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Comment by parshimers | Hacker News Reader

Amazing. If you get caught with so much as a non-stock air filter on your car, you can get hauled into criminal court (at least in California). If the car maker actively conspires with ill intent, to cheat the test, all they need to do is "fix" it and promise not to do it again.

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Oh, no, they'll pay a fine per car similar to VW, maybe a little less for less stonewalling. Fiat is still claiming there's no defeat device, though, which raises the possibility of an even larger per-car fine.

It's still a slap on the wrist either way. They aren't going out of buisiness any time soon because of this. These companies do things we send average people to jail for, on a regular basis ( https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/9-charged-federal-court... ).

$22,000,000,000 was not a slap on the wrist for VW. And there are VW execs in jail awaiting trial.

How can you tell that no one from Fiat is going to be arrested? Isn't that truck diesel developed in the US?

As far as I know, only one is awaiting trial because he was brazen enough to think he wouldn't be arrested, and the rest that are indicted are not within reach of the law.

Indeed. Although VW is still a massively profitable company and as big as ever the whole scandal had the effect of costing them a whole crapload of customers. I'm a Canadian VW TDI owner whose car is getting bought back. Like a lot of customers, we're so pissed about how things went down we'll never touch another VW/Audi again. And a lot of us have switched to electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. My Chevy Volt is on order.

The thing that made me the angriest about VW is how they tried to pin the blame on their engineers when the story first broke.

They are the worst dinosaur -- wasted a decade of R&D on diesels instead of investing in EVs. They actually removed their only hybrid from their 2017 lineup. Their only EV is a rush job with an air cooling system on the battery, which is going to lead to even more class action lawsuits as those start to fail as they did in Nissan Leafs. Audi has their semi-successful PHEV A3 with a sad range but they did nothing to improve it for 2018 (except increase the price).

I've come to loathe them, as have a lot of other VW/Audi owners. It will come back to haunt them.

I'm so thankful for Tesla. We've seen this coming for two decades now, and yet no other manufacturer has gone all-in on electric. Now Tesla has a higher market cap than most of the dinosaurs.

It really puts the lie as capitalism to being the end-all, be-all solution for innovation. Nope, companies just find local maxima and stay there, and as long as they all stay there and collectively decide not to venture out, they can get stuck there for decades.

The market cap is high because of speculation. Whether Tesla can turn the high expectations into reality remains to be seen.

GM produces very high quality EVs and PHEVs that are available right now at a reasonable price. They are just being cautious about producing them in volume. Same with LG Chem and battery supplies (the two likely tied together) That could change in a few quarters if they sense the time is right.

I don't think you can go from 1,000 cars/month to 40,000 cars/month in a few quarters. 40k/month is the number pointed at by Model 3 reservations. LG Chem apparently does have a big ramp of their battery factory in progress, but with cars like the GM Bolt selling well under their 30,000/year minimum target... GM's got headroom, no evidence of demand for what they're selling, and no sign that they could hit it out of the ballpark this year.

Personally, I'd love it if GM would hit it out of the ballpark. More likely that they aren't even going to hit the minimum.

They are apparently losing $7400 on each Bolt. So they've kept the production numbers low. It's a halo car and a cautious test of demand, and something to have in their backpocket in case consumer demand warrants it, battery production on scale becomes feasible, or a gov't forces its via regulation. I think there are likely warring divisions within GM, too.

See: https://cleantechnica.com/2017/05/20/ubs-chevy-bolt-drivetra...

Oh, and as for 1000 to 40000 in a few quarters, a company like GM absolutely can. They have decades of experience in mass manufacturing. The limitation as far as I can see it will be battery supplies.

I was referring to battery production scaling, sorry that wasn't obvious.

What does California do about rolling coal? I see it a lot in the Midwest.

Regarding California:

https://www.arb.ca.gov/enf/complaints/smoke.htm

https://www.arb.ca.gov/enf/complaints/svc2.htm

Regarding rolling coal:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nothing-wrong-with-rollin...

I've never actually seen it, but I expect the same thing for most aftermarket things that are frowned on- fix it tickets & fines.

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