German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal
politico.eu
politico.eu
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Drumm
It took 10 yrs to convict them mind you, and as I understand it they’re all out now.
窃(Steal)国(country)者(people)侯(gets to be the king)
Similar to Paul Getty's quote, "If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."
But in this case, it cuts much deeper and darker.
The others are about getting away with something by just making the crime big enough that it's evaluated and handled in a totally different arena.
The bank can still destroy the rest of your life, so you didn't get away with anything (setting aside bankrupcy and how you can actually usually start over, and that may or may not be all that terrible for you).
The banking one is just saying that the bank can not get 100 million from you no matter what they do, because it simply doesn't exist. In that case, everyone still agrees you still owe it and they are entitled to it. You didn't gain anything by going big enough. And it's not really true that it's the banks problem instead of yours. The bank has a problem, but you still also have a problem.
If you owe the bank enough money, you have the power in the relationship in most cases.
If you have any assets, the bank can take them from you.
The thing about renegotiating a loan is you don't have enough assets, but if the bank takes what you do have, you will never be able to repay the loan. I.e. the bank stands to recover more if you are successful than if you are bankrupt.
If you have any assets in the less than a billion dollars range, if you have assets over a billion dollars (which if you have enough of a loan in today's money to match the 100 million quote, you probably have over a billion in assets) then the bank knows its looking at a real fight. Nobody likes a real fight.
People like fights they're guaranteed to win quickly.
Yes, it is a Chinese idiom.
A. Gellius, Noctes Atticae, XI, 18, 18.
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/L/Roman/Texts/Gellius/1...
In this case not only were the managers personally held liable, the company itself also had to pay vast amounts of compensation to customers. Not only in Germany or the EU, but also to US customers.
Yes but not all of them. The top one is still evading justice.
Even if you like their stuff, find them useful and valuable, it's hard to abstract away the behavior. At some point it is bound to hurt you as well...
“I find all of this so weird because of how it elevates finance. [Various cases] imply that we are not entitled to be protected from pollution as citizens, or as humans. [Another] implies that we are not entitled to be told the truth as citizens. (Which: is true!) Rather, in each case, we are only entitled to be protected from lies as shareholders. The great harm of pollution, or of political dishonesty, is that it might lower the share prices of the companies we own.”
[0]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-retailers-cite-rising-theft-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft
Actually it turns out fraud and white collar crime takes more out of the American economy.
EDIT: I'm going to cast more suspicion on the FBI graph. According to a 2022 report[0], the number of robbery offenses reported in 2018 was 1691 cases. The median loss being about $2k. Doing some caveman-math, that's about $3B lost to robbery in 2018. Unless we went through some insane spike of lawlessness between 2012 and 2018, I don't see how $340m in 2012 jumps to $3B in 2018.
[0]: https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...
Why not compare recovered to recovered, which are pretty close to each other? https://hayesinternational.com/news/annual-retail-theft-surv...
That business appears to steal as much from their workers as criminal theft rings surely is kind of a big deal (based on the matching ACTUAL recovery numbers).
That's 0.01% -- one percent of one percent. That's a background noise level, or simple error rate level, or rounding error level. And because of our conservative assumptions, over those three years GDP is actually maybe 3x higher and the reported wage theft per year maybe 20% of the figure used, so it's more like approx 0.002%.
If wage theft is "just normal business in the US" it's not a very big business!
Should we not care about them as they are such a small part of gdp?
Wage theft is about $20b a year.
https://hayesinternational.com/news/annual-retail-theft-surv...
Comparing wages with GDP in this context doesn't prove anything.
But I don't know about the strict financial analysis. I'm pretty sure it would tell us to have negative care about a serial killer that targets the homeless.
It's amazing how badly customers are willing to be treated but at the same time, you're not obliged to buy a service so I can't really rant too much.
Edit : Found the quote and unironically it's credited as an American Proverb.
> If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the bank. — American Proverb.
But at least he's there for a bit
So I'm glad finally seeing some repercussions for corporate crime.
VW has international sales, and OP's implication might've been that Germany has a national interest in VW being competitive.
Well yes, I of course meant the entire EU+UK market. Regardless besides US and a handful of other countries VW is hardly competing that much with any American car companies anywhere (besides Tesla).
