europe. Also, this direct monetary outlay is not exactly a slap on the wrist, even for one of the world's largest automakers.
Losing your job << going to jail for your actions. From the Wikipedia article: "... estimated that approximately 59 premature deaths will be caused by the excess pollution produced between 2008 and 2015 by vehicles equipped with the defeat device in the U.S."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal#D...
Installing the defeat devices in hundreds of thousands of vehicles was not an accident that happened one day. It was a calculated corporate decision involving many people, over a long period of time. The result, according to many sources, was dozens to hundreds of deaths in the United States, Europe and elsewhere.
There's no way they can reliably calculate that. Any increase in deaths could just as easily be attributed to the increase in popularity of country music and therefore diesel truck sales. All we can reliably say is that the environment is worse off.
Also, 59 seems like a statistically insignificant number when compared to the overall population. Or maybe I'm interpreting it incorrectly?
I sit in stunned amazement at the foaming-at-the-mouth outrage being expressed on this thread.
There is no way you can pin the death of anybody on VW diesel emissions. It's a statistics game that that's it. You might as well blame Tesla for the extra deaths caused by the increase coal plant emissions created by owners charging their cars. Or make up any other example of any activity that increases some polutant. The only difference is that VW violated an arbitrary number in a government regulation.
There are millions of vehicles on the road today with worse emissions than the violating VW diesels. They are all killing people (statistically) and the government and therefore you and I are complicit in this murder by allowing it to continue. I am sure everone on this thread will endorse punitive tax increases to punish us all for our negligence, and to buy out the owners of these polluting cars so that they can all buy clean-and-green new ones (conveniently ignoring the rather massive environmental impact and attendant premature deaths caused by junking and replacing perfectly serviceable vehicles).
Exactly. It's understandable to be angry about this, but I think many people overestimate the magnitude of the issue here (or perhaps have misplaced their anger).
Consider the fact that in some states, heavy duty diesel trucks (8,500 lbs or more) and trucks older than 1997 are completely exempt from all emissions testing.
I bet a single one of those trucks produces more emissions than the "actual vs claimed" emissions delta of dozens of VWs combined.
Not to mention the car transporter ships which pump out bunker oil soot and Nox while idling at port while the VWs get unloaded. An extra 30 minutes of that is probably worse than all the extra emissions combined.
Additionally, I find it quite extraordinary how such huge settlements over a bit more car exhaust in a country with lots of emissions-testing-exempt trucks and massive hydraulic fracturing programs can exist at the same time, but who said that government policy needs to be consistent?
That's a bullshit attitude. How about cancer from smoking? Is that also a statistics game? The effect of NOx on human health was studied the same way that smoking was.
1. I am not an expert here, but unless you are too I wouldn't refute claims made by peer-reviewed publications without at least offering an argument against the analysis made.
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/11/11...
If you agree that the environment is worse off and that the environment being worse off causes more deaths, then you agree that they caused deaths. Then it becomes a question of magnitude, which they tried as best as possible to estimate.
2. There is a confidence interval around 59 in the study which doesn't include 0, so it is statistically significant according to the analysis they did. Not sure what sort of analysis would say that 59 deaths is statistically insignificant unless it was a difference between two groups, but that's not the case here.
3. There's a problem here with news articles boiling down an estimate with a wide confidence interval to a single number. There needs to be a way for the public to start understanding statistical conclusions and confidence intervals.
> [If you agree that the environment is worse off and that the environment being worse off causes more deaths, then you agree that they caused deaths.]
...I should have said βworse off than if VW had not cheated and all other variables remained the sameβ.
I don't question that more emissions results in more deaths. I question their ability to reliably calculate the number of deaths caused when dealing with numbers that small (~0.0003%) and leaving out some very important variables (which they do reference but don't incorporate). Of course, the publication was meant to compare the claimed vs actual emissions, but I'm talking in the more general case of overall emissions.
The publication claims that:
>> [Finally, we note that there may have been environmental benefits of the defeat device that we have not computed. For example, the reduced use of diesel exhaust fluid in selective catalytic reduction may potentially have also reduced ammonia slip, and therefore associated PM2.5 exposure and health impacts. In particular, Dedoussi and Barrett (2014) find that total PM2.5 exposure attributable to road transportation is caused approximately equally by NOx and NH3 emissions.]
