Make VW Pay
Furious. That was Marcus Moench’s reaction. He and his wife Elisabeth owned a 2010 Jetta Sportswagen TDI diesel car - one of VW’s emissions-cheating vehicles.
What was so infuriating was they did their homework and shopped around for the cleanest vehicle they could find both for smog-forming pollution and carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas contributor.
Based on the description and the specs of the Jetta, Marcus and Elisabeth decided to go with the so-called “clean” diesel VW vehicle.
Within days of the EPA announcement that 482,000 VW diesel vehicles (soon to grow to 567,000) were designed to get away with breaking the law, including Marcus and Elisabeth’s, they decided to do something about it and connected with me, since we had launched a campaign to Make VW Pay.
We agreed that VW needed to do two major things - fully refund customers for selling them a defective product and support programs that moved our transportation system to a cleaner, electric-powered one to make up for all the pollution these vehicles had secretly emitted.
In order to shine a spotlight on our demands and push VW to do the right thing, our first strategy was to recruit the dealership where Marcus and Elisabeth bought their dirty vehicle.
At the time I said - “Volkswagen dealerships have a great opportunity to stand with their customers and call on Volkswagen to buy back these cars for their original price. The dealers didn’t build the defeat devices that misled nearly a half a million Americans. But they did sell the cars and they can fight for their customers and ensure VW does the right thing – give customers their money back.”
We went to the local Boulder dealership where they purchased the vehicle and called on the ownership to join us at a news event demanding VW to do the right thing. Marcus and Elisabeth even went inside the dealership to try and return their car for a full refund right there and then.
The dealership declined to join our call to make VW pay and after a few conversations with VW’s national leadership it became clear more needed to be done to convince them to fully compensate their customers and fix the environmental damage they had caused.