Volkswagen Scam

The German transport ministry announced that Volkswagen had rigged emission tests on 2.8 million diesel vehicles in Germany alone. Switzerland temporarily banned the sale of VW diesels in the country.

It sounds like the sinister plot of some straight-to-DVD movie. Since 2009, Volkswagen had been installing elaborate software in "clean diesel" vehicles sold in the US, so that the cars' pollution controls only worked when being tested for emissions. The rest of the time, the vehicles could freely spew hazardous, smog-forming compounds.

Suffice to say, regulators were livid once they caught on. Not only did the EPA order the German firm to fix the affected vehicles but the agency could end up levying fines in $ Billions.
The Department of Justice is also contemplating criminal charges.

The scandal has only widened from there. Volkswagen admitted that some 11 million clean diesel cars sold worldwide contain software to fool regulators, with the vast majority of cars likely to be in Europe.

Volkswagen, in other words, is in deep shit.  The company has halted US sales of its 2015 and 2016 clean diesel vehicles and now has to fix millions of existing cars. It has already set aside $7.3 billion to deal with the problem. Meanwhile, VW's stock price has been plummeting, with the company losing one-third of its market cap in the last week.

If VW can fix it, why didn't just manufacture it appropriately from the start?

Just a thought.