The Never-Ending Attack

If you thought it was over, think again. The government may have torn off its pound of flesh; now it’s the lawyers’ turn.

Arguing that VW “embezzled from the environment” and “polluted portfolios,” a class action suit is demanding an additional $10.6 billion in damages from VW – on top of the estimated $32 billion the affronting of Uncle has already cost the company.

The argument is that VW didn’t alert investors to the “notice of violation” the government (EPA) sent to company higher-ups on Sept. 18, 2015 until four days after it had been received – depriving them of the opportunity to unload their stock before the story became public.

Following which, the value of VW’s stock cratered by 34 percent.

True enough. But their loss is chump change. The real losses have yet to be quantified. But we know who the real losers are.

Us. 

We won’t get the 60 MPG diesel VW was working on and had planned to offer for sale in the United States. We won’t get any VW diesels at all. Other manufacturers – including Cadillac (just announced) Mazda, Mercedes and looks like BMW, too – have also either decided not to bring diesels to the market here or pulled the ones they had in the lineup on account not merely of “bad PR” but because of lunatic emissions compliance costs (to achieve environmentally irrelevant fractional reductions in tailpipe exhaust emissions) that are making it too expensive to bother with diesel engines.

How much has that cost us?

These diesels – and not just VWs diesels – were brilliant. They delivered hybrid-car mileage without the expense and complexity of two drivetrains in the same car – and suffered from none of the multiple functional gimps that make electric cars as sensible as a submarine for the desert.

Instead of half or less the range of an electric car, the diesel went twice as far. And when the diesel ran low, it took a couple of minutes to refuel vs. a couple of hours (more like 6-12 hours) for the EV to recharge.

Diesel don’t carry around 400 pounds of toxic materials that will spontaneously burn if they come into contact – as when the battery case is damaged in an accident.

Diesel is hard to burn.

Much harder to burn than gasoline. Orders of magnitude harder to light up than the stuff inside an EV battery. A mere spark won’t usually do it. It requires compression and heat to get diesel combusting. It probably won’t light up if it just leaks out of a damaged fuel tank – even if you throw a match on it.

Try it and see.

Diesel takes less energy to refine than gasoline; it is a simpler product. Electric motors may not be complicated, but the electronics necessary to run an EV and modulate the battery, so as to prevent it from being discharged too much and too soon or recharged too fast – among other things – are very complicated. It is one of the reasons why EVs are so expensive.

The infrastructure that would be necessary to support more than the handful of EVs currently in circulation (about 1 percent of all new cars and almost all of them in California and Arizona) is essentially nonexistent; it will take billions to build it and all of that money will have to be ripped from the hides of taxpayers, since there is insufficient market demand for electric cars to prompt natural investment in the infrastructure – charging stations, power plants – EVs need.

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