WVU ‘gotcha!’ to cost VW record $14.7 billion

West Virginia University researchers’ gotcha will cost Volkswagen $14.7 billion to settle a lawsuit over cheating on auto emission testing.

Dan Carder, the Director for the Center for Alternative Fuels, Engines, and Emissions at WVU, said the Environmental Protection Agency and the Air Resources Board “have hinted at things like more in-use testing.”

VW had programmed their autos’ computers to not pollute when they’re stationery, as they were during EPA emissions testing, but to pollute 40 times the allowable poisons once they hit the road.

No one caught it because they also tested the VWs while they weren’t moving. WVU’s wiser guys took them on the road in 2014 and tested them and found the astounding, incriminating, baldfaced cheating.

$10 billion will go to the owners of 487,000 diesel cars, to compensate them for losses in the car’s value. That includes the option of having VW buy back the offending cars. Volkswagen will also pay $2.7 billion for environmental cleanup.

No other automaker has had to paid more than $3.3 billion to settle.

The auto maker could still face criminal charges and civil penalties for violating the Clean Air Act.

VW CEO Martin Winterkorn, VW’s top American manager, Michael Horn, and Audi and Porsche research and development chiefs Ulrich Hackenberg and Wolfgang Hatz all lost their lucrative positions over the cheating.

VW stock plummeted, costing stockholders tons of money.

U.S. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates called it "the most flagrant violations of our consumer and environmental laws in our country's history."