American car makers are still struggling a lot more in relative market share terms (GM+Ford+Tesla barely had over 33% in 2024 in the US). While VW alone had 26% in EU/UK/EFTA (just German companies have 39% of the entire market there)
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgkell/2022/12/05/from-emiss...
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/a2c7ca01-461c-4dc2-8006-ec1d6b61a...
Yeah, they're actually not doing well at all right now.
And the politicians which sanctioned these special diesel tests were not even named. Nor all the other countries who also choose the European Standard (not testing diesel engines) over the US Standard.
As early as the late 90's tuners offered features where doing something with the cruise control buttonss which would switch the engine computer back to stock programming to pass emissions, run on cheaper gas, or fool the dealer if it went in for service. How does everyone think they were able to do stuff like that without any hardware mods?
Oh, and all the car companies were self-reporting their CO2 emissions in the EU for decades. When EU regulators actually got around to testing cars, shockigly, the companies were lying.
It's basically accepted at this point that Telsa lies about their range and efficiency numbers, and recently there's evidence they have been fucking with people's odometers for the purpose of getting them out of warranty quicker.
Ferrari have all sorts of terms and prohibitions on things journalists can't do with their cars - one being track lap time testing. Why? Because they got caught by Top Gear specially modifying their cars for the Top Gear test circuit, as well as using tires that aren't on the production vehicles - and when Top Gear called them out, Ferrari permanently banned them *and have gone so far as to prohibit Ferrari owners from allowing Top Gear staff access to the owner's vehicles for testing, under threat of being blacklisted. Now that they've been caught cheating, they simply won't allow anyone to test their cars versus anyone else's.
The wheel keeps on turning.
They can buy a brand new truck sans engine and drop some terribly polluting piece of crap from several decades ago and bypass all modern emissions regulations.
The SCR/EGR/DPF regime that's been forced upon truck mfrs is at the ragged edge of reliability and maintainability, not to mention its effects on fuel use. So that regulators who've never heard of Pareto optimization can pursue cutting the final 1% of the emissions that a truck from the 1960s would have.
One badly-tuned mid-80s F700 can produce more particulates in a day than a brand-new diesel truck will in its lifetime, but somehow, the priority is not making it easier for the owners of forty-year-old equipment to update to the standard of...2004, but rather to decrease the number of milligrams per tank (at $infinity cost) of soot that a brand-new engine is producing.
Otherwise good point.
Just look at the hole the US has dug for itself when it stopped producing civilian sea-ships, nowadays the cost of producing or even repairing its war-oriented sea-ships is way too high. And not only that, but it doesn't have the people with the knowhow to build those ships anymore, no matter the money thrown at the problem.
Western Europe has certainly lost the capability of making even artillery shells at scale, let alone tank tracks, just look where we're at it now.
> as military technology typically comes first before any civilian application.
Diesel himself wasn't involved in any military thing, as far as I know, so I think you're wrong on that one.
The thing is that without a strong civilian industrial base focused on things adjacent to warfare (like the steel industry when it comes to building ships or artillery shells) any big power is going to come very short-handed in the next big war (assuming the war doesn't get nuclear, which is another discussion). So, if your country can't make diesel engines at scale, for whatever reason, then you can say goodbye to your logistics lines because you need lots and lots of trucks for said logistics as part of a continental war, i.e. forget the tanks.
Speaking from personal experience with a 2023 Chevy Duramax 3500, and a friend with a similar 3/4 ton Powerstroke.
Compare that to e.g. Chevrolet, which tried - and failed - to get a foothold in Europe. The failure was mostly them not understanding the local market.
Also it overlapped a lot with Opel which a much more successful brand in Europe. Basically it was an off-brand/cheap Opel, which wasn't exactly doing that great itself...
Mercedes don't have an easy filter, but they do have some cars available with diesel engines, e.g. C-Class.
Diesel is now down to 9.5% of new cars sold in Europe (Q1 2025), less than full EVs ([2]).
[1] https://www.bmw.co.uk/en/all-models.html
[2] https://www.acea.auto/pc-registrations/new-car-registrations...
It does seem like diesel is trending lower, but it's not gone yet, regardless whether you think that is a good thing or not.
In any case, my point was this:
> it would be impossible to create diesel engines which would comply with enviromental standards
is false. Which it is.
