Mercedes-Benz Fined $1.5 Billion For Emissions Cheating (cbsnews.com) 88
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Automaker Daimler AG and subsidiary Mercedes-Benz USA have agreed to pay $1.5 billion to resolve allegations they cheated on emissions tests, officials said Monday. The U.S. Department of Justice, Environmental Protection Agency and the California attorney general's office said Daimler violated environmental laws by using so-called "defeat device software" to circumvent emissions testing. In doing so, the companies sold roughly 250,000 cars and vans between 2009 and 2016 with diesel engines that didn't meet state and federal standards. The settlement, which includes civil penalties and still awaits court approval in Washington, will require Daimler to fix the already sold vehicles.
Daimler AG must repair at least 85% of the affected cars within two years and at least 85% of the affected vans within three years, justice department officials said. The company must also offer extended warranties to drivers on certain vehicle parts and conduct emissions tests on the repaired vehicles each year for the next five years. A separate class action civil settlement will bring a one-off charge of about $700 million, Daimler AG said. In a statement, the company also said settling the emissions allegations means Daimler does not admit any liability nor will the company have to buy back any of the vehicles in question. As part of Daimler AG's settlement, officials in California will receive $17.5 million for future environmental enforcement.
Daimler AG must repair at least 85% of the affected cars within two years and at least 85% of the affected vans within three years, justice department officials said. The company must also offer extended warranties to drivers on certain vehicle parts and conduct emissions tests on the repaired vehicles each year for the next five years. A separate class action civil settlement will bring a one-off charge of about $700 million, Daimler AG said. In a statement, the company also said settling the emissions allegations means Daimler does not admit any liability nor will the company have to buy back any of the vehicles in question. As part of Daimler AG's settlement, officials in California will receive $17.5 million for future environmental enforcement.
VW vs. Mercedes (Score:5, Informative)
Odd that Mercedes got off relatively easy - they made the example out of VW. Perhaps Mercedes was less dodgy than VW was?
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Better lobbyists :/.
Re: VW vs. Mercedes (Score:5, Informative)
Pretty sure that there wasn't multiple rounds of bald faced lying in official communications to the feds after they were caught, unlike with VW.
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In addition to the fine there is 700 million in class action and then repairs + warranties for the large fleet. They are getting off slightly cheaper and they don’t have to admit liability.
I’m sure buying their way out of jail time was preferable.
Although I wonder how they are going to get people in to fix the vehicles if the fix just ruins gas mileage.
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I’m sure buying their way out of jail time was preferable.
Well yes, since it’s the shareholders who pick up the tab in the end.
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But they were literally ALL doing it.
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But they were literally ALL doing it.
So when you say "literally ALL" - taking care to capitalize "ALL", mind you - you really me "some", right? Because you yourself said that "Toyota and a couple of other companies" weren't doing it. I'm curious to learn who those other companies are, because after your use of "literally ALL", I don't know if "a couple" to you means "a few" or "most".
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But they were literally ALL doing it.
They were all doing it because standards were unrealistic. Without cheating it made bad cars that nobody wanted. They were not in a hurry to relive Malaise era.
Re:VW vs. Mercedes (Score:4, Informative)
They weren't all doing it, not Mazda for example. Mazda delayed their diesel until they could get the emissions down. VW and Mercedes (and others) had too much investment in diesels to let them fail, so they cheated.
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Re:VW vs. Mercedes (Score:4, Insightful)
"Unrealistic expectations produced onerous regulation that disproportionally affected a number of manufacturers."
They all had the ability to meet the numbers but chose not to for marketing reasons. I'm misinterpreting NOTHING.
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Re:VW vs. Mercedes (Score:4)
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"with the exception of Toyota and a couple other companies"
yeah, about that:
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2... [arstechnica.com]
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Perhaps Mercedes was less dodgy than VW was?
Leave Chrysler out of this.
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Other than the big vans and maybe a few old 300D, I might have seen one diesel Mercedes in the USA. I couldn't imagine the person who would who spend that much money on a slow ass diesel engine in a luxury car.
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They make for great armored cars.
Re:VW vs. Mercedes (Score:4, Informative)
I couldn't imagine the person who would who spend that much money on a slow ass diesel engine in a luxury car.
Look again, sport. The diesels have very similar performance to the gassers, except they actually have more low-end torque because all the current Mercedes turbo diesels have a Garrett VGT that lets them spool up super early. Our 2006 Sprinter (not an affected model) has VGT and it is super quick off the line.
