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I feel it's worth making the point that everyone talking about penalties is avoiding: Penalties are pointless. Financial penalties applied to a company this si
by swombat 11y ago
I feel it's worth making the point that everyone talking about penalties is avoiding: Penalties are pointless.
Financial penalties applied to a company this size basically just get socialised. Either employees (generally innocent of this) lose their jobs as the company closes factories, or the price of future cars goes up, or even the company goes entirely bust in which case that doesn't actually help anyone at all. The only non-socialised effect of a penalty is to punish shareholders - who are also innocent of this (and arguably even that is socialised, since pension funds probably own large chunks of most car companies!).
The people who are guilty are the people who decided to install this software, who installed it, who kept it installed - and the people who were supposed to put in place checks to prevent this sort of fraud from happening, from the CEO on down.
The correct response for society, in my opinion, is not to try and apply a punishment to "the company", which is mindless and is only the product of people's decisions, but to make those people accountable. They were guilty of fraud, either directly (very serious) or by lack of diligence (somewhat less serious but still criminal). We have laws about fraud. Apply those laws, put those people in jail, and the next bunch of smartasses who think they can put fraudulent software in cars with this will think twice about it - and probably not do it.
In other words, this is a state, criminal matter. Approach this much like any other form of organised crime - investigate, offer reduced penalties for information, and put people who were guilty of this high-level organised crime in jail.
- happyscrappy 11y agoThere will be a criminal case for fraud and a civil case for customer damages, at least that is how it works in the US. How many countries were defrauded and all their different laws will take quite a while to sort.
- onion2k 11y agoAlternatively, nationalise the company with no redress to the shareholders. They lose all their money, the company keeps on running so the jobs are kept (until the business shuts down or is sold at least), and customers aren't left without support. If the penalty for failing to ensure the company you invested in is losing your investment then perhaps shareholders would police their investments better.
- PavleMiha 11y agoAs a shareholder, how are you supposed to police for this kind of situation? The shareholders were lied to as well.
- mikeash 11y agoI don't know, but you could ask that about anything a company does. The whole point of owning shares is that you share in both the successes and failures of the company. If the company has a significant downside potential that you can't control for, then you need to account for that when buying shares. In terms of losses to shareholders, this is no different than if VW had decided to burn all their factories to the ground and go into the sausage-making business, which then failed spectacularly. The shareholders get "punished" for that, and we would expect nothing different. Why should a legal failure be treated more leniently than a financial failure?
- harryf 11y agoWonder how long it takes before we find BMW, Mercedes et al. are doing the same as VW and this is car industry "standard practice"? That in turn could lead to German economic collapse... this is gonna get really "interesting"
- chrischen 11y agoLarge organizations do take on a mind of its own. This is because individual people will adjust their behaviors once they become exposed to the established pressure from culture, policies, and rules in the organization. Take the U.S. President for example. They almost always change their policies when actually taking office due to new internal information from government. The government faces unique challenges from that of an individual person, and so the individual must act differently when making decisions for the large organization.