*33c3 preroll music*
*applause*
Herald: So, has anyone of you heard of Rolling Coal? It's a mostly American
phenomenon of modifying your car in such a way as to maximize the emissions so they
are visible as a big black cloud of smoke. Apparently I heard that VW cars are now
very popular among the friends of Rolling Coal. But let's not joke so much and focus
on the topic at hand. Daniel Lange has the mission to stop the omissions of emissions
at VW. He spoke to hundreds of people since...
*laughter* *applause*
Last year he also gave a talk together with a colleague about the same topic and
since then he has spoken to hundreds of people and has gained some new insides
that he will now share with us. I welcome you to Dieselgate—one year later.
*applause*
Daniel Lange: Thanks very much. Can you hear me? Okay. Wonderful. Thank you very
much. A very quick announcement: The talk will be about 40 minutes, so if you have
to leave after 30 minutes because you have a dinner appointment or something like
that, please do so quietly. I was really unable to reduce the slides down much
further without taking all the jokes away. So, my name is Daniel Lange. I have worked
on the Dieselgate stuff on and off over the last year because I worked with press,
so I worked with litigation people. And last year I was here because I felt that
this Volkswagen notion of there being this “rogue group of engineers” was so
utterly wrong, and everybody in the automotive industry actually knows this,
that I just felt I had to speak up. And I don't know why, but they kind of keep
motivating me to come back and point out their lies, so that's actually what I'm
going to do. I myself have worked for 16 years in the automotive industry. 14 years
of that at a Bavarian manufacturer that's not located in Ingolstadt.
*laughter*
And I run my own company, right, Faster IT here is a consultancy, but we
don't work for the automotive industry, right, so that's why I can actually talk
here and don't have much of an issue. Hello, next slide, okay, this was broken
in the process, so I'm fixed here. I can't walk. So everybody basically cheated,
right? The emissions thing is not a Volkswagen scandal. It's Dieselgate. It's
something where nearly everybody basically has an issue. So this is why I'd actually
like to show you this slide to just, you know, relieve my conscience. This is about
the temperature window. This is kind of the second last finding that came out in
the middle of this year, that basically everybody has a temperature window, where
they reduce and at some point in time switch off the emissions treatment system.
And if like at Opel, which Felix is going to talk about later a bit more, or Nissan
or Audi for example, these kick in at 17°C, that kind of has a flavour to it,
that has a taste to it, because the testing is being done at 20°C and there's
a 2°C margin of error. So that means, testing can be at 18°C to 22°C and if
you're starting to switch off your emissions treatment at 17°C, you just
start to switch it off, like in most real-life situations in northern Europe or
in the States, but you're sure it's available when the car has been properly
set up for testing. So, sadly so that's the only slide I'm going to show, which is
not on Volkswagen, so I'm also guilty of not putting enough focus on the others,
but Volkswagen is just so entertaining that, you know, I can't make that up with
anybody else. So, this is the money slide. This is kind of to update you in case you
have been living under a rock for the last, I don't know, six months. There's
two class action suits. Class action suits are a legislation in the States which
allows to collect actions from individual people that have owned a Volkswagen and
have been betrayed together and they have split the solution to these class action
suits into two, because on the 2 liter it was rather easy—Volkswagen said: “Yes,
we cheated.”—, but on the 3 liter they maintained for quite a long time that they
didn't cheat, so there were extended negotiations. And what you see here is
basically a breakdown of the overall cost, which is currently estimated to be in the
$ 12 billion range for settling these. For the 2.0 liters, Volkswagen basically has
to buy them back. A bit more on this later. And for the 3.0s they have split
them into a Generation 1, which they also buy back, and a Generation 2 and those
vehicles will be getting a new catalyst, they will be getting up to three new
sensors, they will get a turbine mixer for the injection of the Diesel emission
fluid, they will get a new Diesel emission fluid—Ad Blue is the brand name—dosing
valve. All of these have to be approved by the EPA and if it is approved, Volkswagen
can retrofit it. If not, they also have to buy back the vehicles, so this is why it
says “GOTO 1” there, right, because then they will be treated the same as
Generation 1. Now if you compare that—I don't know whether you saw the talk last
year—in Europe there is this plastic tube, this flow rectifier, a kind of, I
don't know, 3 Euro part, which is put into your car and all is well, right? Now,
okay, that's, you know? Honestly, 2 liter engines, 3 liter engines, they are
different. 4 cylinders, 6 cylinders, but, you know, I guess everybody, you don't
need to work in the automotive industry to understand that a plastic part for 3 Euro
and some better flow calculations are not the same as investing substantially in
each car to really equip it with what it should have been equipped with right from
the beginning. So that's kind of the settlement there. The process is quite
interesting. Volkswagen has to reach 85% of all customers bringing in their vehicle
for fix or buying back those vehicles. If not, there will be additional penalties.
