Volvo "dieselgate"

[Tannaton]

Originally Posted by Familyman 90

It cost VW Group 30 billion dollars in fines and compensation in the America alone, against an annual worldwide profit in the region of 10 billion dollars (from a turnover around 229 billion - margins are slim).

Its estimated by some pundits that when all this is eventually resolved it will have wiped out a decade of profits worldwide, so its done them a lot of harm.

The company were responsible for the murder of hundreds of babies born to slave labour in WWII, but then lied about this right up until the 1990's. The VW Group board did not come clean until 1996, by which time most of the survivors had conveniently died and the compensation bill was conveniently minimised. They then more recently get caught out with dieselegate, estimated to be responsible for 5000 air pollution related deaths every year in Europe alone.

Why anyone would buy a car from a company with an 80 year history of death and deceit is anyone's guess. One of the nice things about Volvo is they have never been proven to be emissions cheats (accusations have emerged, but no actual proof has been forthcoming and Volvo continue to deny it), didn't make weapons or vehicles for fascists, and didn't murder children.

What an absolute load of irrelevant cr*p. Who cares? Why should anyone give a rats ar5e? EVERY large german company did that because it was state sponsored - so did Continental, BMW etc.

We cannot change or re-write the past - any time spent doing that is wasted. We can shape the future - that's where 100% of our efforts should be.

I could just as easily say if you were born English White at some point it is inevitable that your ancestors benefited from the slavery trade. When are YOU going to apologise for that? When are you going to hand over a substantial portion of your net worth to compensate the decendents of those slaves?

By the way my wife has a Golf. It's boring, very "appliance like" but it does the job. I don't think it was built by slaves. Actually I've seen a video on YouTube and it was built by people in smart uniforms, in a nice warm factory, with good food in the canteen, and they got paid more than the boiler factory up the road. OK every time it goes on the brake rollers at the MOT station the engine power halves and the radio changes to Classic FM do to the "cheat" but that's only once a year.

Can we talk about some cars now please?