Or multiple car manufacturers are still cheating, I guess we must consider the possibility.
Absolutely not "impossible" FFS, VW was cheating to avoid using a proper adblue system, which would have been perfectly sufficient. They could also have used a particulate filter and burn off scheme like some trucks but that would require significant engineering and probably doesn't work as well with a small diesel engine.
Orrrrrr they could have just done what the "cheat" mapping did: Run less lean. The entire point of cheating was to run very lean to make artificially high fuel efficiency figures. The cheat map for emissions would then run richer to kill off nox emissions.
I genuinely believe they still "cheat" somewhat. My 2018 GTI has a 2L turbo engine. The MK7 GTIs were the first to be EPA emissions rated at 89 octane gas, even though the power figures are still recorded using 91 octane gas. Previous GTI engines were EPA rated with 91 octane gas.
My tinfoil hat theory is that they run EPA tests on 89 octane so that it runs rich and reduces combustion temp, reducing nox emissions. Using higher octane fuel runs much leaner, and demonstrably produces better miles per gallon. They purposely chose to advertise a lower miles per gallon figure because, IMO, they couldn't pass emissions with the leaner burning 91 octane. Notably, low RPM (and emissions testing RPM) performance is utter garbage with 89 octane fuel, and the car becomes very stall happy, when at 91 octane it is very difficult to stall.
It's funny how the Clinton admin forced a golden egg into GM's hands (the EV1) and GM tossed it away in disgust when Bush was elected.
Seriously, if people are framing this in terms of "what's good for industry" vs "what is the right thing to do", the crooks have already won and your national industry has already lost.
US emissions standards don’t allow some things that euro6+ does, and visa versa.
There is an effort to make them overlap to make it easier to meet both standards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal#U...
The emission limits being for ULEV vehicles, I don't think I have seen a ULEV truck - indeed California classifies most under the LEV banner.
None of this is to change the point around nitrous oxide emissions - the environment doesn't care whether it came from a VW TDI or a F350, just the amount.
But it is also far far easier to implement such low emission standards in the US because we just don't really use diesel like that.
And when you get to the heavy duty pickups (F250, F350, etc.), then most of that goes out of the window.
Wirecard CEO has been arrested since 2020, will probably sit for another 10 years.
The question this is this one person (or small group) operating against their instructions, or is it the CEO encouraging people to cheat? That can be a hard question, but we want CEOs to think if I do "enough" (whatever that is) to ensure we obey the law I'm okay and thus I want to ensure enough is done. There are always crooks in the world, we want to ensure they are not encourged. If the CEO is always at fault their thought is likely to go to how can I ensure that tracks are covered so they nobody can be convicted.
Whether he knew or nit is a matter for courst, but in any case he is responsible too. Punish crooks harsh and visibly, reward honesty and good engineering massively and also visibly and company as a whole will act accordingly. We dont talk about a single guy hacking some firmware build, but a well known company culture.
Or the politicians who wrote into law to able to use such a cheating device?
That would be 5 CEO's plus at least 2 german politicians, plus 20 more politicians in all other countries which selected this cheating EU standard.
Bosh's software is tunable to silly extents to avoid expensive vehicle testing as testing is tied to binaries due to bad processes.
You can more or less make a different program by changing 'parameters'.
I really think it might be unfortunate if this would extend into a crusade versus general computing.
Sending A Letter To The PM | Yes Minister | BBC Comedy Greats
It differs in that mens rea is the legal concept of a culpable state of mind, and negligence is one example. More fully, a crime is generally defined by a prohibited act (actua reus) and a wrongful state of mind (mens rea), though there are strict liability crimes with no mens rea required.
For, say, murder (in common law, specific statutory schemes may diverge from this somewhat), the actus reus is homicide, and the mens rea is “malice aforethought”.
While “malice aforethought” is sui generis and seen only in murder, the common kinds of mens rea used in defining crimes, in descending order of the severity with which they are usually treated, are intent, recklessness, and negligence. (The same mental states are relevant in tort liability, though strict liability in tort is more common, and the civil and criminal definitions of negligence, particularly, are somewhat different.)
Companies and the concept of limited liability exists to make innovation possible. No one will start a startup knowing they will have their house confiscated and go to prison if it fails. And, because majority of money businessmen make is the stock worth, company being insolvent and thus it's stock losing all value is in itself a punishment heavy enough for the founders.