So that's the way that the US folks actually make sure that this is successful
and somebody in the States gets like $ 10,000 to 20,000 on top of the value of
their car. So that's kind of quite substantial. For the States themselves
this is also quite interesting, because the last lines you're seeing there is
$ 2.7 billion on the 2.0 settlement and another $ 225 million on the 3.0 liter
settlement. They go into an environmental trust and this is then used to, you know,
buy new bus fleets, build up forests, do infrastructure for zero emission vehicles
and so on and so on. So there's a lot of money actually being available now to the
government of the United States, and Canada has settled for a very similar
thing, to actually do good for the environment and set off the damage that
Volkswagen has done to the environment. There's an unofficial figure which I
didn't put on the slides, so the press people that only read the slides don't get
it, so they really need to see the talk, Bosch seems to have settled for a $ 300
million fine as well, so they will pay $ 300 million into the fund to offset their
participation in the Dieselgate. I think you probably remember that we were
discussing how much did Bosch know last year and we basically showed that it's not
possible to do this type of cheating without a close cooperation between the
supplier of the electronic control unit, which is Bosch in this case, and the OEM,
which is the Volkswagen group. The callback process itself is quite
interesting as well. This is the form that you have to fill when you bring in your
car and Volkswagen has hired more than 700 people in the States just to conduct this
process. So this is not only, you know, about $ 5 billion to the environment and
to zero emission vehicles and building up the infrastructure, it is also really a
job machine, because at every dealer's there is a dedicated person taking care of
this process and there are 700 people that run it for Volkswagen central in the USA.
I find this mildly funny here, because in the process they're actually making you
fill that your car has gone the milage which is shown on the odometer, so about
30%-40% of our old cars sold in Germany have falsified odometer readings. This is
really another scandal. This is something that is not being so widely reported on,
but if you buy a used car, you have a chance of one in three, that it's actually
a car that is not worth the money you're paying. And it's so easy to fix this
problem, but the OEMs don't seem to have an interest to do it. And the outcome here
is that actually Volkswagen tells you: “By law you are required to give an
honest statement on how many miles does that car actually have”. You know, it's
quite funny that they actually are bitten by the same problem which they have
ignored in the market for a long time. Okay. So, the thing is, the official
narrative from Volkswagen is, they want to buy back transparency and trust to their
customers. This is from Mr. Müller, who is the CEO of Volkswagen group at this
time: “From the very start I have pushed hard for the relentless and comprehensive
clarification of events. We will stop at nothing and nobody. This is a painful
process, but it is our only alternative. For us, the only thing that counts is the
truth. This is the basis for the fundamental realignment that Volkswagen
needs. The Board of Management of Volkswagen deeply regrets this situation
and wishes to underscore its determination to systematically continue along the
present path of clarification and transparency.”
Can I have an applause for this please?