I can think of a few more inadvertent environmental/health benefits of the defeat device:
For example, suppose that VW hadn't cheated and instead spent more time and money on R&D to come up with a legitimate solution. They would then have to pass this cost on to the consumers in the form of a more expensive car.
Would all of the people who purchased diesel VW's still have purchased them if they were more money?
If not, would they have purchased a car that produces worse emissions instead?
The VW Jetta has a 5 star crash rating. Would all of the people who purchased other cars purchased cars with the same crash rating, or perhaps a car with a worse crash rating?
There are a bunch of things that you could list that could all have an impact that rivals the 59 cited in the publication.
We're talking about 59 out of 17,500,000 (number of annual deaths integrated over 2008-2015). It wouldn't take much to actually find out that the VW emissions scandal actually resulted in more lives saved.
EDIT: That said, the publication isn't really trying to measure the amount of deaths caused by the scandal itself, but rather the increased emissions portion of it. Perhaps my original comment was out of line now that I think about it.
Yes, it's very tricky to take an action as complex as the decision to cheat on emissions test and boil down numbers describing the damage done to society. Having numbers like "they killed 59 people" certainly makes it easier to stir enough outrage, but it is an oversimplification.
Would you agree with something like "the emissions they caused by cheating killed people, and our current best estimate of that is 59 (+- the confidence interval in the paper)".
It's true that the decision to cheat may have had the benefit of getting safer cars to more people, but that is even harder to measure than deaths caused by emissions. To me, the decision to cheat wouldn't be justifiable and I would still be outraged because they knowingly did harm to the environment and society with the hopes that there would be a nearly un-measurable side benefit: increasing the average safety of cars relative to a world that doesn't exist. To me, it seems despicably irresponsible to gamble the well being of many human lives against something so hard to measure.
This argument will seem a bit more empathetic if you don't consider it as killing 59 people outright, but increasing risk factors so that on average 59 additional deaths occurred(unclear over what timeframe and what the methodology is). Spread out over the world population (we share the same air) that is a relatively short amount of lifetime.
On the other hand, consuming more fuel, making car ownership more expensive etc also carries real costs. People can't get work done, spend more of that lifetime tAking less efficient means of transportation, doing less enjoyable things like waiting on a greyhound bus, etc.
The sensationalist 'caused x deaths' headlights are very hard to reason With and usually one sided. That being said, car emissions are still a problem and there is a reason for these(and other public health) rules -- the response should perhaps be a little bit less emotional though. ( there are plenty of scandals that are probably more worthy of this emotional response, e.g. Illegal dumping or contamination, unhealthy foods, antibiotic overuse, etc.)
The method for the paper that is quoted in the Wikipedia article can be found starting on page 2 (the full text is available for free): http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/11/11.... It's three and a half pages long and includes many citations to other published articles.
When you say "serious consequences", do you have any idea whether the people responsible have moved on to other similar jobs or are still working in the industry or living a similar lifestyle?
Because if they are, then I think we may have to disagree on what constitutes a "serious consequence", as per the original posters point.
And if we don't know that, then we're not really in a position to know if there have been sufficiently serious consequences for those involved.
Hell, I'll pay the 15 billion dollar fine if I can do it with Volkswagen money and you don't touch my assets, the money I took out of the company as salary while doing the crime, or jail me.
Serious consequences laid on a corporation don't do anything, because there's no conscious being there to react to, perceive, or experience those negative consequences. They especially don't do anything if you're managing other people's money and the executive class receives relatively little personal punishment.
Shareholders are not innocent. It's their responsibility to bear, albeit limited, financial risk. It's therefore prudent for them to demand companies uphold legal and moral obligations, or move capital into ventures that will. Failure to do so means they are more likely to lose their investments.
Then they should have invested in companies that have stricter controls, or put their money somewhere safer w/ more transparency. That some investors are unsophisticated doesn't absolve them of liability.
All bets are off when we're talking about blatant violations of the law. Who's to say that "transparency" is even really transparent? What good are stricter controls when the people who are in charge of creating and enforcing them are the same people who are violating them?
My point is that this could happen with any company and is part of the risk of investing, but to imply that the shareholders should have just "demanded companies to uphold legal and moral obligations" is assigning more stupidity on the shareholders than deserved.
