German car cartel: class action lawsuits

Delicious Nothing Burger, op.

>Anglo-American capitalism
>fairness

lol, just, lol

>>1093189
But you can cash in! Like with those mails from the Nigerian prince!

>>1093163
>cartel
That word does not mean what you think it means. Go look it up.

The word you SHOULD have used here was 'conspire'.

This had little to do with making more profit and more to do with efforts to meet ever more restrictive emissions standards in a world where vehicle emissions OF ALL KINDS are contributing to runaway climate change.

The fact of the matter is that engines burning fossil fuels need to be obsoleted. No matter how 'efficient' they are or how well you 'treat' the exhaust, they still produce prodigious volumes of carbon dioxide, which is, of course, a 'greenhouse gas', helping to trap heat in our atmosphere.

We're going to have to switch everything to electric, one way or another, and the entire fossil-fuel industry will have to die and go away.

If you want to look for the real culprit in this 'diesel emissions' scandal, look there instead; the fossil fuel industry is to climate change as the tobacco industry is to human health: There's far too much money involved to let little things like long-term malevolent effects get in the way. They don't really care how much harm it's going to cause 100 year from now so long as their bottom line is favorable this year. To make matters worse, unlike the tobacco industry, we actually NEED energy sources, and just saying "No more!" can't happen; there needs to be a ready replacement at hand to seamlessly take over or the entire First World would suffer economic collapse -- plunging the world into a new Dark Age. Nobody can let that happen.

Gladly, things are starting to turn around. Here in the U.S., even with the Trump 'administration' and it's ass-backwards attitudes on 'dirty' energy like coal, renewables are thriving and will continue to do so. For all we know we might even be able to convince the NIMBYs that nuclear power can be done safely, providing we use new-generation reactor designs that are inherently failsafe and low maintenance. We continue to develop new battery designs. Etc..

>>1093211
..and I, for one, will welcome vehicles that are entirely electric powered. I've been repairing my own internal-combustion vehicles for decades and decades, and quite frankly they're dirty, noisy, complicated (and more so now than they used to be), and expensive to maintain. Electric vehicles are much simpler in design, overall cleaner from a maintenance perspective, and more reliable overall.

>>1093163
You don't hate Germans; you hate capitalism.

Fascism spawned not just VW but the world auto industry.
Heinrich Ford was Hitler's main man in America.
Cars are not a result of the free-market either.
The free market had no interest in workers having cars. Workers were housed in factories and did not need cars.
It was Fascism that set the industry in motion and came up with the idea that each family should have a car.
The thousand year Reich is alive and well thanks to VW, Merc, Ford, GM and all the rest of the auto fascist industry.
This is also why the left/commies despise cars/personal ownership.

>>1093267
No, hitler's VW was a response to the american car usage. Before hitler, there was like 1 car per 50 people in germany compared to 1 per 5 in america.
Capitalism pushed automobile usage since workers had money.

>>1093268
Also, they had a systtem where you'd put down money for a car and then they'd give it to you when they'd built it. This ended up being a way for workers to fund the production of factories to build tanks, ball bearings, petroleum refinement, etc.
Nice war machine but not many people actually received the cars they paid for.

>>1093268

But Hitler was not really a capitalist. Hitler's and Germany's economic model involve alot of state supervision. Volkswagen itself was founded by the Nazis as a state owned company:

>http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/volkswagen-is-founded

But nice propganda Germoney to make it appear that your kind respects Anglo-American style capitalism. In reality Germoney has very heavy handed state involvement in the economy:
http://germanywatch.blogspot.com/2012/10/german-economic-imperialism-social.html

>>1093267
Go back to your containment unit, /pol/.

>>1093163

A better article on the German anti-competitive car cartel:

>http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/22/investing/german-car-cartel-investigation/index.html

>>1093283
Well there's laissez-faire capitalism on one hand, and state capitalism and corporatism on the other hand. Hitler's policies fit into the latter category.
Conservative economic policies in the FRG aren't all that different from those of the Empire T B H. There is still a large degree of cronyism and fluctuation between the the parties SPD, CDU and FDP, and big business.

>>1093283
Every successful country is a state-ran capitalist system.
America especially.
Just before the great depression there was little state intervention.

Update a new class action lawsuit in US courts has been started over the cartel revelations:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-28/porsche-audi-bmw-and-others-acted-as-cartel-lawsuit-says

>German’s major automakers were accused in a U.S. lawsuit of acting as a cartel, colluding for nearly two decades to limit the pace of technological advances in their vehicles and stifle competition -- allegations that widen the scope of the latest scandal to hit the nation’s auto industry.

>BMW AG, Daimler AG, Volkswagen AG and its Audi and Porsche brands shared competitive information about vehicle technologies with one another from 1996 through at least 2015 in violation of antitrust laws, according to a complaint filed Friday in San Francisco federal court.

>"These coordinated actions enabled the manufacturer defendants — the self-named ‘Fünfer-Kreise,’ or Circle of Five — to impose a German automobile premium on consumers premised on superior German engineering, while secretly stunting incentives to innovate," the suit alleges.

>The suit, which seeks class-action status on behalf of U.S. drivers, says the companies agreed to limit the development of vehicle systems, including emissions control. The arrangement allegedly led to the development of so-called "defeat devices" used by Volkswagen to cheat on pollution tests.

>...

>>1093163
Of course they're gonna protect their industry. Just as Anglo-Americans were protecting their financial industry when it was causing the biggest ever global recession. And both do it for the very same reason: too big to fail.

File: b7db5e464a161ec5adc8a52b50deb479--ford-pickup-trucks-culture-jamming.jpg (80KB, 668x806px) Image search: [Google]

80KB, 668x806px

>>1093163
>Anglo-American type capitalism, fairness, etc.
kek you mean corporate welfare