What does that have to do with anything? We're not discussing a case of VW making bad business decisions and losing money.
If you start a company and break the law and harm people, you should have your house confiscated and/or go to prison. If you can't take this responsibility, just don't start the startup, that's perfect.
You are creating confusion about the subject being discussed in order to defend criminals.
"You see, I didn't steal your money, the company I ran stole your money, but that's actually on you because you didn't read the fine print I put in the contract you signed. And don't worry, justice was served, the company got punished and is now insolvent. Now watch this drive *swings golf club*"
This is a great example. Why is this emissions fakery illegal? Ultimately it’s because pollution kills people. Are these people going to prison for killing people? Not exactly. They’re going to prison for killing too many people. If they had stayed within the limits, they’d still be killing people, just not as many, and it would be 100% legal.
Stab a person in the lungs, go to jail. Kill people by putting toxins into their lungs, well, just stay under this limit.
Walk out the door with a $10 item you didn’t pay for, crime. Fail to pay your worker $1,000 that they earned, that’s a civil matter. Worst case you’ll have to pay a penalty.
Polluting is not a "rich person" crime. It's very much something normal/poor people do a lot, too. It's common for individuals to burn leaves. It's less common, but also an active problem, for them to burn piles of trash (including plastic, tires, etc.)
As an individual, I'm allowed to do a certain amount of pollution (some because it's legal, some because it's unenforced), and will get fined if I do too much, same as the corporation.
Large polluters don’t have that excuse. I recall that diesel hate alone resulted in dozens or hundreds of excess deaths. How many people do compliant cars kill? How many does a coal power plant kill? And all 100% legal.
Edward, Lord Thurlow c.1850
This isn’t how it works.
A corporation can do pretty much anything. Steal, lie, poison communities, give people HIV. Anything.
No, it isn’t. Limited liability does not shield executives from criminal prosecution. If an LLC defrauds another party, the perpetrators are both criminally and civilly liable; this is true in every common law country you can think of. Limited liability corporations enjoy a limitation of civil liability (i.e. the shareholders cannot be held liable for more than the company is worth). This limitation is not exhaustive in the case of fraud or criminal negligence. In practice it is of course possible that people “get away with” both, but that is a failing of law enforcement, not limited liability itself.
The latter could be even more disasterous long term. Nobody wants to go out to dinner with cannibals or show up at the stores for fear of being eaten. Likewise being known as an expropriating country, you may as well go ahead and embargo yourself.
Therefore it's Lower Saxony that owns some parts of Volkswagen.
Audi never owned Volkswagen. Volkswagen has owned Audi since 1964. What is true is that there has been an attempt of Porsche AG (the sports car company, not the capital holding) to take over VW in the late 2000s, but got switcheroo'd and instead taken over by VW.
While Audi does build some engines for VW (especially in the higher-tier sector, which arguably is more of an Audi thing to begin with), VW itself produces engines itself (to name a few, the TSI-, TDI- and TGI-series of engines).
Now, does VW build good cars? It's a hit and miss. I personally drive a New Beetle, and will probably continue to drive it for years, the thing is build like a tank and reliable to a fault. Then you have models that are ... not something I would like to drive.
Seems like a pattern honestly.
We would do well to overhaul the banking system by categorically eliminating usury and much speculative nonsense. It is incredible the amount of rationalization that goes into propping up these morally indefensible practices. Criminalizing them will go a long way to eliminate many legitimized patterns of economic exploitation.
Do you think the US would extradit top level FAANG people if they indirectly harmed some foreign country? No way!
You've been incorrectly informed.
As reported back in 2018[0], 36 individuals had already received a cumulative jail sentence of 96 years, with still more cases ongoing when this report was written.
[0]: https://www.visir.is/g/20181632401d/36-manns-i-samtals-96-ar...
People like Carnegie built 1500 public libraries because he knew the game. He knew that his position as part of the ultra-wealthy made him a target, and he had to toe a line. He need to maximize exploitation but not too much, so as to not cause a stir. He did a pretty good job. Some people didn't do such a good job - we don't hear about them because they and their families were murdered.
Rich people today are much safer, mostly due to people being better people and technology.
In particular, terroristic violence almost always incites spiteful reaction against the perpetrators and anyone associated with them.