But you know who did spend a lot of money for slow ass diesels in luxury cars? The people who bought the original 300SD. At over 80k in today's dollars it was famously described as the most expensive economy car in the world. Now those are slow. I have a 1982 and it does not take off rapidly at all, because it has an original T3-pattern turbo (Garrett T0301) which doesn't spool up until about 2k, and doesn't actually make full boost until you get it well-loaded. And even then the engine only made 120BHP when it was brand new. It does have 240lb-ft., though, which is pretty damned good for a 3 liter 5 cylinder designed in the 1970s. And it gets 30 mpg on the freeway, which was phenomenal for a full-sized sedan in the 1980s. The performance was actually competitive with American V8 land yachts because at that time they had the emissions malaise. And you'd get over 400 miles to a tank pretty much every time, which is part of the appeal of the Mercedes diesel today — except it's more like 600 miles to an even smaller tank.
Modern Mercedes diesels are quick and even relatively quiet. There's really no drawback to driving a diesel any more, in terms of experience. Most small diesels don't even need glow plugs to start, and they don't make a loud clattering noise at idle either. I don't know that I'd recommend one, but they certainly aren't offensive like they used to be. You don't have to warm them up or anything like I do with my 1982 (which only takes a couple of minutes before it's no longer sluggish.)
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It's high compression, and not aftercooled, so it will be producing plenty of NOx. I think the Tesla still wins. I have off street parking now so I could in theory have an EV. Maybe I can come up with a way to cheaply make a hybrid 4x4.
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Modern Mercedes diesels are quick and even relatively quiet. There's really no drawback to driving a diesel any more, in terms of experience. Most small diesels don't even need glow plugs to start, and they don't make a loud clattering noise at idle either. I don't know that I'd recommend one, but they certainly aren't offensive like they used to be.
Maybe if you're /in/ one! Outside though I find the smell of diesel fumes so much more noticable (and worse) than that of regular cars (which is no picnic).
I lived in central London for a couple years a while back and I was amazed at the noticable difference.
But I agree with your point on performance; my mate had some high-end BMW diesel (X5 M?) and it went like a bat out of hell.
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Lol in no way was that 300D ever competitive with a land yacht in acceleration. 0 to 60 in a 300D is 13 seconds. Sounds comparable to a Chevette.
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During the malaise era you had American V8s with no more power or torque. And they didn't have a turbo, either. And it's a 300SD, not a 300D. Totally different animal.
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In 1982 that was pretty normal. The early 1980's was the deepest part of the malaise era and performance was down across the board. To pick a random example, the 1982 Lincoln Town Car had wheezy 5.0 L V8 that developed all of 134 HP and 0-60 time was...about 13 seconds.
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Clearly you've not driven a modern turbo diesel car. They're not as quick as a turbocharged high performance gasoline variant, but they are nowhere near the shitty old stinky rattletrap diesels of the 80s either. And they get far better economy than the gasoline variants, which is why they exist.
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A turbo diesel is as fast as your average 4 banger gas engine now. Even with the slight savings in mileage it doesn't make sense because diesel is more expensive than premium gas here. My V8 benz was getting 26mpg at highway speeds, that was with a 5.5L.
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Other than the big vans and maybe a few old 300D, I might have seen one diesel Mercedes in the USA. I couldn't imagine the person who would who spend that much money on a slow ass diesel engine in a luxury car.
They're not bad. I owned a 300SD for many years. I'd say it was more like a regular car with speed. I wasn't in that much of a hurry anyway. Problem was maintenance. I owned two of them for quite a while and they both had worse mechanical problems than my Cadillacs. May have seemed worse because it was a bitch to find someone to work on them. For certain things like the HVAC, a real bitch. I'm back to Cadillac and I'll buy a Lincoln if the opportunity is right.
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Mercedes has less market share than VW. VW basically makes affordable Mercedes cars, Mercedes is for the upper class that doesn't want a Tesla or a sports car.
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"Perhaps Mercedes was less dodgy than VW was?"
They sell less than half the cars that VW does, even without their Porsche, Audi, Seat, Skoda, Bugatti, Bentley, Lamborghini, Scania and MAN brands.
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Why do companies get to break the law, never go to jail, pay a fine and ALWAYS get to do this.
