The Guardian view on the VW scandal: punish the guilty | Editorial
We won't ever know how many people have died as a result of Volkswagen cheating on the emission controls of its diesel engines. But the pollutants emitted by diesel engines do kill just as surely as other poisons and their victims are predominantly people who are not themselves drivers: pedestrians, or those whose families have to live near the kind of heavy traffic that anyone with money tries to avoid. On a global scale, the filthiest engines are found in the poorest countries, so here, too, it is the non-drivers who pay the price for drivers' selfishness. That particular injustice will necessarily continue whether or not the authorities can decide on and then enforce honest standards from carmakers in the future, since diesel engines have a life of about 15 years (longer if they are more polluting, less if they run hotter to minimise the damage that they do to the rest of us). Even if every diesel engine made in Europe is honest and unpolluting from this moment on, there is still a huge backlog of VW engines that will go on spewing poison for another 10 years or more.
This is a very serious crisis, and the spectacle of the boss on whose watch it erupted stepping lightly down on to the cushion of a gigantic pension is frankly repellent. It is an important part of the explanation for the scandal that the executives involved may have believed that everyone else in the industry was at it. They may well have been right. It is also part of the explanation that the industry regulators connived and still connive at a great deal of small scale cheating for such things as fuel economy tests. But none of these explanations amount to an extenuation. In fact they make matters worse, and argue the case for severity, since it will take exceptional disincentives to change behaviour so widely accepted within the industry, as one lesson of the banking crisis suggests. The VW group has lost almost a third of its value on the stock market in the last week. It is only fair that some similar catastrophe should strike at the men personally responsible for this.
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