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Comment by brianwawok | Hacker News Reader

Maybe. I am not sure this would be the way to go on this.

Really the car the consumer got was better (to them) than the product ordered. It had better gas mileage, and better performance than it should have had.

The net loser in the trick was the environment (/ the world). If a company does a trick to make money and hurt the environment, the government should step in and make them pay, right? Like if I run a tire shop and secretly burn all my old tires in the back yard.. my customers weren't hurt (directly), but the entire environment was.

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Could the fact that lower emission was a possible selling point and may have affected customer choice have an impact here? Some customer did feel cheated by this fraud since they bought the car in part for it's lower emission and fuel usage.

Ya I can totally see this side also. As a non-legal person, it seems harder to argue:

I expected 99x and 89y, but I got 120x and 70y

You lied and spewed toxins all over the environment

as the first case requires some kind of weighting. Like if a pair of shoes advertises weighing 12 ounces, but they made a silent upgrade to only weight 11 ounces.. 99.9% of people are happy for that. The .1% of people who use shoes for boat anchors are not happy.

The car may have been better than it should have been, but it was NOT better than was claimed. It is not the product itself that is the problem, it is the claims made of the product by the manufacturer. VW made claims about the power, fuel economy and emissions. In as-delivered configuration the emissions claim is false and in order to live up to the emissions claim they will need to negate the power and economy claims.

> the car the consumer got was better (to them) than the product ordered

Two exceptions are: people who prioritize environmental impact over solely personal short-term ones ("act local, think global"); and people who will now have to waste time to get the car fixed so it will pass local smog testing.

A closer analogy would be selling tires that spew asbestos as you drive. The consumer _is_ damaged by the sale because the cars are no longer legal to drive on roads. Even with good-faith doctrines that mean the consumer isn't in the wrong, there are commensurate damages in resale value, and performance _below_ what the consumer was sold. Horsepower and torque numbers will almost certainly need to go down, and urea NOx recovery systems aren't cheap, and it's one more part to maintain.

So I disagree with that interpretation (getting something better than promised; it's only in the very limited sense of average gas milage). I own a TDI and am affected, fwiw.

Are these cars not legal? has any action been brought on the owners?

If the tires spewed asbestos and no law was against you driving them, then I think my argument still stands.

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