Calculating the Costs to Society of the VW Scandal
Posted By RichC on January 10, 2016
The U.S. Department of Justice lawyers on behalf of the EPA are probably sleeping and dreaming dollar signs … a still unknown number but calculations mentioned in the WSJ top $45 Billion. They have an opportunity to capitalize on Volkswagen’s willful disregard and purposeful installation of “defeat devices” on Volkswagen, Audi and Porche TDI diesel vehicles for most of the past decade. The number of affected vehicles initially were 482,000 with a recent addition of another 100,000. Who knows what the lawsuit number will eventually request? I’m sure the number will be mind bogglingly large.
Interestingly Harvard and MIT researchers attempted to put a price on the “human health toll.” They concluded “excess pollution emitted from the cars will cause 59 premature deaths, 31 cases of chronic bronchitis, 34 hospital admissions, 120,000 days of restricted activity including lost work days — 210,000 days with lower respiratory problems and 33,000 days with increased use of asthma inhalers. The cost, they said, will be $450 million.” They also admitted that those calculations could be interpreted higher or lower based on additional outside costs … it could be has high as $1.2 billion or as low as $72 million.
It is an interesting read in this past weekend’s WSJ. Source: How to Calculate the Costs to Society of the VW Scandal
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