Volume 88 | Issue 1 | obiter-dicta.ca
The Definitive Source for Osgoode News since 1928
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
VOLKSWAGEN
EMISSION SCANDAL
ê Can public pressure put the brakes on regulation evasion? Photo credit: Financial Post
shannon corregan › staff writer
I
n what’s shaping up to be the biggest auto
industry shake-up of the decade, Volkswagen’s
(VW) emissions scandal has—by this point —
obliterated over 30 billion USD of the company’s
shares, and forced CEO Martin Winterkorn to resign.
In late September, the US Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) revealed that VW cars being
sold in the US were rigged with stealth software that
allowed the cars to “cheat” emissions tests. In what
has been dubbed a “defeat device,” the software signals to the car when its emissions are about to be
tested; upon receiving the signal, the car shifts gears,
so to speak, and begins to run cleaner than it would
during ordinary use. This allows the cars to pass
emissions tests while emitting more pollution than
the legal limit. In some cases, VW cars were revealed
to be emitting forty times the allowable amount.
As legal loopholes go, the “defeat device” is quite
clever. It could be argued that the system wasn’t
breaking any regulations, just evading them.
Initially, the EPA indicated that the “defeat device”
had been installed in 482,000 of the cars that VW had
sold in the US, but it wasn’t long before the company
admitted that eleven million of their diesel cars across
the globe had similar software installed. To put that
number in perspective, eleven million cars amounts
to approximately twenty-five percent of VW’s vehicles worldwide.
Maybe more than any other automaker, Germanbased Volkswagen has a reputation for reliability,
trustworthiness, and—increasingly—environmental
responsibility. This is perhaps why the initial backlash
against VW has been immediate and unequivocal.
» see volkswagen, page 15
In this Issue ...
news
Syrian War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
opinion
Sustainable Development Goals . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
arts & culture
Netflix Guide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
sports
NHL Free Agents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14