*applause*
Thank you very much. And, you know, because heads of states and ministers
don't read press clippings, they actually write letters like these to every head of
state, to every minister in Europe, at least as much as I could verify, where
they personally update the ministers to, you know, give them the latest
claims—this is from May 2016, so it's, you know, half a year later and you can
read it here, it's the same narrative as, you know, “we're doing well” and, you
know, “we keep you informed” and, you know, “there's no need to listen to
anybody else. We own the narrative. We are actually informing you”. So, let's check
one thing. Hello? Thank you. Right when the Dieselgate scandal broke there were
two things. There was the NOx issue, which has clarified that it's a real
problem, that there are defeat devices in the engines. They are being fixed. And
there was the CO2 issue. The CO2 issue was pretty clear, because, you know, the
cars actually consume much more fuel than the sticker rating says, so there must be
a problem there, right? There is a problem there, but Volkswagen called it off really
quickly and this is my Maha moment, right? Martin Haase is here. If you read that
line here: “No unlawful change to the stated fuel consumption and CO2 figures
found to date” right? So there is Volkswagen saying: “We didn't find
anything to date.” Now that kind of, you know, that's a pointer, right? So, let's
keep on looking. This is from November this year. This is a new class action suit
and Audi in this case here is sued, because inside their gearbox, inside their
automatic gearbox there is yet another defeat device. There is a defeat device
that actually makes this car drive like a dog, so it shifts up really early, it
doesn't provide any torque, but that is sufficient to run through test cycles and
obviously, if the car doesn't have any power, it consumes very little fuel and
thus you get very good sticker ratings and you get very good CO2 emissions. So, we
found it, right? Felix will give a bit more details on the technical side here,
but this is a class action suit, so this is the same thing, which they have settled
for with the engines now running for the gearbox and the module in the engines that
cooperates with those gearboxes here. Next fact check. Warranties. Volkswagen refuses
to give warranties in Europe. So, you know, we're only getting those cheap
fixes, but then people like the ADAC, the German biggest car owners' club, asks:
“Couldn't you please kindly at least give us a warranty? Can't you warrant that
it will not have a negative effect on the car?” And Volkswagen says: “No, we
can't. We'll give you a certificate. We'll give you a paper, but it's not a
warranty.” And this is 'juristische Feinheiten', so this is legal intricacies,
right? We can't do this, It's very sorry, but you'll get a paper. Now if you look at
the States, this is the settlement, which came out on 20th of December, so the
second part of the settlement and the American customers get a 10 year warranty
or 120,000 miles, which is about 200,000 kilometers and they get 4 years or 48,000
miles after the fitting the new catalyst and all the other stuff insight the car.
So that means not only do they get a stash of money, not only do they get their cars
properly fixed, they also get a warranty that the proper fix is proper and if not,
Volkswagen has to redo it. So, you see that it's possible, but there's a huge
discrepancy between the American legal system that forces a company to do this
and the European legal system that apparently does not have any scare factor
or any lever to motivate them to give a warranty. And they're not giving it by
free will, right? They could. They could just be generous and say like: “Of
course. We fucked up. Sorry, we'll give a warranty.” But they've been asked over
and over and over again and they've refused to do this. So, Jack Ewing from
the New York Times, one of the few really good journalists working on that topic put
it well: “In the US, VW owners get cash. In Europe, they get plastic tubes.”