"settling the emissions allegations means Daimler does not admit any liability"
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The problem with companies and justice, is that for criminal actions the blame will get spread across a lot of people doing a bad decision but not necessarily a criminal one.
Boss to the company We want to sell a product with so much HP that will use less than so many MPG. -- Nothing wrong here
Engineers start working on the problem -- As they should
Marketing in parallel starts their marketing plan -- A good idea, to improve turn around time
Engineers found they couldn't quite meet the expectation -- it happe
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"No one did anything worthy of getting them put in jail."
Strongly disagree. If you forget to install a bolt when installing a balcony and then a bunch of people die when it collapses then you killed them. It doesn't matter if you really, really meant to put in that bolt.
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I'm not sure what Mercedes' story was, but in VW's case there definitely was a criminal element to it all. Somebody had to request, approve and develop a system that would cheat when the standardized dyno tests was detected.
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Odd that Mercedes got off relatively easy - they made the example out of VW. Perhaps Mercedes was less dodgy than VW was?
It's all about sales volume. VW sells far more Diesels in the US than Mercedes. There are a few Mercedes Diesels out there in this country but they are far outnumbered by the VWs and Audis.
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Mercedes never really pushed on how Environmentally friendly their cars are compared to VW.
I still remember and old VW commercial.
They were two guys in their driveways.
A dopey kinda effeminate looking guy with a Prius.
With a stronger more masculine looking guy with a VW.
The Prius guy is touting his fuel economy. The VW guys says he gets the same thing, but his car performs so much better.
VW was targeting people who wanted greener cars, and spend a lot of time competing with Toyota Prius brand, to get their
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Probably an argument of quantity. VW shifts many more vehicles than Mercedes.
Persuading Owners? (Score:3)
Re:Persuading Owners? (Score:4, Insightful)
I would love to know how they are going to persuade 85% of the owners of the vehicles to go along with this. Presumably, the fix degrades vehicle performance in some manner otherwise there would be no need to make the clean mode only operate when being tested. So what incentive is there for their owners to agree to get the fix not to mention to keep bringing it in annually for 5-years just to get all the emission tests.
You act as if Mercedes owners are turning wrenches under the hood. This will amount to a couple of extra maintenance trips, and chances are most Mercedes owners won't notice a 5 - 10% performance degradation (I doubt it's even that bad), especially considering that damn near every car owner couldn't maximize the potential of their vehicle even if they wanted to.
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They may notice an extra 5-15% fuel consumption which is what these types of extra controls cost on VW and other diesels. The environmental impact of a slightly more "dirty" diesel is better than the solution.
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At least some of these vehicles have DEF injection with SCR, any of the ones with "Bluetec" in the name. Fixing them will probably only affect low-end torque and rate of DEF consumption [caranddriver.com]. The bulk of VWs had to have performance reduction because they didn't have DEF systems, only the latest models affected by the recall did. Because they had DEF, they were addressed first because it was easiest:
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You act as if Mercedes owners are turning wrenches under the hood.
I'm in facebook groups full of Mercedes owners doing just that. It may even be just as prevalent as it is for other types of cars now, if not more. Lately I've seen farm workers driving Mercedes.
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Especially for used Luxury Cars. Where the Wealthy may lease or buy a car for a year or two. Then they will sell it, for a newer higher status car. By then the still perfectly good car will fall in the hands of people who could afford the cheaper newish car. Then tune it up, or use the money they saved on it to trick it out a little bit more. Then get an extra 10 years out of it.
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You act as if Mercedes owners are turning wrenches under the hood.
I'm in facebook groups full of Mercedes owners doing just that. It may even be just as prevalent as it is for other types of cars now, if not more. Lately I've seen farm workers driving Mercedes.
Those can be some very interesting and informative groups, but make no mistake; all of them combined represent less than 2% of vehicle owners. If DIY maintenance is rare, DIY car hacking (e.g. 80's 300D biodiesel conversions) is extremely rare.
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This will amount to a couple of extra maintenance trips
Yes, but ones that they have no incentive to bother doing....so why would they?
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Because in California and possibly in other states which follow our emissions regime, you won't be able to renew registration without proof of correction.
We recently had to get the T21 emissions recall on our 2006 Sprinter because they had a bug which could cause misoperation of the EGR (which is known to frequently jam up and stop working anyway, nice work Mercedes.)
