VW diesel-gate pay out

[NeptuneGarden]

Thought you guys would find this interesting....

Back in 2013 I bought one of the diesel VW Passats

I will say I've been pleased with the car and it actually beat the stated MPG on the window sticker by a fair margin. They advertised 42mpg freeway, and I get more like 50-60mpg freeway and 42mpg combined city/hwy. $35 fill up will get me 700+ miles, in a large 4 door sedan.

I got a package in the mail the other day regarding the pay out settlement from all the government and class action lawsuits involving their run around of the (impossible to meet) EPA emissions standards.

This still has to be approved by the judge sometime in October but VW has agreed to settle for:

1. $900 million per year for 3 years paid to US government for fines and "environmental remediation"
2. "Restitution payment" to owners based on the car's value, but no less the $5,100 and as much as $10,000+
3. They have to buy back the car at pre September 2015 value (when the scandal broke) and if you owe more than the car is worth they have to pay up 130% of vehicle value to pay off loan PLUS the "restitution payment"
4. or they have to provide an emissions fix (which they still have not come up with and may take until 2018) PLUS the restitution payment
5. They can not sell or export any of effected cars until said fix is provided, if no fix is agreed upon with the EPA the cars must be scrapped

I plugged in my VIN, outstanding loan amount, and mileage to the online buy back calculator and it came back with paying off my loan plus giving me another $10,600 in cash, for a 2.5 year old car with almost 70,000 miles on it. WOW ! That pretty much gives me the car for free for the last 2+ years as I will get back everything I've made in payments

This is going to cost VW somewhere around $14-15 BILLION before it's all said and done.

 

[Triggreef]

Lol my co worker has the same deal from them. He's getting back every penny basically. Crazy.

 

[Nibejeebies]

kind of makes me wish i had bought the VW vs the dodge dart rally i went with.

 

[Darryl]

same here on a 2010

 

[bif24701]

same here on a 2010

Awesome! Awesome stuff right there

 

[TaylorPilot]

Why does it annoy me so much that they have to pay the Feds almost 3 billion. They weren't victims, they didn't cost them any money. They just think that they should get theirs off the top....typical...

 

[rockskimmerflow]

Why does it annoy me so much that they have to pay the Feds almost 3 billion. They weren't victims, they didn't cost them any money. They just think that they should get theirs off the top....typical...

Haha I feel the same. It's almost too predictable. Of course the feds are entitled to it because they passed an arbitrary non-voter-approved set of restrictions that are near impossible to meet- and especially difficult to meet if you're trying to design an efficient diesel engine. Then, oh boy, a company had the audacity to make an extremely good diesel engine that included the most logical work around to the inane emissions standards. Good thing it only took 7 years for the government to find out about that workaround- must be really running a tight ship over there at the EPA lol.

 

[NeptuneGarden]

Why does it annoy me so much that they have to pay the Feds almost 3 billion. They weren't victims, they didn't cost them any money. They just think that they should get theirs off the top....typical...

Yep, reminds of when you hear about "insider trading" fines and they have to "pay back the profits" made from the insider trading. Exactly who do the pay back these profits to ? The mom and pop investor that was on the other side of the trade when it went through ? Nope, it gets "paid back" to the guberment

Haha I feel the same. It's almost too predictable. Of course the feds are entitled to it because they passed an arbitrary non-voter-approved set of restrictions that are near impossible to meet- and especially difficult to meet if you're trying to design an efficient diesel engine. Then, oh boy, a company had the audacity to make an extremely good diesel engine that included the most logical work around to the inane emissions standards. Good thing it only took 7 years for the government to find out about that workaround- must be really running a tight ship over there at the EPA lol.

I looked high and low for diesel options. Ford, Subaru, and others all offer diesel options .... except in the U.S..... VW was pretty much the only option, and they had to "cheat" to do it.

I will admit that diesels are dirty. They do produce the bad emission of NoX..... but the new Ad-Blu exhaust injection technology drastically reduces the NoX. The car does not put out black smoke or stinky diesel exhaust and is as quiet and smooth running as any gas powered car I've driven.

