Not questioning his innocence, but will the executives involved be held to the same legal standard?
EDIT: FTA
> U.S. prosecutors have charged eight current and former Volkswagen executives in connection with the diesel emissions cheating probe. Liang is one of the lowest-ranking executives charged so far.
> Another VW executive, Oliver Schmidt, has pleaded guilty and is scheduled to be sentenced in Detroit on Dec. 6. Under a plea agreement, Schmidt could face up to seven years in prison and a fine of between $40,000 and $400,000 after admitting to conspiring to mislead U.S regulators and violating clean air laws.
> but will the executives involved be held to the same legal standard
Yes, they will, but Germany will not extradite them. They already made that clear.
And it is very unlikely that the german court system will prosecute them. Haven't heard
anything yet, because this might inflict the politicians who backed this Diesel
emission testing system for decades. They didn't even go to the technical root yet.
Only one made the mistake to go for his holidays to Florida, so he was caught.
Honestly, US penal standards are so out of whack with those of the rest of at least the "western" world, that no country ought ever consider extradition as an option.
America does not have to extradite its own nationals to Germany, either. From the US-German extradition treaty:
Article 7
EXTRADITION OF NATIONALS
(1) Neither of the Contracting Parties shall be bound to extradite its own nationals. The competent executive authority of the Requested State, however, shall have the power to grant the extradition of its own nationals if, in its discretion, this is deemed proper to do and provided the law of the Requested State does not so preclude.
Well. Is there any case where any western country did extradite their own citizen for non-spionage, non-military, non-war and non-capital crime? I hope not.
I certainly do not approve of the scam and deception VW did (and possibly other automobile manufacturers?), but I think I do not approve extraditing citizens of your own country for some non-capital crime. Or even some capital crimes for that matter. I (and most of the other Germans and EU citizens [1]) oppose death penalties. So extraditing someone to the US, which could result in death penalty if someone committed a murder, would be a really big ethical and/or diplomatic issue.
Interesting. They served an initial time in the US and then the rest in the UK. I do not know how to feel about such high-profile fraud cases by banks and companies. Yes, someone should pay their debt, but maybe work on some arrangement across borders? I do not know, prosecute them together and let them serve in their home country. Cross border legal issues seem to be hard problem, especially between common law systems (UK, US) and civil law systems (almost all of Europe).
It's already hard to understand the culture in a country. I see also the difficulty of handling administrative matters for my American wife, from taxes to mortgage contracts. Everything of course in a second language. Even people's gestures or their facial expressions are different.
To have to navigate the juridicial system in another country is a huge disadvantage. You will make errors which a native will never make. You will not know about options that are very clear to long term citizens. Etc. Etc.
All in all, whatever the crime, you would like to have everybody the same chance in your juridicial system. Foreigners will have a disadvantage however.
> To have to navigate the juridicial system in another country is a huge disadvantage. You will make errors which a native will never make. You will not know about options that are very clear to long term citizens. Etc. Etc.
All of that is the lawyers' job, not the defendant's, and these guys will be able to hire very good local lawyers.
No judicial system composed of humans can ever be perfectly fair and free of bias, but that doesn't mean we should let criminals go free.
because american prisons are shit to the point that prison rape is somehow a funny meme and joked about on tv, default sentences are ridiculously inflated, and people openly admit that you won't get justice unless you have money.
There's a big difference between a few rednecks illegally modifying their personal vehicles and a company selling millions of vehicles that fail emissions standards and trying to cover it up.
This has always been my problem with the whole case. Yes they violated the law and yes they probably should be some punishment but the real impact was almost nothing, the vehicles would have met the restrictions of only a few years prior, and the limits are almost entirely arbitrary and politically motivated.
It likely resulted in multiple deaths from air pollution.
Now, yes worldwide 100,000's of people die every year from air pollution but simply giving up is a poor solution. Further, you can't make getting caught have similar penalties vs. cheating or you promote cheating as having zero downsides.
I agree. If we weren't on a forum filled with mostly people from CA who take for granted things like byzantine HOA rules and intrusive bylaws we'd be questioning why emissions requirements made "screw it, we're cheating on this one" a defensible decision for anyone at VW. You shouldn't have to break the law to be competitive.
"Screw it, we know how to meet the law, but we want to save money" is what VW did. Not only did it result in people dying from air pollution, it also left their competition wondering how VW did it so inexpensively.
Last time I checked all tested diesel cars displayed anomalies between their supposed emissions and their actual emissions. So at this point: Likely all car makers.
And while this hasn't been public knowledge, it is not that surprising, because it has been public knowledge how much the mileage tests are gamed, so it's not surprising that all other tests are gamed as well (and, specifically, using defeat devices is also illegal).
The technology exists for diesel engines to meet emissions regulations. However, German car-makers secretly formed an agreement not to use certain emissions reduction technologies (such as large, refillable AdBlue tanks) in order to save money:
"Rolling coal" remains an illegal modification, practiced by scofflaws. TÜVs are not immune to conflicts of interests.[0] And while generally not a separate sticker from annual car registrations, annual or biennial emissions testings are carried out by most states.[1]
>any sudden punishment of violators from outside reeks of market protection.
Perhaps it's because the EU lacks the authority of the member states to regulate & police emission laws. They started legal proceedings against their member states precisely because of their inaction.
"The European Commission on Thursday began the so-called "infringement procedures," calling Germany, Britain, Spain and Luxembourg to account for not imposing the same kind of penalties Volkswagen faced in the United States for using illegal software to mask health-harming emissions."[2]
Most states emissions testing requirements are not stringent. Having lived in Washington, Oregon, and California I can say that WA's and OR's tests don't do much.
