VW’s CEO has resigned
Meanwhile, in poor South East Asia, some jerk companies are burning forest in massive scale every year (for the past 20 years) and causing huge environmental hazard to cities like Kuala Lumpur and Malaysia. Your VW emission cheating causing environmental pollution place in comparison to this.
Yes, because one is worse, you should ignore anything else that doesn’t hit that standard.
Yeah, but our EPA doesn’t have any power to address that.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see that curbed too, but I don’t know how American regulators could deal with that.
I wish we had stronger standards like yours. Sigh.
Volkswagen AG Chief Executive Officer Martin Winterkorn, who during nearly a decade at the helm catapulted VW to the top spot in global sales, stepped down after admitting the automaker cheated on U.S. emissions tests.
“Volkswagen needs a fresh start - also in terms of personnel,” Winterkorn said in a statement Wednesday. “I am clearing the way for this fresh start with my resignation.”
The automaker’s supervisory board will consider successors at its meeting on Friday. Possible replacements as CEO are Matthias Mueller, head of the Porsche brand who is backed by members of the Porsche family, and Herbert Diess, who recently came over from rival BMW, a person familiar with the matter said.
Winterkorn out!
That is a pretty solid, “The buck stops here” move. Good for him - although if he was part of the original deception then he is actually pretty bad but honorable.
Well, if he was Japanese maybe suppuko, but being that he’s German, hmm, maybe he’ll just settle for annexing the Sudetenland?
There’s no way he was making it through this with his job intact though, is there? This feels like a strictly PR move instead of claiming ignorance and delaying the inevitable.
He was doomed to lose his job from the moment this went public.
It’s possible for a CEO to survive a scandal if the bottom line is alright. It’s not like the board gives a shit if the profits outweigh the fine a lot and if the reputation of the company isn’t really hurt because it’s not that visible to the consumers. However, given how much the VW share price dropped since Monday, given that it’s not fully clear yet how many cars are ultimately affected and how far the undeniably vast damage to the company’s image will extend, there was no way for Winterkorn to stay.
Yeah, dumping a third of your market cap is kind of an attention getter I guess.
Maybe not that item in particular, but a large amount of pollution around the world is directly or indirectly caused by American companies. In theory it’s possible to regulate this activity even abroad through some combination of tariffs and incentives in favor of clean or green industrial production and agriculture. In practice one of the two main reasons for exploiting foreign production for import here is the lack of regulation (the other of course being cheap labor).
Sure, though that wouldn’t really be an EPA thing. It would require some cooperation from congress, I’d imagine, so basically no chance in hell right now.
Of course. I meant to suggest there’s no chance in hell because it’s not in favor of corporate interests in the US. The whole point of “free trade” is to not regulate production.
I’m not clear that these cars are exceeding the NOx emission limits of countries other than the limit in the U.S. My understanding up to now (and an albeit brief Google search just now) is that non-U.S. NOx standards are less stringent, acknowledging the trade-off for better fuel economy which they’ve held is more important. If true, higher NOx emissions in non-U.S. cars, in and of itself, may be bad in terms of NOx emissions world-wide (and subsequent ozone formation locally) but it’s not illegal. Of course, giving a false result on a government test is probably illegal, regardless of the fact that you’d pass anyhow.
Seems like he’s gonna be fine, though: Volkswagen CEO Likely to Get $32 Million Pension After Leaving - Bloomberg
I have to wonder if this company officials could be brought up under the RICO Act:
http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/content/rico-act.html
They are less stringent in Europe, but not by the factor the testing exposed here. 20 to 30 times allowable US still puts it well above European NOx standards from what I can see.
Several other car manufacturers from Japan and the US have been fined in the past for doing very similar things. I wouldn’t be surprised if all major manufacturers knew about it but decided it’s in their best interest to remain silent.
The VW boss was told it’s time to go voluntarily today. It looks as though his successor will be the Porsche boss. The whole affair has a major political component here in Germany. VW is basically controlled by the state of Lower Saxony, who owns a blockade minority or whatever it’s called. The governor has a seat in VW’s board of directors. His predecessor was the current vice chancellor and head of the social democrats.
To say the rest of the German car industry - and even other old export branches like the machine building industry - are furious would be the understatement of the year. VW heavily damaged the “Made in Germany” brand. This can cost the industry billions every year until the brand is repaired in a decade or so.