You aren’t my lawyer. You may not be anyone’s lawyer. For all I know, you’re a dog on the Internet.
But let’s say you own one of the diesels that have recently been exposed as having an environmental testing defeat device, which until recently has hidden the fact that these cars are spewing a mixture of sulphur, sarin, uranium, and ogre farts.
VW has offered a “please don’t hate us” package of about $1,000 worth of stuff, including a $500 gift card, receipt of which doesn’t sign away any legal recourse. Let’s say you signed up to get that.
Now, a Federal judge in California is in charge of consolidating dozens to hundreds of lawsuits against VW into one case. The press reports that this judge wants to handle this case quickly, so who knows.
What would you do? Wait for the case to proceed and opt to be included in any class action judgment or settlement? Opt out and think about filing a small claims suit against VW? Respond to one of the jillions of law firms sending you spam every day about signing them up to represent you? Drive to a bad part of town, leave the car running, the door open, and just walk away?
I’m curious what people would do if they were in my – I mean, their own hypothetical – shoes.
I’d take the offer from VW, since as you have noted it does not bar me in any way from seeking any legal recourse, and I would participate in any forthcoming class-action lawsuit.
And if I needed a new car next year, I’d look for a deal on a low-priced VW diesel.
That’s why I have considered opting out of a class action lawsuit and thinking up some basis for a small claims court case. The limit around here seems to be about $5,000, which I believe is very likely several times the most I might possibly see from the class action.
Inspired by this story:
I’m not sure what my actual damages would be – I doubt I could justify the full five grand if I did go that route, but I’m sure it would amount to a few thousand bucks.
I wouldn’t be too sure about that. Most class actions involve a great deal of litigation over class certification, which is hard to get. By the time that’s over the class representative is rarely going to want to litigate liability and damages, which might take another 10 years with appeals. So they take a nice cash settlement and everyone else gets a coupon, or whatever.
In this case, liability should be relatively easy to establish (though damages will be limited), so assuming a class is certified the settlement should be bigger than normal. Cash rather than coupons, in other words.
I can’t imagine I would want to bother pursuing my own litigation, whether in a small claims proceeding or elsewhere. Although most of this story is common knowledge it would cost you a few hundred dollars at a minimum to find a witness qualified to testify on liability. You might get away with introducing VW’s press statements as evidence for some of your case, but most likely you’d need two expert witnesses if not more.
In other words, your court costs will be more than your damages; fine if you win, and the other party pays, but a nightmare if you lose (especially since you are already out a ton of resale value on your diesel).
One thing that’s kind of unique about this recall is that you as an individual owner probably don’t want your car to get fixed. Whatever solution VW ultimately decides on, it’s almost certainly going to mean reduced performance and fuel economy. It’s quite possible that whatever final settlement VW comes to with owners will be contingent on them bringing their cars in to get the recall work performed. They might also just start doing the work on any car that comes into the service department, so you might want to spend that gift certificate ASAP.
Why are you trying to poison the bad-part-of-townies? Are you some sort of anti-bad-part-of-townite? They have every right to fresh air as you or I, pal!
I’d send them a congratulatory letter of appreciation and say that because of this I’d be recommending VW to all my friends. Emission laws are like anti-smoking laws, they’ve gotten ridiculously overzealous and politicized. So they emit 40x the pollutants? So what? Car emissions are already so close to nothing that forty times that is still nothing. Unless you’re willing to give up personal automobiles entirely and ride the bus you can’t complain…
It isn’t an either-or choice. We can obviously have cleaner cars, so long as companies aren’t cheating.
More stringent pollution regulations have had a real impact on smog, especially in places like L.A. There was a paper published not long ago that concluded that the rate of childhood lung problems in L.A. has been cut in half over the last 25 years, and a good part of that is because lower NOX emissions leads to less smog.
I still don’t fully understand exactly what the problem was, but AIUI the issue was that they wanted to reduce the amount of blue urea stuff used per vehicle to keep costs down. So can’t they just… put that stuff back in, and restore emissions control without affecting performance?
Yeah right. You could really use a mass spectrometer and positively identify the particulate pollutants inside those 59 people’s cancer-ridden lungs as having come from one of VW’s cars.
Get over it. The impact the automobile and all its related industries has had on the Earth is enormous and will continue to be for centuries. We have acted responsibly in eliminating the more egregious and practically manageable effects. But individual cars are a first world luxury (that all of the third world also aspires to) and you can’t pretend they’re ‘evil’ while at the same time know that there is exactly zero chance that you would give them up.
Good for that woman taking VW to small claims court and winning. It truly makes me sick to see how the class-action lawsuit payout really breaks down… Lawyers make over $8MM, while the people actually impacted get $100-$200? That is just wrong on so many levels.
I wish someone could figure out a formula to let the lawyers make a decent amount of money to make the work worth their time, while also giving the people in the class action a payment that gives them “justice”.
There are typically hundreds of lawyers involved in class action suits spread across multiple states, and they may be litigating a case for 10 years before they see a dime.
That should be “estimated to die in the future”. :dubious:
I was under the impression that VW can now meet the standards, so I would expect that there will be recalls.
"“They said it started with the decision to launch this major diesel car campaign in the U.S. But VW developers couldn’t figure how to meet U.S. emissions standards within the timeline and budget they’d been given, so they developed the software defeat device.”
Later, VW actually had the ability to install systems to make those cars run cleaner — but it stuck with the test-cheating software, which the automaker says was ultimately installed in 11 million cars worldwide." -NPR
they’ve always been able to meet the standards, but it would have been at the expense of cost and/or performance. Like I said in another thread, VW was chasing volume in order to be the world’s #1 automaker. So they were trying to make all of their cars cheaper (the 2011 Jetta was savaged by the automotive press) and also pushing the “Clean Diesel” campaign. It seems likely to me that Bob Lutz’s take on the situation is fairly accurate. The order came down from on high (Ferdinand Piëch) that the diesel cars were going to meet emissions standards, they were going to come in at the desired MSRP, and if engineering couldn’t do it he’d get people who could.
except the “reign of terror” didn’t work this time.
It seems to me that your initial point was that tail pipe emissions are negligible so 40 times those emissions aren’t a big deal. Your new point is the emissions are so enormous that VW’s excessive emissions are just a drop in the ocean.
I grew up in Los Angeles and can remember smog days when schools were closed or recess was canceled simply because the air was dangerous to breathe. Emission controls and other regulations have largely removed that threat for today’s school children. That’s what is at stake when companies intentionally cheat on emissions tests. So, no, I won’t “get over it”. If I were a VW owner, I would take their blood money, and join in any lawsuit against them, and still not stop hating them.
