Hacker News Reader

Comment by riedel | Hacker News Reader

I fully agree that automakers should be held responsible. However, I am feeling a bit of negative sentiment here. What does 'properly' mean? There has been court cases that have been decided against them. Sure there is always more. But this sounds a bit like whatabotism. Also there is a high probability of defeat devices in Citroen, Dacia, Fiat, Ford and Honda cars as well. It is however true that the EU create a huge grey zone. But what does that mean in terms of court cases against cloud providers??

View on HN

"Properly" means that the automakers should pay a fine per vehicle sold that was producing more emissions than allowed, and that fine should be so high as to effectively get them into bankruptcy. It should also put in jail anyone that was aware of the violation and did not report to the authorities. Everyone, from the CEO to the test engineer who knew about the cheating devices.

Anything less than that and all you are getting is an incentive for the make a risk calculation between profit and losses of being caught.

> Also there is a high probability of defeat devices in Citroen, Dacia, Fiat, Ford and Honda cars as well.

Which would be a sign that the regulations are not really working and consumers are just getting fooled into believing that their beloved EU is oh-so-awesome.

> Anything less than that and all you are getting is an incentive for the make a risk calculation between profit and losses of being caught.

But that logic applies to anything that any company does. You want to effectively kill any company for any infraction?

That sounds a little too severe.

If the infraction was intentional and with the sole purpose of getting unfair competitive advantage in the market, yes, the company should be dissolved for it.

> If the infraction was intentional and with the sole purpose of getting unfair competitive advantage in the market, yes, the company should be dissolved for it.

My memory may be hazy[1], but I don't think Dieselgate was ever proven intentional; your proposed policy wouldn't have kicked into effect anyway.

[1] So feel free to post links to the findings if you have them handy

The whole thing started because the EPA reported that the software that controlled fuel injection on diesel engines was intentionally programmed to detect if the car was running in special lab conditions. It's on the first paragraph of the wikipedia page[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

I'm mostly with you in spirit but I'd stop at big fines and jailing the executives. Most of the employees are probably fine and someone better can take the helm without too much disruption to their work. Jailing executives might be enough on its own but the fine is useful as well, to pay compensation if nothing else.

Meanwhile, in the EU the price displayed/set in the contract is the price you pay.

Meanwhile, the prices in EU are overall higher even after sales tax included...

We could spend the whole day in this pointless display of "my dad is better than your dad", but can we just skip it please?

Having lived in the US and now living in Germany for over 9 years, I have no intention to leave. But this idea that "regulations" could fix the consumer hostility of Big tech is naive at best and damaging at worst. To assume that the differences between US and Europe are due to lack of regulations is a terrible mistake of reversing cause-and-effect. Cultural differences between and Europe can explain a lot better why things work different, while "regulations" assume that people are just automatons who can do nothing but follow orders established by some higher authority.

> Meanwhile, the prices in EU are overall higher even after sales tax included...

Regulation has its costs. Predictable.

> Cultural differences between and Europe can explain a lot better why things work different

Yep, the cultural differences that lead to even a "left" US government to be a lot more hands off than any EU government :)

It's not whataboutism. Read the comment it was replying to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com