This intentional evasion of emissions standards couldn't have been caught by the EPA test process. That should be changed (which will open other doors for other ways to game the tests) but it doesn't have anything to do with VW's willful violation of the law.
Because they knew it upfront. The whole Diesel testing system was rigged to eliminate costly end machine testing as done in the US, which historically led to costly cheating on the roll by the US manifacturers. They paid experts passing those tests which were paid as much as a Formula 1 driver.
So the Europeans improved that to reproducible test cases, and much cheaper, only with the engine.
So when the problem with the overly large AdBlue tanks came up, the Europeans knew they can cheat that away, because legally they thought they can get away with it. The engine test passed legally, and there was no legal framework to protect actual sold cars from emitting too much NOx.
This is of course entirely the fault of the politicians, which were of course lobbied into that, and didn't ask much.
That's why VW insisted all the time that they acted legally in Europe. In the US of course not, because in the US the big three always had the advantage of special drivers to pass the emission tests.
So they still don't fear any legal woes in Europe.
So the strategy is to keep calm, and protect the rest of the industry, the politicians, the workers, change the ECU's, and either add bigger tanks or change AdBlue more often. It's insane to ask for 2 years AdBlue storage anyway. 6 months if enough.
And the good engines can pass the new EURO 6 limits, because their injection system is highly optimized. Those engines are miles better and more effective than a normal otto, which enables them to actually use the crap diesel oil. Problematic are only the overly large engines or the cheap ones.
If the Volkswagen AG would be the only culprit. So far it looks like Audi persuaded Bosch to add the cheat detection code into it's ECU used in almost every Diesel car, and consequently almost every car was using it.
The scandal is much bigger than VW.
FYI: Audi is the technological part of VW who actually
develops and produces the engines. VW has not much
to do with engines.
Audi and Porsche also do own VW.
Germany has had laws against Nazi symbolism and activity for decades. This isn't new. "Now there is no free speech" is the rewriting of history--and it smells pretty disingenuous.
And Reporters Without Borders ranks Germany sixteenth in the world as far as press freedom goes. The United States is forty-third, behind such leading lights as Belize and Burkina Faso. The understanding that is that support of Nazism serves primarily as a declaration of the intent to commit violence, and the state reacting thereto, sure doesn't seem to be a problem.
In fact, they've had laws against Nazi symbolism since the US imposed it on them. From an article of the TIME from 1946:
To re-educate Germany, the Allies last week adopted a typically Nazi device. The four-power Coordinating Committee decided to reduce to pulp all "undemocratic, militaristic and Nazi" literature, museum and library material, newspapers, films and war memorials. (...)
I don't think this statement is correct. The diesel emissions scandal is hardly a new scale in terms of international fraud — just think about banking.
I abhor this line of reasoning, and it is depressingly common, especially among partisans. "I can do illegal thing X because I believe that my political opponent did the same or similar."
Is has become so common that it is a tell that the person using this justification is deeply partisan or otherwise zealous in some manner or another.
In July 2014, the United States Environmental Protection Agency stated that the practice was illegal, as it violated the Clean Air Act which prohibits the manufacturing, sale, and installation "of a part for a motor vehicle that bypasses, defeats, or renders inoperative any emission control device [and] prohibits anyone from tampering with an emission control device on a motor vehicle by removing it or making it inoperable prior to or after the sale or delivery to the buyer."
I love this bit (not a criticism, just find it amusing): "The bill was introduced by state Assemblyman Tim Eustace after a pickup truck blasted smoke at Eustace's Nissan Leaf while driving on the New Jersey Turnpike."
You're comparing industry-wide fraud with an illegal practice that individual citizens do? I'd wager that there are easily 100,000 trucks on the road in the US for every one that can "roll coal".
...It's not? It's illegal here. It's not often punished just because (a) it's quite rare and (b) most police have better things to do than pulling some guy over and emissions-testing his car over something that looks like a simple engine problem. It's in the news because it's political, but it's not actually common at all.
Per day. For reference, that is €1,131,500 or $1,350,000 per year.
> You’re in the top
0.007%
richest people in the world by income.
> That makes you the
428,441st
richest person on earth by income.
I'm really disappointed with Germany on this one, but it makes sense since VAG were buddy buddies with Merkel & co. since time immemorial (makes sense since it's a powerful force for the economy, still despicable).
If you kill a couple of people you go to jail or might even get executed. If you kill 1200+ you get early retired on a comfy stipend.
> If you kill a couple of people you go to jail or might even get executed. If you kill 1200+ you get early retired on a comfy stipend.
This falsely looks like a good point.
Cars kill a lot of people by virtue of accidents. Does that mean cars are a bad thing? You see, just because something inevitably kills people in practice it isn't automatically a bad thing. What you need to balance it with is the good it brings compared to the alternatives.
Your point makes a comparison between killing a couple of people for no good and the effect of cars and their exhaust.
"U.S. prosecutors have charged eight current and former Volkswagen executives in connection with the diesel emissions cheating probe. Liang is one of the lowest-ranking executives charged so far.
Another VW executive, Oliver Schmidt, has pleaded guilty and is scheduled to be sentenced in Detroit on Dec. 6. Under a plea agreement, Schmidt could face up to seven years in prison and a fine of between $40,000 and $400,000 after admitting to conspiring to mislead U.S regulators and violating clean air laws."
EDIT: FTA
> U.S. prosecutors have charged eight current and former Volkswagen executives in connection with the diesel emissions cheating probe. Liang is one of the lowest-ranking executives charged so far.
> Another VW executive, Oliver Schmidt, has pleaded guilty and is scheduled to be sentenced in Detroit on Dec. 6. Under a plea agreement, Schmidt could face up to seven years in prison and a fine of between $40,000 and $400,000 after admitting to conspiring to mislead U.S regulators and violating clean air laws.