 

[redfishbluefish]

I looked high and low for diesel options. Ford, Subaru, and others all offer diesel options .... except in the U.S..... VW was pretty much the only option, and they had to "cheat" to do it.

I will admit that diesels are dirty. They do produce the bad emission of NoX..... but the new Ad-Blu exhaust injection technology drastically reduces the NoX. The car does not put out black smoke or stinky diesel exhaust and is as quiet and smooth running as any gas powered car I've driven.

I believe you are referring to Blue DEF (Diesel Exhaust Fluid), which in now required on all new diesel trucks in the US. And there are issues with this stuff. A close friend has a trucking company, and when his trucks "mileage out", he was simply buying new trucks. Well, he had ten trucks that needed to be replaced, and instead of purchasing new Blue DEF trucks, he sent all ten out to be rebuilt. Older trucks are grandfathered. The reason.......the breakdown/repair on these newer trucks, because of Blue DEF, would be too costly to his business. One Blue DEF truck he had had to go in for repairs at 4000 miles because the exhaust clean out was clogging up and not working.....supposedly a common issue with Blue DEF.

 

[NeptuneGarden]

yep. I sell heavy construction equipment for a living. The Tier 4 industrial diesels are an expensive nightmare. Those are a completely different beast compared to the small passenger car diesels and their injection systems. A heavy truck has to refill his exhaust fluid tank at almost every fill up. The 2 gallon tank in the trunk of my Passat will last 20,000+ miles before needing refilled.

ADBlue is just the name brand for the fluid that VW recommends because it's supposed to be refined to their standards. I just put the same stuff you can buy at Walmart in and it has not caused any issues
https://www.amazon.com/Emissions-Blue-Sky-Gallons-2010-2013/dp/B00ANTBIF4

It's about to get much worse too. The new Tier 5 standards are set to go into affect in 2020 and NONE of the engine makers are going to be ready for it.

Dont even get me started on the red tape nonsense surrounding trying to import and export Tier 3 vs. Tier 4 powered heavy equipment and the engine labels that have to be on the engines or they will make you put the thing back on the boat, even if the engine meets the required standards but is just missing a stupid sticker on the engine..... and you can't put the sticker on over here. Has to be done BEFORE it ships. If it shows up without the sticker and you can either ship it back or put a brand new $100+k engine in it, just because of a missing sticker.... seen it happen more than once to people who weren't up with all the regulations.

There are huge parts of the world that can not run the new Tier 4 engines at all because they do not use the ultra-low sulphur diesel required and can not even get it. S.America, Mexico, Africa, large parts of Asia, you can't export these new engines to them..... it's causing a real head ache globally...

 

[TaylorPilot]

It's just like cars in the early 70s. I met an old engineer who worked for Chevy during that time and he said the whole thing was a sham. They put these catalytic converters and smog pumps on vehicles, but in order to make them work, you had to richen up the motors allot, so they would dump un-burnt fuel into the exhaust to burn off anything. Problem was that it took almost 10 minutes in some cases to get the converters hot enough to start working. So for the first 10 minutes you were dumping un-burnt fuel fumes out in to the air. Also, the pumps and converter put added load on the motors, so it had to produce more power (burn more fuel) to go the same distance. The pumps are designed to inject air into the cats so that the oxygen can help in the burning off of the gas, but in reality it helped to dilute the gases for testing. They didn't actually measure output of the gases, they measured percentages in PPM. So if you dump pure air in upstream of the monitoring device, the PPM went down. He told me that on trips of less than 15 miles (most commuters) , they were actually putting out more exhaust, burning more fuel and decreasing performance of the engines.

 

[USCG CWO]

Why does it annoy me so much that they have to pay the Feds almost 3 billion. They weren't victims, they didn't cost them any money. They just think that they should get theirs off the top....typical...

Pretty sure they violated environmental or other law(s) of the US, therefore fines are payable to the US. 3 billion would be the settlement for those violations. It happens all the time. Environmental fines can be astronomical. In some cases $40,000 per violation per day.