Pictures of massive Volkswagen recall

[Kaido]

$7.4 billion spent to buy back 350,000 VW & Audi diesel cars worldwide.

Pictures from a California desert storage yard. Dang.

 

[paperfist]

Holy Mary Mother of God!

Not to many wild colors there...

So what happens to them?

 

[frozentundra123456]

Good question. Can they be modified to meet the emissions regulations, or resold in places with less restrictive regulations?

 

[paperfist]

Good question. Can they be modified to meet the emissions regulations, or resold in places with less restrictive regulations?

I was wondering if they could not have been made compliant to begin with. Sure what they did was illegal, but if those have to be scrapped then what an epic waste of resources.

 

[mikeymikec]

Burgle it.

 

[SearchMaster]

They're still far less polluting than hundreds of thousands of cars on the road - too bad they can't do their own "Cash for Clunkers" type of thing.

 

[monkeydelmagico]

No way they will scrap all those cars. 350,000 cars at an average wholesale price of $8k is going to net them roughly half their money back. Likely to end up in Mexico/South America as soon as they can sufficiently bribe whomever passes for an EPA chieftain for a waiver/exemption.

Or they can just do the "approved" fix and resell

 

[bigi]

What really boggles my mind is that diesel trucks, buses, ambulances, pick up trucks, etc pollute 1000x more on daily basis, right on public roads and nobody gives a fvck.

 

[dainthomas]

I thought it was just a software thing?

 

[SKORPI0]

https://thehustle.co/volkswagen-car-recall-graveyard/

In 2015, VW copped to fudging the emission control systems on all their diesel vehicles sold in the US since 2009. Long story short, they pleaded guilty to 3 felony counts, received 3 years of probation, and paid $4.3B in federal penalties.
As part of their settlement, Volkswagen agreed to buy back about 350k diesel vehicles, costing the company an additional $7.4B.

The question is, where are they keeping all these cars?

Welcome to the boneyards

Of the 350k vehicles recalled, VW’s destroyed 28k, resold 13k, is keeping the other 300k… in car purgatory.

The German automaker has 37 remote storage facilities across the US, including a former football stadium in Detroit, an old paper mill in Minnesota, and a whopping 134-acre patch of desert at the Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville, California.

 

[SKORPI0]

I thought it was just a software thing?

Volkswagen Agrees To $14.7 Billion Settlement In Emissions Cheating Scandal

 

[dainthomas]

Volkswagen Agrees To $14.7 Billion Settlement In Emissions Cheating Scandal

Right, but I guess I assumed it was just something in the computer turning off the emissions control when it wasn't being tested. Seems like a patch would fix it.

 

[paperfist]

Hmm wasn't the GM ignition $2 billion and people died over the faulty part?

 

[AdamK47]

Hmm wasn't the GM ignition $2 billion and people died over the faulty part?

How can you compare the warranted deaths of people stupid enough to buy GM products to that of the slow poisoning of our planet? Poisoning that will not only kill the complicit VW owners, but also millions of innocents over a span of hundreds of years. Your shallow reply is a detriment to logical thinking.

 

[paperfist]

How can you compare the warranted deaths of people stupid enough to buy GM products to that of the slow poisoning of our planet? Poisoning that will not only kill the complicit VW owners, but also millions of innocents over a span of hundreds of years. Your shallow reply is a detriment to logical thinking.

You've got some gumption blaming innocent victims who were merely trying to save money on the 2nd biggest purchase in their life and for being patriotic about it as to prevent a company founded by Hitler of all people from using the money to fund a new order of hatred.

Look trees die every day as they have for billions of years regardless of which company you support. It's how you use those dead trees that matter.

 

[Yuriman]

To be fair, many GM cars are built in Mexico. Buy Toyota if you want something built in the USA.

~

All joking aside, it's pretty hard to quantify exhaust fumes vs physical trauma. Maybe not the best analogy, but while nobody dies by immediate accidental death from living near a power plant which produces cheap energy from coal, I used to do soil and groundwater testing for a plant to ensure the mercury, lead, arsenic, cadmium, etc. were within "acceptable limits" in the homes nearby. I personally felt these acceptable limits were rather high.

At least with something like a coal power plant, you can see it and choose to live somewhere with cleaner energy.

 

[Topweasel]

I thought it was just a software thing?

But unpatching them would make them uncompliant, and patching the cars to only run like the EPA tested would result in the cars performing well under customer expectations.

That's why they bought them back. They have to resolve the issue for compliance sake, but doing so would mean the customer didn't get what they paid for. The actual pollution aspect probably isn't as much of an issue here as it may be in Europe. The bigger issue is that they lied, the cars aren't up to code, need to be fixed, but fixing gives the customers something other than what they purchased. So now that they have bought the cars back (a pretty penny) do you fix the cars, list them as fixed, try to explain what they new cars performance wise, while most of them don't run anything like they did before, while spending another pretty penny on it, hoping to maybe break even on doing the fix and recoup a small amount on the buy back? Do you try to ship the cars to a country that doesn't have or has looser emission restrictions and flood the market with having to do the fixes. Or do you hold them forever until they rot or someone buys them off them for scrap?

 

[paperfist]

By the time Trump gets done with the EPA those cars will be complaint next year and VW will be able to sell them again as green models.

With the economy booming and gas on the rise they'll sell for more used then new.

 

[theeedude]

I am sure Russians would love to take these.

 

[Perknose]

The older models were more . . . compliant.

 

[HarryLui]

I thought it was just a software thing?

Also less power.