*applause*
And there's another thing I want to point out to you. We ran this here in the
Süddeutsche Zeitung a few days ago. Volkswagen says, it wants transparency,
but what it does is, it actually goes and keeps as much information secret as
possible. So in this case here, every time somebody sues Volkswagen, they settle and
they used to be settling in court, which means, you could get the
information, you know, what was the settlement value? Did they buy back the
car? And now they've learned and they settle out of court, because then the
court only records that the two parties have settled, you know, somebody pays the
fee for the court, which is only a few hundred Euros and everything is fine. And
you don't find out what the settlement is. So this is something which they're now
doing quite on a big scale and the thing here is, we have a very odd situation. The
Kraftfahrtbundesamt says: “You need to do the recall”, but legally they have
not ordered the recall. So this is something that is voluntary. Well
voluntary actually means, it's voluntary for both sides. Volkswagen voluntarily
fixes the car and you voluntarily agree to have the car fixed. If you don't want to
have that voluntary agreement, you can sue. And we can't do this as a class
action suit. You can't do this like in the States so it's done once and for all. It
has to be going through the regional courts and everywhere, but the pattern we
are seeing as Volkswagen is afraid of getting actually judges to trial this and
actually get fines and have to buy back the cars, so they settle quite generously
outside of court. The downside is, when people settle, they need to subscribe to a
non disclosure agreement, to keep everything silent, and they put really
hefty sums on this, so there's like five figure Euro sums that people have to pay.
So they kind of get their car bought back for, you know, a few thousand Dollars or
Euros on top and then, if they were talking about it, they would be having to
pay hefty fines to Volkswagen. So that's the way they keep people quiet. Another
way, which is quite interesting, is a court case which is running at the
Landgericht Paderborn actually asked Mr. Winterkorn to come around and testify. And
he's a witness, so, you know, courts can ask witnesses to show up. But Mr.
Winterkorn actually said: “No, sorry, sorry. I would like to have my right to
remain silent on it.” Remaining silent is a legal privilege against self
incrimination. So you cannot be forced to say something in court which will be later
causing a problem to yourself. But the issue here is, Volkswagen always said:
“You know, he's not our boss anymore. We continue to pay him and he gets a hefty,
hefty income still for sitting at home and, I don't know, watching TV or watching
this talk.” Hi!
*laughter*
The thing is, if the narrative is true and he didn't know, he can go to court and he
can say: “I didn't know”. He may be on oath, so that means, he has to really be
sure that he didn't know, but that's the only thing that could happen. But they're
fighting this really hard. So in this case here, that's an invitation for 20th of
January. On 20th of January the court will have a hearing only on the fact of Mr.
Winterkorn having to show up and testify, so the thing is another pattern which
we're seeing here and that pattern is: Volkswagen is trying to delay everything
as much as they can. So in this case they're not saying: “Yeah, we'll bring
him along and, you know, yes, there will be some press, but, you know, we fucked
up, so, you know, that's fair.” They delay everything as much as they can.
We think, the legal issue behind this is, they granted an extension on the deadlines
for cases to be brought against them until 31st of December next year. So we think,
they kind of reconsidered and are now trying to drag everything out beyond that
deadline. Because legally, because there's no class action suits here in Germany,
that means the right to sue has voided because of the time when people bought the
cars and, you know, there's warranties of two years and that's it. So that's kind
of, you know, what's probably happening and that's probably the tactics, which is
behind that. Okay, one thing for the journalists: This is a list from Rogert &
Ulbrich, who are lawyers working on the Volkswagen cases, of all the German court
cases where Volkswagen was forced to buy back, compensate or terminate the leases.
So they are happening and the red ones here are Oberlandesgerichte. They're like
higher level courts. But I guess, you, like me, have not really seen much press
reporting on this. And that's one of the issues here. The Volkswagen people are
very good at communicating to the press, doing regular press clippings, have all
the good marketing and advertising running and journalists need to do tedious work.
They need to go to those courts and say, like, you know: “Can I please have the
documentation?” And they need to write a piece on that and stuff like that. So, we
really need to get the message over to the journalists that it would be really cool
if they were reporting both sides of the picture, because then actually the people
that read the magazines, that read the Internet and possibly newspapers, if
people still do that, they will actually get a more fair picture, because this
information here is out there. It's available for grabs, if you have all the
Aktenzeichen here, so, please folks, pick it up and write some pieces on this.