It usually goes without saying that shareholders expect the companies they're investing in to obey the law and not lie to them.
Like I said, this is part of the risk of investing. There's always a chance the company you are investing in is cooking their books, lying, etc..., but the risk exists with any company and there's not much you can really do to mitigate it.
> German prosecutors said on Monday that the former Volkswagen chief, Martin Winterkorn, is suspected of market manipulation for having waited too long to disclose that the company faced an inquiry. They are looking into another member of the management board as well for potential violations of securities laws.
Like other commentators, I would suggest that the criminal investigations are ongoing, but I also suggest that VW management is getting off very easy. They are not currently under arrest. Individuals by this point, with this sort of evidence, would have been arrested and bailed. There is more than probably cause to start arresting dozens of VW employees. They can then fight amongst themselves as to who is going to turn state's evidence.
They should treat it as they would any other conspiracy. You focus on an individual, arrest them, then get them to give evidence. Eventually you work your way up the chain. Waiting until you've got all the ducks in a row is special treatment in comparison to standard criminal investigations.
Compare Toyota's fine for it's failure to report safety defects to GM's in the GM ignition scandal. I think reasonable minds can conclude that they are both serious, but it is possible to make an argument GM's was more serious, and they paid a lesser fine. Also compare timelines, and the fact that US regulators were pressured by public discourse in the GM case. It's not crazy to come to the conclusion regulators show bias towards US automakers.
It's actually no conspiracy at all that the US government has bias and favors US auto makers in public policy. Afterall, it was not long ago we gave GM a huge welfare check / bail out package. Ford to a lesser extent.
Here's the arguments I can make in 5 minutes of Google searching. My point is just that there's room for debate here (in other words, I'm not saying I am right and you are wrong, what I am saying is that reasonable people can agree there is reasonable debate on this issue).
Argument 1:
Toyota paid 1.2 billion dollars for failure to disclose safety defects linked to 5 deaths. Floor mats in Toyota cars may be linked to up to 34 more deaths. GM had to pay only 900 million for safety defects leading to at minimum 124 deaths, but the real death toll may be much, much higher than that, because as many as 90% of claims are not included in that figure as they are part of an ongoing civil dispute.
Argument 2 (an argument similar to yours that oversimplifies):
Complete loss of control of your car (not even airbags functioning) is less serious than having floor mats in your car?
Argument 3:
Toyota paid 1.2 billion dollars for "having floor mats in their cars" and an extremely rare accelerator sticking issue that was linked to only 5 deaths. GM got off easy on an issue that caused complete loss of control of the car as ignition cut off, and not even the airbags would be deployed in this scenario. GM also internally was aware and discussed this defect for about a decade and did not disclose it.
Argument 4:
Most of the deaths in Toyota's case were linked to floor mats, but how much blame can we reasonable put on floor mats for causing accidents? Is it more or less than putting items on your key chain? Maybe it's not reasonable to assume items on your keychain a safety risk, but manipulating and kicking the floor mats out of their socket holders obviously could interfere with the accelerator pedal.
Edit: I think no matter how you spin it, GM paid probably an order of magnitude less $$/human life than Toyota in these two cases.
My comment was unrelated to how much did each have to pay though.
And it's not "complete loss of control", not to mention airbags are not part of "control of a car". It's "less control" and unlike in Toyota's case, the car doesn't actively do something.
I mean, sure, it's debatable and GM were despicable for not fixing it when they knew about it, but every time I hear about "IgnitionGate", it feels like most people are making out of it a bigger problem than it was.
>My comment was unrelated to how much did each have to pay though.
The topic of my post is about unequal punishment b/w GM/Toyota. If your comment isn't about that then I don't see what the point is in changing the topic and going into a microscopic debate about which safety fault was worse?
If you want to go into these tangential arguments about safety defects, car control, etc. ...my arguments were for illustrative purposes in the first place, but second... you know when the ignition is cut off in modern cars, that would usually mean you can not steer the car, right? That is pretty dangerous.
We don't like to talk about it, but if you want to commit crimes, the best way to do it is to collective responsibility over a corporate entity, and hold your employees and economic sector hostage.
As an individual, you make one wrong statement to the FBI, and you are hauled off to jail. The company lied over 500,000 times to the government, and gets off by paying a paltry fine. No wonder companies continue to do this: there is no consequence to the employees who do this shit.