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Half a Million VW Vehicles Dumped in Graveyards

posted by martyb on Saturday December 08 2018, @04:26PM   
from the What-harm-could-a-lie-do dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

After VW was outed for falsifying environmental data in its cars hundreds of thousand of VW vehicles were taken off the road now sitting in storage sites. Hundreds of thousands of cars now lie in lots in the Mojave Desert, a shuttered suburban Detroit football stadium, and a former Minnesota paper mill in America alone. These vehicles are now in the open slowly breaking down with pollutants entering the environment. Is the the modern cost of corporate greed? What can we do to ensure this never happens again?

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Original Submission

• Re:Quit allowing governments to "engineer" cars. (Score: 2) by toddestan on Sunday December 09 2018, @07:20AM

  by toddestan (4982) on Sunday December 09 2018, @07:20AM (#771840)

  Part of the punishment for getting busted for cheating on the emissions testing for their diesel vehicles, Volkswagon was forced to offer a buyback the owners of any of the affected vehicles. The offers were fairly generous, and given that recent Volkswagons have rather dubious build quality anyway and repairs are expensive, many owners took Volkswagon up on their offer. So now Volkswagon is stuck with a bunch of vehicles that would need an expensive retrofit with the emissions equipment they should have had in the first place. Otherwise, they can't be resold, and since few would pay much for the cars even if they were retrofitted, instead they sit.

  I'm actually surprised that Volkswagon doesn't just ship them off to some other part of the world that doesn't care so much about emissions and sell them for what they can get for them, but perhaps the feds won't allow them to be exported. Since it doesn't seem that Volkswagon cares much about keeping the cars in resalable condition, I'm guessing they'll eventually all be crushed.

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