*applause*
One of the things I predicted in 2015 was accidental data loss, right? Because
always when these big things happen and, in the States the thing is, you actually
get the right to request the other party to produce data for you. So, it's
different from the way it's here in Europe, and that's kind of a very big
tool. It's quite logical that it's very hard for the incriminated side to go and
produce all the material that will actually proof that it has betrayed, that
it has committed fraud and so on. So, it was a quite sure bet and here is the
result. We have two incidents here: The one on the top is a gentleman called
Daniel Donovan. He worked as an information manager at the general
counsel's in the legal team of Volkswagen group of America and he said: “I
questioned whether you are actually preserving evidence well.” And this is
why he was fired. And then they settled. So, there is an agreement or a
communication here again by Jack Ewing reported, which is word by word the same
between his legal team and the Volkswagen legal team and they agreed on very
amicable terms. And it was settled out of court, so we don't know how much he was
paid. And then there is another lawsuit. I didn't give the name here, because it's
not publicly known. You can find it out if you know how to use Google, but it's not
very publicly known. There was a German law advisor at Volkswagen and he requested
his colleagues to delete documents. So he basically wrote an email to his colleagues
and said, like: “You know, we're getting under pressure. Please delete all
incriminating stuff.” That's not a very cool thing to do if you're a company
lawyer. And then we have the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, and they brought
a lawsuit against Volkswagen because, read the first line here, they lost or
accidentally erased 23 mobile phones. I don't know. These things just, you know,
whoop, another one gone. I don't know. The other issue they had is, Volkswagen
brought a witness and they said: “This witness was either unprepared or unable to
provide information because 250 times he said: “I don't know” to all the
questions. And the funny thing is, and here we have another Maha moment of
over-communication, in the reply Volkswagen said: “Oh, he was very well
prepared. We spent 20 days with him, just preparing for that deposition.”
*laughter + applause*
So it took Volkswagen 20 days to make one engineer say “I don't know” a
sufficient amount of times. Okay, so why do we all have this problem in Europe, right?
It seems to be working in the States somehow. Where does that come from? And
the root cause here is actually copy and paste regulation, or regulation by Stack
Overflow, or however you want to call it. The thing on the upper side is the
American regulation. They define two things. And I'm sorry, you won't be able
to read it all, but the slides are being made public and then you can dig into
this. But the basic idea here is, the Americans define Auxiliary Emission
Control Devices, so things that actually modify some physical values which have an
effect on emissions. And then there's a defeat device. A defeat device is an AECD
which reduces the effectiveness of emission control, so it doesn't improve it
for example, and in many cases it is not disclosed, so you may have AECDs. You may
even have AECDs that reduce the effectiveness of an emission control
system and those are then called defects. And there's an amount of defects which
you’re allowed to have. And the amount of defects decreases from year to year, so
that is a way to steer the automotive industry into compliance. A very clever
system. Now whoever wrote the law for the European Union actually just copied and
pasted, which you can see because you'll find all the same words there, and there's
a second slide coming up and you'll find more of the definition here at the top,
vehicle speed, engine RPM, transmission, manifold vacuum and so on. And, so, they
just copied and pasted and thought like, “We don't need AECDs”, you know, they
just say: “A defeat device is an AECD, so, let's ditch the AECD.” It's like,
you know, people that copy and paste or Debian working on the random number
generator. It's like, you know, “I don't understand that code. It doesn't seem to
be used. Let's ditch it.” And so they did “I don't understand AECDs. They
don't really … necessary. Ditch it.” But the problem here is, this is
why Volkswagen can actually say: “We don't have a defeat device.” And the way
they say it is again very lovely. They say: “We have no unlawful defeat device
under European law”, right?
*laughter*
So we have a defeat device, but it's not unlawful and not under European law. And
they clarify this and say: “The efficiency of emissions cleanup systems
will not be reduced in those vehicles, which however would be a prerequisite for
the existence of an unlawful defeat device in the legal sense.” So that's a quote.
