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Comment by plink | Hacker News Reader

Will Germany be applying the same enforcement to these standards that they applied to VW and emissions?

You can be confident that the same stringency as was shown during the emissions debacle will be applied to these standards /s

As you're apparently aware, minister Dobrindt (who was in charge of both) took great pains to deflect trouble from the German automotive industry.

I think history will show that by making their present more pleasant, he'll have made their future less stable. Now they get to milk the status quo for a while longer, instead of being forced to adapt to changing times.

For this and other reasons, I despise the man.

Probably, yeah. Our car industry is a driving factor of our economy, so politics doesn't punish them as hard as they punish other parties.

After a quick google I get two results that disagree:

* wikipedia claims ongoing investigations against 37 people involved

* Politicians are working on the Musterfeststellungsklage, a class action equivalent for the German justice system. Explicitly so that buyers have better odds suing VW.

Which in my perception is still not nearly as hard as other industries would have been punished for similar crimes. I did not claim that they don't get punished at all.

The proposal for the latter has already been hollowed out in such a way that the likelihood of any customer actually being able to sue a company is rather slim. Only a narrow band of customer representatives are even allowed to sue. And it's going to be exclusive, meaning the first one to sue locks out everyone else for good. So if your company fucks up? Get some stooge to sue and fail, before anyone else gets a chance.

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