VW Might Be Forced to Fix the Environmental Damage It Caused

The fallout of the emissions-cheating scandal VW is involved in may be even larger than we previously thought, as the company may not only be obligated to fix the thousands of faulty cars it produced, but it could also be forced to undo the environmental damage those cars caused.

Environmental and consumer groups are pushing the federal government to consider a long list of possible reparations, from a VW-funded program to build the infrastructure to power electric cars to high fines to cleaning up five times the amount of pollution released by the dirty diesel engines.

“The clean-air reparations must be so large that Volkswagen or other companies will never again be tempted to cheat,” said Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, an environmental group based in Washington.

There’s precedent for a U.S. settlement with automakers going beyond repairing or replacing affected vehicles. In the 1990’s, the Environmental Protection Agency forced truck manufacturers that had cheated on emissions tests to invest $1 billion on cleaner engines, among other things.

The EPA in March 2015 updated its policy of accepting company actions as part of a settlement if they support key government objectives, such as reducing the impact of climate change, promoting innovative technology or improving children’s health.

Driving theVolkswagen case is the purposeful cheating that permitted about 600,000 VW andAudi cars, including popular diesels like the Jetta, Golf and Beetle, to emitas much as 40 times the legal limit of smog-forming nitrogen oxide. VW acknowledged last year that it had been rigging diesel vehicles since 2009 with“defeat devices” to pass emissions tests in the lab while they exceeded limits on the road.