So what that actually means is, they found the loophole and the loophole is there
because people have been doing bad copy and paste regulation. Okay, now, the other
problem the European Union has, is that it's herding cats and the only tool it has
is this one very long stick, which is the EU Treaty infringement process,
Vertragsverletzungsverfahren in German. So, the thing here is, they actually would
want to have proper emissions' regulations, but they can't, because it
needs to be put into local laws and there are 3 countries that didn't put any
sanctioning mechanisms in place over 7 years and there are 4 countries which
didn't use those sanctioning mechanisms. One of them is Germany, obviously.
Actually the UK will probably evade this because they can just sit it out. Brexit.
Okay, so this guy here, he was really really pissed because Fiat didn't show up
when he said: “But you are actually emitting way to much. We caught you in our
lovely report, which we made. So would you please show up and, you know, we'll really
tell you off.” And Fiat said: “You know, we're an Italian company. We are
regulated in Italy. We will answer to the Italian people, but we don't really want
to chat with you.” So he was really pissed. He made a press report, that was
from the press report, and said like: “This uncooperative behavior from Fiat
is completely not understandable.” All right? This is from Süddeutsche Zeitung
and it basically says that his people went and took the report, which was already
very amicable. We know the quote „Mit industriefreundlichen Grüßen“, right?
I don't know whether you read newspapers. And they softened it down even more,
right? I was at the IMIS commission of the European Union, which is the investigative
committee on Dieselgate and I just called that report a joke and I'll repeat that
here. It's a joke and I wouldn't wan't to have my name on that, so any scientist
that does, sorry, that's more kind of shameful. Perhaps take it out of your CV,
so as to try and hide it. So, the funny thing is, here it is said, also in this
press statement: “It cannot be that a European law is formulated in a way that
manufacturers of underdeveloped engines can hide behind engine protection
reasons.” Audience: Only German ones!
D: Right. So, I'm sorry, this is German. But the car he meant was obviously the
Fiat 500X, which was measured in this report, but if you look at this engine
here, which is from his own report, it's the Audi A3, the 3 liter, the one, which
has just been settled in the States, and it is allowed to emit 180 mg, so in the
cold and in the warm it does this, but as soon as you go below 10°C, remember,
there was this temperature window, right, it does 663 mg and when you do it on the
road and you actually move the steering wheel and it detects that, it does 868 mg.
So underdeveloped engines are made in Germany and actually produced in Hungary,
because that's where the engine comes from. I was in a cold retreat on an island
in the mediterranean sea. I run my own company, so, you know, we can do great
things for our employers and somebody brought this. And I don't read Bild
Zeitung. I have to read Bild Zeitung because they are the only ones who have a
leak and get some information out of Volkswagen and everybody copies them, it's
really weird, right? Bild am Sonntag reports it first and then the Süddeutsche
Zeitung writes an editorial on it. And in here I found a gem and the gem is the
Kraftfahrtbundesamt doesn't actually have people who are able to analyze what Opel
gives them, so they have tasked Felix Domke, the guy who is coming after me, and
asked him to actually verify whether Opel has actually implemented a fix. So, you
know, I'm very happy they support the hacker community, but I don't think that
is a very sustainable business model for authorities, right?
*laughter*
*applause*
Okay, so, second to last point. Braunschweig. Braunschweig. The
Braunschweig general attorney's office are the ones that actually should be analyzing
the case of all the Volkswagen senior management. They have now 28 people which
they are investigating against and that includes Mr. Hans Dieter Pötsch, who is
the former CEO, Martin Winterkorn, and the current head of Volkswagen, the Volkswagen
brand, which is Herbert Dress, who came in from BMW. So that's great. That's
great. They're actually doing something. The question is just, what are they doing?
