An Open Letter to California Air Resources Board on VW Cheating Scandal | Hacker News Reader

An Open Letter to California Air Resources Board on VW Cheating Scandal

takepart.com

90 pointsbontoJR67 comments

Note point 5:

> 5./ Allow VW some flexibility in the execution and timing of this plan by allowing it to be implemented via zero emission vehicle credits.

Which, together with the rest of the requests actually means:

> Force VW to pay a lot of money to an existing EV manuctarurer.

Which, together with the rest, means:

> Force VW to pay Tesla, instead of producing its own vehicles.

(VW is already killing its "efficient Diesel" program, and instead focusing on EVs)

I have seen nothing tangible so far that shows that VW is backing off Diesel cars - perhaps they cancelled their marketing campaign in the US. I would very much like them to focus on EVs, but whether they do remains to be seen. (A very good indicator for that would be that they start building charging infrastructure and introduce some vehicles with more than 100 miles range...)

This article might give you more information: arstechnica.com/cars/2015/10/vw-responds-to-diesel-scandal-says-the-future-is-electric/

They’re focusing on EVs now a lot.

Being from Germany and a Volkswagen owner, I believe it, when they show some real actions, not only declare to focus on EVs. I would be very happy if they do - my next car is electric for sure - but they got to show first.

City dwellers who park on the street or even in apartment garages do not have the authority to install chargers. EVs are 100% off the table for me for at least 20 years (until I own a home) and probably forever (unlikely that I will own a suburban home).

Sure, there are public chargers, but not nearly enough, considering that you have to sit at one for 45 minutes or more.

In 20 years, most cars (electric or not) will probably be self-driving ones owned and controlled by a centralized ride-sharing service. You won't need to charge/refuel them.

> In 20 years, most cars (electric or not) will probably be self-driving ones owned and controlled by a centralized ride-sharing service

This is not true. Just to give an example, how do you plan to implement that "centralized ride-sharing service" in a city like Cairo (current population 10+ million)? Sometimes HN users need to get out of their bubble.

Or in a city like Huntsville, AL, with a population of 200,000 and a surprising number of workers who commute from 40 or more miles away?

> how do you plan to implement that "centralized ride-sharing service" in a city like Cairo (current population 10+ million)

https://www.uber.com/cities/cairo

I agree, minus the ride-sharing part, which will have a very minor share, in numbers compared to taxis and similar. Car is still a necessity in the eyes of an average (first world) human and our individuality will not let us share them.

> Car is still a necessity in the eyes of an average (first world) human and our individuality will not let us share them.

Individuality and fear of foreigners sure is a strong force. However so is saving money. There is a reason some people still take the bus, even when they could have taken a taxi.

How does that relate to self driving cars?

If you can save 75% of trip costs, by sharing it with 3 other people, a lot of people will.

I would imagine that gas stations of the future will have the capability to fuel/charge cars without drivers present via some kind of pre-paid account. After you get home from work, push a button and the car drives itself to the nearest/cheapest station and a pump/cable extends. When full it drives itself back home.

Perhaps, but this does not help one own an electric car in the near term.

This comment, combined with your username, just made me laugh out loud.

This is like high speed internet.

If you care about it you can easily find an apartment in any large US city which lets you charge an EV, if you don't ahead of time you can have issues.

If you're willing to spend an unlimited amount of money, sure. In the Bay Area at anything close to 30% of income? Hell no.

That depends on income. If you work retail @ 7/11 then EV's are probably a bad idea, but for 150+K tech worker it's really not a problem. Honestly, owning a regular car in NYC is far more of an issue for most people as a single space can run you 500+$ / month. Though, it can be far cheaper if your willing to park in a less convent location.

EX: 1,000$/month and people are recommending it. http://www.parkwhiz.com/p/new-york-parking/105-duane-st/#mon...

The GP's point is that if you care about charging as your highest of priorities, then you can do it.

Personally I think that's a silly priority. You don't need to own a car in the city anyway. Unless maybe if you have very small kids that need special car seats. That makes taxiing/carsharing annoying.

Well in my case (East Bay) I don't need to drive but I like it, and rideshare/public transit for every little errand is taxing and unnecessarily slow.

I also like driving. But I've realized that while I like driving a car, I hate everything about owning a car.