We're talking about sociopaths, not people like you and me.
How much of a percentage that is on that level, we can guess.
So, how do you punish everyone fairly? By fining the company for a large amount of money. Shareholders lose their value, employees don't get their raise, and execs won't get their bonus, there is a good chance they get fired too. Companies are for profit, it is even more true for public companies, for which profit is their duty to their shareholders. So hit where it hurts, that is profits.
As for jailing CEOs, what will it bring? Don't forget that a CEO is just an employee, hired by the directors to maximize profits for the shareholders. If the entire company is corrupt, everyone will be more than happy to hire scapegoat CEOs if it can serve their interests. Jailing them will solve nothing, it may even be counter productive as those who are most likely to get that job are people who are ready to risk prison to win big, a crime lord profile.
There are still reasons to jail the CEO, but only if he personally deceived the rest of the company and shareholders, but that is effectively the same as stealing from the company.
If that means a "company" becomes smaller, with more isolated crews run by their own leadership, good.
By punishing those who decided to commit the crime? Indirectly benefiting from somebody's else illegal actions is not a crime (you might be required to pay it back but that's it..).
Generally executives are the ones who benefit the most of these case and then leave the rest of of the company and the shareholders on the hook while they move on or retire.
> and execs won't get their bonus,
What if they already have their bonuses? Generally it might take years for any investigation to conclude, often executives who benefited from it couldn't care less what happens to the company they don't work at anymore anyway.
My evidence for my view is basically pointing at all countries with strong rule of law and institutions having less corrupt systems. In so many countries bribery is just considered "the way things are done". Add robust systems for punishments to those with the most authority instead of blaming some abstract entity and watch as all of a sudden the whole system creaks towards accountability. Hasn't this happened reliably in basically every country that enacted and reliably enforced democratic laws?
A second exec sentenced in the US (also in 2017) was James Liang, also a German citizen, who prosecutors say "was a pivotal figure in designing the systems used to make Volkswagen diesels appear to comply with U.S. pollution standards, when instead they could emit up to 40 times the allowed levels of smog-forming compounds in normal driving." He cooperated with prosecutors and was released from prison in 2019.
I vaguely remember that the top execs were charged by US (Federal) prosecutors (in 2017) but the German government refused to extradict. Schmidt was arrested and tried only because he made the mistake of traveling to the US after the scandal came to light (although of course the German Court might have gotten around to trying him like they tried the execs in this current news story).
https://www.dw.com/en/4-ex-vw-managers-guilty-of-fraud-over-...
Apparently he has some health issues which caused the case against him to be suspended. That might resume later but unclear right now. He's 78 at this point.
Instead, Germany refused to extradite him to the US to stand trial in 2017 [1].
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-ceo-volkswage...
https://www.dw.com/en/4-ex-vw-managers-guilty-of-fraud-over-...
"A former head of diesel engine development was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. The former head of drive electronics received two years and seven months in prison.
The highest-ranking defendant, a former member of the Volkswagen brand's development board, received one year and three months' probation. A former department head was sentenced to one year and ten months' probation."
Doesn't sound like it got near the C suite.
Your quote shows that it was the CTO who got the suspended sentence and the trial for the CEO is pending. The head of the board was indicted as well, but not convicted.
So the English translation might be machine-done; in the original German, the word makes a lot of sense and carries a definite meaning.
The English Wikipedia article isn‘t terribly clear about that.
CNN reports that he was on vacation to Florida and was arrested in the airport awaiting a flight home to Germany [1].
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2017/03/17/news/companies/volkswagen-e...
As long as breaking the law only results with a fine the company has to pay, then the issue is an accounting problem for the executives, but the moment they risk going to jail, then it becomes a legal problem for them so they actually address it.
Can a board member be reasonably responsible for the actions of tens of thousands of employees if they have not explicitly enabled or condoned criminal behaviour?
The person that would benefit the most would be a senior executive who stands to gain a promotion, bonus or land an even better job elsewhere.
A former prime minister of my country was fined over $6 million for being on the board of a company what traded while insolvent. Not a prison sentence but a harsh penalty for someone that was not super rich (as far as I am aware).
Not sure what the answer is, but if the answer is yes, then that incentivizes them to build the oversight and reporting capabilities to be able to steer away from crime, and to hire noncriminal subordinates &c.
