Mother Jones
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The story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Volkswagen isn’t going to get away with this. You don’t (allegedly!) fake emissions data for a few million cars and just walk away. But what the German automaker’s punishment will be, and how much it’s going to hurt—those are still open questions.
The final decision will be up to lawyers at the US Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Justice. That latter agency has opened a criminal probe into the company’s (alleged!) emissions software tampering shenanigans. But based on precedent and the outlines of what Volkswagen actually seems to have done, we can make a few predictions.
If US officials absolutely throw the book at VW, EPA rules stipulate a maximum fine of $37,000 per affected car. At 482,000 cars on American roads, that comes to $18 billion. But according to attorneys who work on these kind of cases, that number is way too high for what’ll actually happen. The biggest fine of this kind to date was $1.2 billion, a criminal penalty that Toyota paid in 2014 for concealing information about faulty ignition switches that triggered sudden accelerations.
Read this article:
Here’s How Much Pollution Volkswagen’s Smog Scandal Produced