My opinion might change if I didn't live in SoMa, of course.

I would hardly call being forced to make EVs a punishment. In ten or twenty years, when EVs really take off, Tesla/Apple/Google/Samsung/etc are going to eat the lunch of anyone left behind.

Investing in electric vehicles could save VW in the long term. I would argue that if they don't want to make EVs of their own accord, then they don't deserve to be saved.

EDIT: I would also worry that if they're only making EVs because they're forced to, then they're only going to put in the minimum effort to make a crappy second-rate electric car. Flooding the market with low-quality, short-range electric cars doesn't seem like it will help push EVs into the mainstream any quicker.

They are already being forced to -- California already has a ZEV mandate, and VW is selling the Golf EV here. This would just accelerate the process.

Think of it in terms of rehabilitation vs punishment.

I would hardly call being forced to make EVs a punishment.

Call it "white-collar punishment." It's not like they'll get an open-ended holding sentence in Rikers for stealing a backpack, the way kids in my neighborhood would. Or anything close to it.

No, for the VW execs it will be, at most: "OMG this is so brutal! My portfolio is going to take a big haircut over this! People aren't going to come to our dinner parties on Ibiza", etc.

I've got no problem with fining intentionally deceitful companies into bankruptcy, if that's what it takes to stop the rest from destroying our world for short-term profit.

I have little problem in quartering the executives of those company if need be, but bankruptcy condemns the lower-level workers a lot more. Many of those are needed to transform the industry, so I hope they’ll find better position, and bankruptcy could help them realise that — but it is going to be painful. Firing those responsible and everyone above them sounds preferable.

Right now not even the former CEO Martin Winterkorn (who resigned after "taking responsibility" for VW's fraud) has been fired: http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-volkswagen-management-idUKK...

VW's former CEO to draw salary until December 2016

During almost nine years as CEO, Winterkorn amassed a pension pot of 28.6 million euros (21 million pounds) and last year was the highest-paid CEO among the heads of companies listed on Germany's DAX-30 blue-chip index with remuneration of about 16 million euros.

"Taking responsibility" means very little these days. The problem with corporations is that nobody is truly responsible for any crimes committed by the company. If the people responsible were to actually go to prison or pay any fines out of their own pockets, then I suspect they would be a lot more careful.

Any fines paid by the company itself, no matter how crippling, eventually only really hurts the workers (because they're downsized), the customer (higher prices to cover the extra cost) or even shareholders (sometimes that may be appropriate, sometimes not). Ultimately higher management remains in control, and no matter how guilty they are, they invariably end up being the ones to decide who really gets punished here.

No, he was fired, he just continues to get paid.

This would be true for almost any worker in Europe, unless you could prove in court that he/she had been grossly incompetent -- and such a case could drag on for years and cost as much as the severance pay.

Was he fired? I thought he just swapped positions with the CEO of Porsche.

That’s hard to do if you can’t prove the CEO was directly involved.

He should be fired for incompetence, as should every person in the chain of command between him and the highest-level person who is fired for actually committing fraud.

He’s already under investigation, but you can’t fire him until that’s proven.

Letting him resign allows VW to rebuild a lot earlier.

It would seem simpler to make the fine come directly as a percentage (or entirety) of the shares in the company from the shareholders. Why disrupt operations more than is needed to effect change, or end the jobs of innocent low level employees to make a point.

It seems counterproductive to buy into the fiction that corporations are "persons" at which we should be angry, or who would fear our retribution. It's the avarice and/or willful ignorance of owners that needs to change.

This HuffPo piece adds nothing. The original content is actually here: http://www.takepart.com/open-letter-to-california-air-resour...

Ok, we changed the URL to that from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/elon-musk-volkswagen-emi....

This is exactly what I've been thinking, too. By all means "fine" VW with billions of dollars, but instead of actually taking those billions of dollars from them, force them to commit to a very strict plan of investing those billions into bringing EV cars to the market (but not hybrids - EVs!).

But they should also have audits every 6 months or so to make sure those money go where they're supposed to.

Well, VW has used this case to fire the old CEO, who was focused on "We don’t need EVs as long as we have our super-diesel" (due to personal involvement in the program), and the new plan of them is creating their building block program for EVs, too.

They already have 2 EVs in their lineup (the up! and the Golf!), but they plan to provide every vehicle as EV in the future.

