VW’s Plans for the Future Include Electric Vehicles—Whether They Wanted To Go in that Direction Or Not

In a few weeks, I have an appointment to meet with a representative of VW USA to turn in my car, a Jetta TDI (diesel), one of 11 million vehicles in the emissions scandal, and receive a check for its fair market value plus $5,100.  That’s the assessment of damages the courts have levied as compensation for VW’s having ripped me and 11 million other customers off (not to mention everyone else on the planet with lungs). That day can’t come soon enough; I’ve been wrestling with them for over a year now to enable me to get rid of the car; I really don’t like to have a product—especially of the size and importance of a car—that was made by a criminal organization, and, more importantly, is dumping 40 times more nitrogen oxide into the atmosphere than the manufacturer claimed.

As I previously reported, one of the many hundreds of people at VW (and their co-conspirator Bosch) who perpetrated the crime is actually going to prison; that’s a rare day in the U.S., a country in which one is far more likely to find oneself in jail for stealing $50 than $5 billion.  The future inmate is a German who, out of bad luck, happened to be in the U.S. at the wrong time, and got nabbed; had he been anywhere else in the world, he certainly would not have been extradited.

In addition to the payment damages to customers according to the terms of the deal VW made with the Department of Justice, they will be forced to invest $2 billion in the development of EVs.  Further details on this agreement are presented in this week’s edition of my colleague Jon LeSage’s Green Auto Digest.