The cost keeps mounting for the Volkswagen scandal uncovered by Ann Arbor-based clean-air researcher John German. In September, the company confirmed it will pay its dealers $1.2 billion for damage to their businesses, and as the Observer went to press, a federal judge in San Francisco announced that he was “strongly inclined” to accept a $10 billion deal to repair, buy back, and compensate the owners of nearly 500,000 diesel vehicles the company rigged to cheat on emissions tests. VW also has agreed to pay nearly $5 billion to mitigate environmental damage and promote electric cars. And that’s just in the U.S.–more than 10 million defective diesels were sold in other countries.
“It’s pretty amazing,” says German, who works for the nonprofit International Council on Clean Transportation. “There’s never been anything close to it in terms of sheer dollars.” While German approves of the planned U.S. settlement, he points out that “older vehicles may not be able to be fixed” to meet emissions standards.
With VW wavering on whether it will ever again sell diesels in the U.S., what’s his advice to people who own one? “The later ones absolutely should be fixed,” he says. “If you like diesels, take the money and get the fix.”
When we first talked to German last fall, he’d done nothing but interviews on the scandal for three weeks and couldn’t get any work done. “I’m pretty well forgotten now,” he laughs. “The story has moved on to who’s guilty–which is fine.”
He says there’s plenty of guilt to go around. These days he’s working on recent European emission reports on 150 vehicles–and he says VW was far from the only company that’s been gaming emissions testing there.
“I got very little reaction to my two blogs pointing out there are other ways to cheat,” he says. “I can’t get people to take it seriously, because if they did they have to admit every manufacturer is cheating [in Europe] … The European commission sets standards but they can’t enforce them.