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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

That sounds a lot like punishing the consumer for being duped by VW.

On the bright side, VW is a very small portion of the market, and I suspect the cheating cars are not much worse than older cars that we allow on the road, which are held to less stringent standards. So while it's completely unacceptable behavior of VW, it's also not the end of the world if people keep driving them until VW issues the software update.

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> On the bright side, VW is a very small portion of the market

In the US. In Europe Volkswagen accounts for 25% of new car registrations. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-17/volkswagen...

They weren't violating European NOx standards.

According to the article they were. They are implementing a fix for European cars because European standards are a bit more lax than the US ones but they still were violating European standards as well.

That said why does it make a difference? If anything, any manufacturer should be doing their best to reduce emissions as much as possible for the sake of the whole world. Just look at the situation currently happening in China. Would you like for your country to be having the same issue, be it France, Germany or the US?

We already "punish" people who are duped into buying stolen property (by confiscation of that property), so why should people duped by other illegal activity be treated differently?

In the case of stolen property, that's mostly because the property needs to be returned to the original owner. Zero sum and all that. You don't own the property because the thief who sold it to you did not have the rights to transfer to you; the rights are retained by the original owner.

Because this wasn't a guy fencing stuff off Craigslist, it was a multi-billion dollar global corruption that is operating in a highly regulated market. Consumer protection and all that. If someone is going to get hit in the nuts it's going to be VW and not the consumer. The cars will get fixed or VW will buy them back, but it's a ridiculous waste of resources to have police pulling over people driving VW's.

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