Just out of economic reasons this is going to be the only way forward for them.

It's a really good way to get around the way companies usually weasel out of punishment "well, you'll really only be punishing our workers..."

Still, what is the benefit of driving a company into bankruptcy while the actual responsible have left with a golden parachute? The only thing that works is to go after all responsible managers. The Sabanes-Oxley act was a start, perhaps it needs to be extended. And I do like the idea of rather forcing the company to invest in making up for their wrongdoing than plain fines which vanish in some budget.

The only trouble there is that what if a company wants to (for instance) invest in EVs anyway? Now the incentive is to first make a quick buck cheating and lying, and then when they get caught the punishment is to do the same thing they were planning to eventually do anyway.

Agree about it being more efficient to invest in emission reductions moving forward. I'd still like to see heavy jail sentences for the executives involved (assuming there's some law they actually broke, and all that). As if the forced recalls ever would constituted true "punishment" for those responsible for this crime.

Every time I read an article, and 20 seconds into it, mid-paragraph a modal window tries to get me to register it evokes such an rage I just stop what I am reading and click back. This UI pattern is one of the worst I've ever seen.

Depending on my mood I'll either stop reading and leave the site, or fill in an (hopefully an actual) email address of the domain I'm on, then leave the site. It's never ever enticed me to sign up for anything

I do not see this, and I believe this is thanks to me using Ghostery. It’s a plug-in that allows you to see, choose and filter in or out the scripts that run on your page. In this case, I see about 15 of them (and block most, out of experience that those are from company with disreputable practices) so I couldn’t tell you which is the culprit.

I strongly recommend that plug-in to any one, technically inclined or not: the savvy because that level of control makes sense, marginally more than AdBlock; the less so to appreciate how much data-gathering is happening, and what are the names of the main actors.

I have Ghostery installed and enabled (along with uBlock Origin) and I still saw the modal popup:

http://thumbsnap.com/i/PQ0bY923.png?1219

Depends on your settings. (right click -> options)

I have uBlock (additional lists) and Ghostery (block all) and don't see that.

Me too, fwiw.

We have no idea how many people think they have to give their email in order to keep reading. I've met a handful of very average people who wouldn't see the "X" or know how to react.

There. I have done this before and it works, i.e. people do sign up.

Why are you hurting The Web?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE

> Every time I read an article, and 20 seconds into it, mid-paragraph a modal window tries to get me to register

I have NoScript installed - I was able to read the whole article with no modal popup windows appearing at all.

Thus solving the problem for everyone, forever.

NoScript improves the web yet again.

Well, it is Puffington Post...

FLOSS oriented sites that do this a lot for some reason. Almost all of them.

I wonder why Elon Musk is involved in the panel and quoted here. Isn't there a conflict of interest where "investing in research, development and manufacturing facilities for new battery technologies" will indirectly benefit Elon by driving the industry forward?

It will — but not at the expense of others. Anti-competitive rules are generally about sorting benefits that raise all boats and practice where one pushes their competitor down to stay above the water (sorry about the too long sea metaphor).

I was expecting him to be a lot more negative against a terribly unfair competitor, but he proved very insightful, and genuinely concerned for impact. The main consequence of VW investing in those tech in the near future is most likely a raise in prices for rare-earth metal needed for the battery, and more competition, so I don’t see him defending his margins. On the other hand, he is trying to accelerate the legitimisation of what is still a slightly unusual technology. I have no problem with that, even less as he has been repeatedly and transparently doing that.

A conflict of interest is when the decision maker stands to benefit from some outcomes of the decision they are making.

When you are just some person sending your views to a decision maker, that is simply interest. Of course Elon Musk isn't "just some person", but he still doesn't do anything like tell CARB how high to jump.

I don't know if it's a panel. It's just an open letter written by 44 people with interests of different kinds. Somebody else impartial, will surely make the actual decision on what will happen.

That's true - but, on the flip side, it would also create a massive competitor for the Tesla.

That's one way to look at it. Another is "force other companies to become our direct competitors". It's like Apple asking the US government to force feature phone makers to make touchscreen smartphones.

Well he seems like an unbiased observer. "Hey California, you should use that settlement money to accelerate the rollout of the product I sell."

He would have, wouldn't he?

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