I'm aware of what he means, but the responsibility is on the following car not to hit him.

“I was not able to slow down even more due to the heavy traffic (cars were behind me).”

That’s the reason the settlement amounts are so high. You’d be crazy to keep the car until VW gets hit with fines for your noncompliance. They have to have the cars fixed by late 2019. That’s 3 years from now. You’d have to wait over 3 years to stick it to VW. I don’t like VW, but that’s just silly.

No. VW will be fined for every non-compliant car, and I'm sure that cars not marked as "fixed" will be blocked from registering.

It's spelled out in the full length settlement. For every car not fixed under recall by the deadline, VW will faces heavy (and increasing) fines. Something like $2k for the first 2 months, then $5k, then $10k. They will make sure your car is recalled because it's going to cost them a ton of money if it isn't.

There is currently no fix. VW is working on a fix, but it is not (and will not be for some time) ready. The EPA is demanding that VW reduce the number of polluting cars as quickly as possible, hence the generous compensation figure. VW wants as many owners as possible to see the high compensation amount and decide to…

Nope, you're good. In the USA, you are automatically a part of a class action suit unless you purposefully opt out.

You are correct. Orlove didn't read the original article properly.

The compensation is not to offset diminished residual value, as VW will buy back the car at pre-scandal prices. The compensation is partially due to the FTC stepping in (the cars were misrepresented in adverts, among other things) and partially to avoid an expensive and protracted class action suit.

That’s not how it will work. Raphael confused 2 separate parts of the settlement. Owners will get their money directly from the class action fund/VW. States will get money from a separate fund for remediation projects to offset the pollution from the illegal TDIs.

You've misunderstood how the proposed settlement works. The money being routed to individual states is not for VW owners, but for environmental remediation projects to offset the pollution of the illegal TDIs. Car owners will get their payments directly from VW/the class action fund.

If that stop was 18 seconds, then a 17 second stop would have got him out in front of Lewis. A 15 second stop would have left enough of a gap that he wouldn't have even had to block Lewis on his out-lap. It was that close.

Generally, yes. You multiply the agreed-upon value at the start of the lease by the residual to get the car’s value at lease end. The payments are then based on the difference between the final value and what you paid for the car (not always the same as the agreed-upon value). Those payments are also subject to an…

There are several national organizations that have programs to allow credit unions to lease or create balloon loans for newer used cars. My credit union used CULA.

Oh, I don’t doubt that there will be a serious hangover, which we will begin to see sometime soon in 2 forms:

In most cases, I agree. That said, I am about to lease a CPO 991 Carrera for a couple of years because the residual from my credit union is absurdly high (basically equal to the car’s current price). So I’ll be driving a pretty sweet car for the price of gas, insurance, maintenance, and taxes for the next 2 years. In…

My commute is <10 miles round trip. Even with long road trips, 10k miles a year is easily do-able. Theoretically, you could have a 30+ mile round trip commute and still pull off a 10k mile lease of you didn't drive the car much on trips or weekends.

The auto lending bubble is not like the housing bubble. It can’t really “pop” or “blow up”, just gradually sink back to early 2000s levels.

Cannot +1 this enough. New Yorkers are just like Trump when talking about a dirty, overpriced, crowded piece of garbage city. "It's great, I promise. I guarantee you, it's fantastic. Just the best."

Of course a bunch of people living in NYC would pat themselves on the back for living in that hellhole. People who live in New York for more than a year somehow forget that the outside world exists. Believe it or not, there are actually cities free of the noise, dirt, price gouging, and overcrowding of New York. But…