Mick Hartley

The latest Volkswagen news, from the Times (£):

Thousands of people will die early across Europe because of excessive air pollution from the Volkswagen cars that were fitted with illegal devices to cheat emissions tests, according to scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The German manufacturer fitted “defeat devices” to more than 11 million diesel VW, Audi, Skoda and Seat cars built between 2007 and 2015, including 1.2 million sold in the UK. The devices ensured that pollution controls worked properly only in the laboratory, while on the road the cars emitted four times the legal limit of pollutants.

The scientists studied the health impact of the 2.6 million affected cars sold in Germany and found that the extra toxic nitrogen oxides they had already emitted would cause 1,200 people to die early, with each losing as much as a decade of their life. Many of the deaths would probably already have occurred, they said, while people weakened by the pollution would die earlier than they would have over the next decade.

Nitrogen oxides inflame the lungs, cause respiratory diseases such as asthma and have been linked to a raised risk of heart attacks, strokes and cancer. Another 2,600 people will go on to die from future emissions from those German vehicles unless they are made to comply with pollution limits on the road, the researchers said. They looked only at the impact of the emissions from cars sold in Germany but said the death toll would be significantly higher if they had taken into account the emissions from all eight million VW cars sold in Europe with the illegal devices.

VW promised a year and a half ago to recall the cars and remove the devices but 700,000 of those affected in the UK have yet to be fixed….

The authors found that the death toll from the VW cars was far greater in Europe than in the US, where there would be 60 early deaths caused by the 482,000 affected vehicles sold there. They said the difference was explained not just by the higher number of cars sold in Europe but also by its much greater population density and different atmospheric conditions.

VW is paying up to $10,000 (£8,000) in compensation to each customer in the US but is refusing to pay any compensation to British and European owners. The US has fined VW $15 billion for using the illegal software but the UK has asked it to pay only about £2 million to cover the cost of retesting vehicles.

As a commenter wryly notes: "Germany leads the way in gassing people once again."

Why are we not fining them billions of pounds? More to the point, why are they still in business? 

Apart from their appallingly smug adverts, there's also the small matter of their history:

As was common with much of the production in Nazi Germany during the war, slave labor was utilized in the Volkswagen plant, e.g. from Arbeitsdorf concentration camp. The company would admit in 1998 that it used 15,000 slaves during the war effort. German historians estimated that 80% of Volkswagen's wartime workforce was slave labor. Many of the slaves were reported to have been supplied from the concentration camps upon request from plant managers.