Dieselgate - VW settle with UK owners for £193m

[scrumpyjack]

I see Sky news report that VW have settled with UK owners who sued them about the 'Dieselgate' scandal (I was one )

https://news.sky.com/story/dieselgate-s ... t-12621224

[pje16]

Have you been paid?

[scrumpyjack]

Have you been paid?

The story only broke today! Lawyers just don't work that quickly. It will be a few months I guess, if ever!

[pje16]

Have you been paid?

The story only broke today! Lawyers just don't work that quickly. It will be a few months I guess, if ever!

Ok good luck...

[Redmires]

£193m divided by around 91,000 claimants = £2120 each. Minus lawyer fees, so they'll probably get about £50 each

[Padders72]

Dieselgate is just QE by another name. Rather like mis-sold PPI in fact. Something to keep ambulance chasing shyster lawyers and cold callers in work. Like fake whiplash claims used to.

Bravo!

[mike]

Someones's going to help me out here !

I fully understand that VW falsified their emissions results.

But what I can't understand is how that affected the owners of the cars. General society yes with the higher emissions, but the car owners as opposed to the country as a whole, no, I can't see it.

Why did the car owners get a payout ? How were they affected or suffered financial loss by VWs actions ?

This must be so obvious as the Sky link didn't explain it, so sorry if I'm being a bit dense

[staffordian]

Someones's going to help me out here !

I fully understand that VW falsified their emissions results.

But what I can't understand is how that affected the owners of the cars. General society yes with the higher emissions, but the car owners as opposed to the country as a whole, no, I can't see it.

Why did the car owners get a payout ? How were they affected or suffered financial loss by VWs actions ?

This must be so obvious as the Sky link didn't explain it, so sorry if I'm being a bit dense

I assume it's because all those VW owners are such caring environmentalists that they have all suffered mental health issues because they have been emitting more noxious gases whilst driving their cars than they believed they would, and therefore need a bit of compo.

Or maybe ambulance chasing lawyers saw a way to get owners to jump on a mis-selling scandal so they could line their pockets now payday loan, mortgage endowment policies and payment protection insurance mis-selling etc has run it's course?

[bungeejumper]

I assume it's because all those VW owners are such caring environmentalists that they have all suffered mental health issues because they have been emitting more noxious gases whilst driving their cars than they believed they would, and therefore need a bit of compo.

Well, yes, a bit of that I suppose. Driving a diesel Golf used to be one of the easier ways to earn an environmental halo, but the realisation that NOx emissions were (somebody remind me, seventeen?) times the US limit was a shock of sizeable proportions to the virtuously inclined.

But let's have a bit of history here. Drivers were (initially) worried that the residual value of their cars would be trashed by the scandal, unless they had them revamped by VW in a way that reduced their already slightly soggy performance.

But there were bigger financial worries in store. The official VW dieselgate fix had the unfortunate effect of speeding up any pre-existing weaknesses in various expensive engine parts, such as EGR valves, fuel pumps, injectors, or especially particulate filters. (A full account of the story is at https://www.hypermiler.co.uk/dieselgate ... res-are-up.) And the retune that came with the fix was pretty damn drastic.

So, all over Europe, drivers with cars that had worked perfectly well until the VW diesel fix were now grinding to a roadside halt because their EGRs had suddenly failed. And that in turn created a shortage of spare parts that affected everybody.

My wife's diesel Golf, which hadn't had the fix, lost its EGR one day because of other/natural causes (mileage and old age), but our independent garage couldn't get a replacement part for eight weeks, because every single EGR unit in Europe was going straight to the VW dealers, who all had huge queues of customers wanting priority. That was a pretty convincing demonstration of how drastic VW's diesel fix had had to be.

Seven years after dieselgate, the wife's 13 year old TDI is still running just fine without the troublesome official fix. And its secondhand value is none the worse for being untouched. And its VED is still only £30 a year.

BJ