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The owners might have to file their own class action for sudden lower performance after doing the next regular maintenance. Of course in order to satisfy this requirement to re-test the cars annually for the next 5 years, they'll have to do something to convince the owners to come in for a checkup, or give up their cars for valet service to take them to a state emissions testing - perhaps free maintenance for 5 years as long as you show up every year? Maybe throw in a good meal, open bar and a massage?
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The "convince the owners" bit is easy - if you live in a place that does emissions testing in order to have the vehicle registered, it's built right in.
Emissions testing guy sees an effected vehicle roll in, he asks for the paperwork showing the recall was completed. No paperwork? No registration.
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Any numbers on the amount of diesels they sold in the USA? I can't believe its even worth their time to offer it as an option.
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Any numbers on the amount of diesels they sold in the USA? I can't believe its even worth their time to offer it as an option.
The answer is in TFS. (Actually, it lists the number of affected vehicles; the total number of diesels may be higher.) Since you should read at LEAST the summary before commenting, I'm not going to put that information here.
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In the summary (that block of text under the heading (That green bit) ) "the companies sold roughly 250,000 cars and vans between 2009 and 2016 with diesel engines that didn't meet state and federal standards."
This included Vans where Diesel is a more popular option.
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I imagine that breaks down to 99.999% vans and the remainder as passenger cars.
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Mercedes sells a shitload of Sprinter vans in the US under various badges - Dodge had them for a while, Freightliner is still selling them. And then there's the ones with Merc badges too.
If you order shit from Amazon Prime, there's a good chance it's delivered in a Mercedes Sprinter with a diesel engine.
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Really? Around here the vast majority of Amazon vans are Ram (Dodge) Promasters. Which is based off of a Fiat platform, unlike the previous Sprinter which was a rebadged Mercedes.
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Not necessarily, it could have been done for cost reasons, or new technology may enable it to meet the standard with no loss of performance. Fossil cars lose performance as they age anyway, it's possible that the new parts would actually improve it.
Anyway many owners would probably be happy with a few percent less performance in exchange for an extended warranty and maybe some compensation and a free valet of the car.
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I would imagine it would be pretty easy in states with emissions checks. Don't get the work done, the car/van fails emissions and you can't drive it. For states that don't have emissions I'm not sure what they'll do.
They bet, They lost. (Score:5, Insightful)
Last year, Mercedes-Benz Cars had a bad year and made 3.7 Billion Euros in profit (4.4 Billion USD). Figure in their average profit between 2009 and 2016 and this fine of 1.5 Billion USD works out to about 2% of their profit in that time period.
What did they get for this? Market share, Billions in sales and long term fleet contracts.
For a company this size, this can be chalked up as an mis-reported marketing budget. No one at Mercedes-Benz is crying over this.
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Can you believe it? Fifty miles from McDonald's. I didn't think there was anywhere in the world that was fifty miles from McDonald's. - Neil Gaiman
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Exactly what I came to post. The only lesson here is that crime pays well in the US.
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That will teach them to ignore paying off government officials. Dumb asses!
They're getting out of it for a song, and they don't even have to admit any wrongdoing. Sounds like they paid off the right ones.
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Last year, Mercedes-Benz Cars had a bad year and made 3.7 Billion Euros in profit (4.4 Billion USD). Figure in their average profit between 2009 and 2016 and this fine of 1.5 Billion USD works out to about 2% of their profit in that time period.
Is that net or gross profit?
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For Mercedes-Benz Cars, that is net profit on a revenue of 94 billion euros. Link to their Annual statement for reference [daimler.com]
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I guess if people couldn't profit from war I don't think there would be war. - Lily Tomlin
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After saying all that, tell me something. Why exactly do you assume someone at Mercedes "bet" here, and lost?
Large corporations take risks. Sometimes they take those risks already knowing they're financially worth it.
A 2% hit on revenue to rake in billions? Yeah, something tells me exactly zero MB executives even cared about being caught, much less fined. Maybe one day regulators will realize that when assessing fines, but I doubt it. Too much corruption now.
This was a well known secret in the car industry (Score:4, Informative)
The study from 2013-2014ish, that found VW was cheating, also found that almost every other car manufacturer was cheating emissions except for a couple like Toyota.
The problem was so rampant, that even though the EPA knew it was happening, they couldn't do anything about it.
It was a year later when a news company broke the story that it started getting attention, but for some reason the story pointed out VW specifically, and not the rest of the car companies.
They were almost all cheating emissions. These stories are going to continue coming out over time.