One way this could look in practice is board members having to post a large bond that gets taken away if the commpany is found to commit crimes during their tenure.
Anecdotically, the Real Madrid requires a large bond (57M) posted by the president. http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/europe/8076515.stm
It is extremely rare to see that kind of prosecution in western countries (US or EU).
Hell even if not on purpose. The point of a board is oversight. If management can commit illegal acts without the board's knowledge, the board has failed. Of course incompetence in a board role shouldn't lead to prison. But it should at least bar someone from future board jobs for a few years.
The head of development, a board member, got a suspended sentence.
>Martin Winterkorn, the CEO, has basically escaped prosecution altogether.
How so?
Winterkorn has spent the past decade getting various postponements in his trial. Now that he is approaching 80 it is unlikely he will suffer any serious punishment.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-ceo-volkswage...
Without these followups the public feel like they just get away, and in some cases they do. I'd argue that without seeing the punishment we are encouraging these crimes.
I'd much rather read this kind of news than whatever filler bullshit is on the front page of the news now.
It'll happen again, though probably on a smaller scale. Software like CrowdStrike's is a massive single point of failure but spending twice the money to have a backup suite on part of the network to maintain basic operations when the primary suite crashes is not very popular. The short hit to productivity is worth the emergency prep in terms of financial output, and the people spending weeks on end recovering systems are expendable anyway.
Anyone here know German? I couldn't find a good translation for the number "several."
Apparently 31 more people are targeted by further cases. (+ Winterkorn, but I wouldn't be surprised if he never makes it to trial given it's been aborted twice already due to health issues)
It's the least they could do for the reputation of German engineering.
[ if (CAUGHT): toss an MBA on the barbie ]
Then the executives Jens Hadler four and a half years in prison Hanno Jelden two years and seven months
Prosecutors are still investigating and trying to shake out more. This appears to be a wide conspiracy within VW.
Presumably they were blissfully unaware, and were simply pleased when VW delivered more profits, as demanded.
It is kind of ridiculous to believe that either the government of lower Saxony or the UAE or the Porsche Piech family were aware of this.
I wish someone would give me a chance to vote to repeal the personal death penalty and create the corporate death penalty.
The downside to all this is that the bad actors get away with it. They have less skin in the game.
My view is that more people need to go to jail. Corporations would behave less like sociopathic institutions if this were done.
More specifically (vicarious liability is correct, but less specific) it is respondear superior, the liability of the principal for harmful actions of the agent within the scope of the principal-agent relationship.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/23/boeing-737-max-crashes-doj.h... (3 days ago)
> Boeing, Justice Department reach deal to avoid prosecution over deadly 737 Max crashes
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44078413 (15 comments)
It seems that at the very least manslaughter is legal in the US now, provided you pay $1.28M per victim.
This should've happened a long time ago, and we should've made an example out of every single one of these scam artists. If it were up to me all these scumbags would be made destitute and barred from ever being anywhere near managing anything bigger than a mop.
When the VW scandal broke, the US indicted seven senior executives. None of these seven were extradited to the US to stand trial [1].
The VW scandal was made public in 2015 [2] and involved cheating since 2009. Sentencing only two executives to jail a decade after their wrong doing made international news does not send a strong message.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-ceo-volkswage...
Sending own citizens to foreign country is generally big deal and not something that is done.
One more mid level engineer involved in the scandal made the mistake of taking a vacation to Florida. He was arrested in the airport awaiting his flight home to Germany [2]. He was sentenced to 84 months in prison but was let out after serving half of that sentence [3].
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-ceo-volkswage...
[2] https://money.cnn.com/2017/03/17/news/companies/volkswagen-e...
[3] https://www.autonews.com/automakers/ex-vw-manager-schmidt-ge...
https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/10-201.9-Ge...
Article 16 (2) No German may be extradited to a foreign country. The law may provide otherwise for extraditions to a member state of the European Union or to an international court, provided that the rule of law is observed.
USA is not a member of European Union nor an international court.
One argument doesn't make the other in any way worse or better
I'm a German, I was not aware that VW was doing this until it came out and it was a huge blow out.
Do you think people just test their cars fume output?! You do understand that the software was build to detect being on a test stand right?
Who reverse engineers software like this...
They protest every time a company fucks up like that.