New details of the settlement, reached in December, were released Wednesday.
That brings Cummins’ total penalty to more than
“Let this settlement be a lesson: We won’t let greedy corporations cheat their way to success and run over the health and wellbeing of consumers and our environment along the way,” California AG Rob Bonta said.
Over the course of a decade, hundreds of thousands of Ram 2500 and 3500 heavy duty pickup trucks – manufactured by
In all, about 630,000 pickups from the 2013 through 2019 model years were equipped with the so-called “defeat devices” and will be recalled. Roughly 330,000 more trucks from 2019 through 2023 had emissions control software that wasn't properly reported to authorities, but the government says those didn't disable emissions controls. Officials could not estimate how many of the recalled trucks remain on the road.
The engine maker said in a statement that Wednesday’s actions do not involve any more financial commitments than those announced in December. “We are looking forward to obtaining certainty as we conclude this lengthy matter and continue to deliver on our mission of powering a more prosperous world,” the statement said.
As part of the settlement,
Preliminary estimates suggested its emissions bypass produced “thousands of tons of excess emissions of nitrogen oxides,”
The Clean Air Act, a federal law enacted in 1963 to reduce and control air pollution across the nation, requires car and engine manufacturers to comply with emission limits to protect the environment and human health.
The transportation sector is responsible for about one-third of
“We increasingly are finding that the public health impacts from emissions from cars are really devastating and it is one of our biggest sources also of emissions leading to climate change,” said
“To the extent that vehicle manufacturers are trying to evade our emission standards that are our biggest tool for protecting us from these public health impacts and climate change, these kinds of fines for evasion are hopefully a very important deterrent,” she added. “There are profound justice and equity issues around air pollution produced by transport emissions.”
Diesel exhaust is harmful to human health; it's a carcinogen. Long-term exposure to ozone-creating nitrogen oxides can cause health issues like respiratory infections, lung disease, and asthma.
Officials said Wednesday it was not lost on them that the
Wednesday’s details come seven years after German automaker
The company installed software in certain model year 2009-2015 diesel vehicles across its brands, circumventing emissions standards and emitting up to 40 times more pollution than those standards allow.
In 2017, the automaker agreed to pay a
The automaker agreed to pay a
In 2020,
“There’s a lot of sunk money into diesel engines and people making profits off of diesel engines,” Columbia's Klopp said. “Unless you give them a really big fine and a really big deterrent, they’re willing to pay the fines to get those profits. That's really sad because it puts the profits before the health of our communities.”
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