Re:This was a well known secret in the car industr (Score:5, Interesting)
What is interesting is that some of the ones who weren't cheating actually had some of the worst emissions (e.g Nissan Qashqai). The Daimler engines from 2008-2016 are known for high reliability exactly because they aren't overloaded with emissions reducing technology, they mainly went down the route of exhaust re-circulation to reduce NOx emissions rather than additives like Ad-blue that Volkswagen used.
The new Daimler all aluminium block design released in 2016 is their real low emissions engine as it allows them to reduce the weight of the vehicle, and also increase the Carnot efficiency of the engine as they can run the fuel under a higher compression and therefore combustion temperature without damaging the engine as the cylinder walls conduct the heat away much faster than steel blocks.
Pretty much all other low emission technologies such as start stop, reducing the weight of the vehicle and streamlining are just nibbling away at the problem. The final solution is to switch to electric as you aren't relying on the second law of thermodynamics for the vehicles efficiency.
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The Daimler engines from 2008-2016 are known for high reliability exactly because they aren't overloaded with emissions reducing technology, they mainly went down the route of exhaust re-circulation to reduce NOx emissions rather than additives like Ad-blue that Volkswagen used.
All the Mercedes that say "bluetec" on them use DEF. E220, C220, S350, G350, ML350, ML250, and several models of Sprinter van, for example. And the system is pure garbage. DEF systems are pretty simple, right? There's a pump, heater, tank, and an injector. Every one of these components is fragile in Mercedes. Pumps fail, heaters and heater connectors fail, tanks leak, injectors fail. And if you run out of DEF (tank cracked) or the system refuses to work (pump, injector) then the vehicle will not start. Than
Germans, (Score:3)
gassing people since 1915, vorsprung durch gaz!
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Isn't that all of the Germanic car manufacturers now? Except maybe BMW.
Yes, including BMW [greencarreports.com].
What a crock of shit (Score:1)
> Automaker Daimler AG and subsidiary Mercedes-Benz USA have agreed to pay $1.5 billion to resolve allegations they cheated on
How does this resolve anything???
> Daimler AG must repair at least 85% of the affected cars within two years and at least 85% of the affected vans within three years,
How does this help the other 15%???
> officials in California will receive $17.5 million
Oh there we go. "officials in California" will get lots of money, 15% of vehicles will continue polluting the environment,
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The solution is actually worse for the environment. These types of tricks were used to increase fuel efficiency and thus have a better mpg rating (and thus boost sales). This "clean diesel" engine reduces those numbers by 5-15% thus increasing oil consumption and emissions.
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They really don't affect MPG very much. They affect performance much more, or in models with DEF (Mercedes calls that "Bluetec") they affect DEF consumption. VW cheated primarily to give their diesels a sporty, torquey feel. Mazda was trying to develop their own performance diesel at the time and they couldn't do it, and they couldn't figure out how VW could do it either. As it turned out, VW also couldn't do it. Mazda could figure out how to meet the emissions targets, but only by making a car that wasn't
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=
> officials in California will receive $17.5 million
Oh there we go. "officials in California" will get lots of money, 15% of vehicles will continue polluting the environment, never to be repaired, and Mercedes "resolved the problem."
Disgusting.
E
When I read this I chuckled to myself.
$17.5MM is practically a rounding error on the state budget for California, and won't sustain "environmental enforcement" for more than a few years. Most likely these dollars will be used to increase the size of the workforce which is difficult to reduce later, so the taxpayers will foot the bill moving forward. If this is a "win", it's very temporary....
software cheat means remote fix possible? (Score:1)
since most cars are connected nowadays...
The consumer can win from this (Score:3)
I don't know if the same will happen for the Mercedes vehicles - and being as their are far fewer of them on the roads here in the US it might be more difficult to take advantage of it anyways - but it could be worth while for consumers to look into.
Defeat (Score:2)
"Defeat device software", AKA engine controller firmware that looks for the speed and load and gear used in the standard tests on a dynamometer in a test lab, then leans it out.
Boo (Score:2)
Who gets the money? (Score:2)
Do the purchasers of said vehicles get the money? I'll bet not. What's a sure bet is that the lawyers all got paid. If it's a typical tort case, the lawyers got forty goddamn percent. Even so, who gets the rest? The EPA? The state of California? Somebody is going to benefit from this that shouldn't be. Cases like this one always have sticky fingers involved.
Environmental laws are serious (Score:1)