This chart shows Volkswagen’s ‘generous’ payout for your polluting diesel car
Published: July Two, two thousand sixteen Ten:46 a.m. ET
Own a diesel Volkswagen? You could get up to $33,000
KathleenBurke
Volkswagen is willing to pay almost ten times as much as the highest-ever auto maker settlement to atone for its emissions sins.
The auto maker VOW, +0.27% submitted settlement terms worth $14.7 billion to a federal judge on Tuesday. The plan includes $Ten.03 billion for holder compensation, $Two.7 billion to an Environmental Protection Agency fund and $Two billion for clean-vehicle initiatives. If approved, the plan would permit about 475,000 diesel vehicles to be bought back by the company at their value before the scandal was announced or have their cars modified to obey with federal emissions standards. Both options provide extra compensation inbetween $Five,100 and $Ten,000 based on the car’s pre-scandal value, according to the Fresh York Times. Volkswagen has said that it has set aside $Legal billion for financial penalties related to the scandal.
Volkswagen came under fire in September when it was discovered to have fitted eleven million diesel-fueled vehicles world-wide with a “defeat device” that permitted it to cheat federal emissions tests.
The almost $15 billion settlement deal dwarfs what other auto makers have paid in the past for faulty vehicles. After recalling five million vehicles in two thousand nine and two thousand ten for unintended acceleration issues that resulted in ninety three death complaints filed to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Toyota TM, +0.04% paid $1.Four billion to lodge a class-action lawsuit and a $1.Two billion penalty to the Justice Department. General Motors GM, +Two.24% faced similar charges after a faulty ignition switch in certain vehicles was linked to more than one hundred twenty deaths and resulted in the recall of more than two million cars in 2014, paying more than $Two billion in consumer harm claims and a $900 million federal penalty.
“It’s a giant amount of money,” says Karl Brauer, a senior analyst for Kelley Blue Book, talking about VW’s settlement suggest. “This could go down for a long time as the most expensive in industry history.”
While no instant deaths have been directly attributed to the Volkswagen scandal, what sets it apart from Toyota and GM is that it clearly intended to deceive officials and customers, so it wasn’t just an issue of not enough oversight in the production process, Brauer says.
Despite the record size of the settlement, industry experts say it most likely won’t be the silver bullet Volkswagen needs to fully recover from the scandal. “This massive financial hit won’t magically make VW’s troubles vanish overnight, and it still has a long road ahead to repair its reputation among car shoppers,” said Jessica Caldwell, director of industry analysis at Edmunds.com, in a statement.
As Volkswagen resumes to rebuild its reputation, affected vehicle owners have much to build up from their efforts. Owners of select TDI diesel engine models of the Beetle, Golf, Jetta, Passat and Audi A3 qualify for the settlement, and consumers can find out if their car qualifies by injecting the vehicle identification number into Volkswagen’s settlement website.
Even if owners already sold their car in the wake of the emissions scandal, they still qualify for the cash compensation as long as it was sold inbetween Sept. Eighteen, two thousand fifteen and June 28, 2016, according to Volkswagen. Compensation is expected to be finished by December 2018, according to the Fresh York Times.
Volkswagen owners stand to receive anywhere from about $12,500 to almost $33,000, depending on the model and model year, while Audi owners could receive inbetween about $Nineteen,000 and $44,200, according to the National Automobile Dealers Association Used Car Guide, which Volkswagen used to determine car values. Volkswagen lessees could receive inbetween $Two,600 and $Four,000 while Audi lessees could see payments inbetween $Three,700 and $Four,900.