Because we never get any feedback. So, I don't know. I have no clue what
they're doing. You know, I'm in good contact with nearly everybody, but they
actually only rang me once and the only thing they asked was: “Do you have Felix
Domke's phone number?” *laughter*
Perhaps Felix knows more. Perhaps, he's able to tell us more about what they're
doing. The good thing is other people are doing something. That's the court of Mayo,
which is in Ireland, very nice place. You should go and visit it. And they have the
same legal mechanism as they have in the States. So they have the capability to
order somebody to produce documents to clarify the case, so in this case the
judge, Ms. Devins, has ordered Volkswagen to produce documents. And they hate this.
They were furious. So what happened, is, the next time they had a meeting, which
was in September of this year, the legal representative told the court that this is
completely inappropriate and unfair. “I did not bring anyone except for myself
because we think you do not have jurisdiction in the case.” Now, it's an
Irish lady that has bought a Volkswagen from an Irish dealer, but Volkswagen is
sure they don't have any legal beef in this, right? So, I don't know what they're
thinking. And to actually add, you know, to this, they walked out of the court. So
in protest, the representatives of Volkswagen, their lawyers walked out of
the court. So, the thing is, the judge is a very cool lady and she said, she would
continue “without Hamlet”, referring to the play, and said, the Volkswagen
legal team had a spectacular walk-out. That has not happened to a court before.
And the other thing is, so the Irish people are trying to help the case a bit
and the States' people are trying the same. They have a gentleman called
Mr. Liang who has worked long time for Volkswagen. First in Germany and then in
the States. And he is now basically the principal witness. They made a deal with
him and said, you know, “We will limit the cost you will have or the time even in
jail that you have to do if you cooperate with us”. And the thing boxed here in
red is: “Defendant shall cooperate fully with the government, and any other law
enforcement agency, including but not limited to the Staatsanwaltschaft
Braunschweig in Germany”, right?
*applause*
So, the Americans are actually bringing the witness to Braunschweig and I have not
heard whether they even had a chat with him. At least there's nothing publicly
known. All right. Bonus round for the last 5 minutes. Somebody on reddit actually
managed to get his car bought back. Cool. Super. He received $21,000 for it. The
thing is, the buyback terms say, it is okay if your car has damages...
*laughter*
... because they actually want to make sure that somebody who has, you know, a
scratch or so, it doesn't get so complicated, right? So the buyback process
actually just goes on, like, what car is it, what did it cost initially and what
is the milage, and, you know, we know about the milage now. So, this car
apparently had some damage and the guy thought: “You know, it's damaged anyway.
All the front parts...
*laughter*
*applause*
All the front parts would be pretty good use for my friend who has a Volkswagen and
wants to keep it. So, you know, I just removed them.” Now the interesting thing
is, we have a company here, which has betrayed millions of its customers, more
than half a million in the States and … Oops, there's a slide missing. That's not
good. Sorry. I hope this wasn't deleted by our friends who set up the video, which
was a difficult thing at the beginning. Ohh no, it's deleted. That's not very
nice. Ohh, it's moved there. Okay, let's use this one. It actually shouldn't be
there. It's the second to last slide. Yay. So this is from a meeting of this
settlement class. I'm reading it.
*laughter*
*applause*
“At least one owner went so far as to strip the car of almost every removable
part, including seats, doors, a radio, and even the air bag.”
*laughter*
Now remember. That company has actually betrayed half a million people in the
States, a few million worldwide. They've made people pay way more for a car which
is dirty, because they believed it was clean, and now there's five people who
stripped parts of their cars and they complain to the judge. Okay, that's it.
*applause*
Takeaway points. I just wanted… The takeaway points here: Everybody's
cheating. I only did one slide, but please don't forget this, right? There
will be much more coming out from others. Volkswagen promises, but their actions
are completely different, so please look beyond the spin doctoring. Don't buy
the Volkswagen narrative. And the other thing is, we don't have a functional
regulation in the EU. I hope, Julia Reda and the others are able to fix it, but
this will be a really tough task. Okay. Thank you very much.
*applause*
*postroll music*