"bob haller" wrote in message
...

VW should be required to replace all the vehicles if the owners want
it.

then crush all the vehicles bought back... making ceertain they are
totally destroyed.

Another well thought out idea that makes good use of resources and is
economically efficient. What's next, crush houses that need a paint
job and put them back up?

the purchsers have probably lost a bunch of resale value on these
vehicles.worse if a software patch could fix it wouldnt VW have done that
already rather than risk a big fine? and a software pach is used it might
cause driveability problems

I don't think that will happen because there are time-honored and
well-established legal means to determine what kind of damages are
appropriate. Will the cars suffer reduced mileage over their lifetimes?
Probably. That kind of loss can be pretty accurately estimated in dollars.

For those who don't want to keep the cars, a reasonable buy-back program can
be established because *someone* will want the used cars if the price is low
enough. VW should buy them back as close to the purchase price as possible
and then absorb the loss in value by selling them to jobbers. That way the
defrauded owner doesn't absorb the depreciation loss. I'd be OK with VW
having to pay the full purchase price back to the owner for the car to
compensate them for the fraudlent testing and the hassle of selling the car
back to VW. That's a better deal for those that have put a lot of miles on
their cars, but no solution will turn out to be *exactly* fair.

The Feds will take care of extracting the cost of the additional pollution
from VW (if any) and can order all sorts of remediation as part of a
negotiated settlement, like they did with BP. We don't know at this point
what potential fixes are available to VW. It's a pretty simple calculation
if restoring the NOx controls equal a 5mpg drop in fuel effiency. It's more
complicated if compliance can only be achieved by a substantial retrofit
(i.e. urea system).

For those who think we should hang the CEO the same reluctance the courts
have about punishing the CEOs actually *benefits* workers who could easily
lose their jobs due to managerial malfeasance and who had little to do with
the problem. We did away with the collective punishment of bills of
attainder in the Constitution quite a while back - well, except for the
USMC. (-:

Still, it would be a good idea if somehow CEO compensation schemes accounted
for risk as well as reward. Tanking the company's stock *usually* punishes
the CEO pretty seriously but I think people are beginning to feel that's not
enough. Especially when you consider that tanking the stock screws so many
stockholders who had NO idea what the CEO (or whomever) was doing and who
likely have little or no real influence over the selection of that CEO
anyway.

One would hope that the people who hatched and implemented this scheme will
the ones punished most severely. Unfortunately previous cases of similar
tampering (and there have been LOTS of them) resulted in little or no
prosecution of the responsible people.

--
Bobby G.