Bill Nelson Takes to Senate Floor to Denounce Volkswagen Deception

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., took to the Senate floor on Tuesday to offer his take on the scandal currently plaguing Volkswagen as reports emerged the auto company misled consumers on their diesel cars. 

Nelson said the following:

Mr. President, Volkswagen has become part of the lexicon of the American economy, American culture.

Volkswagen Beetles at the time when I was growing up are all a part of the America that we know and love, and now we find out that Volkswagen for years has been purposefully deceiving the American public — for that matter, the customers around the world — on their diesel cars by deceptively telling them what the mileage is on the cars.

And oh, by the way, in the United States, because they were supposedly getting a great mileage, there was a benefit, a tax benefit to the purchasers of those vehicles.

What in the world is happening to the American automobile industry and those foreign manufacturers that are selling automobiles here to take advantage of the American automobile-consuming public?

It is an outrage that VW would take advantage of its consumers by purposely deceiving them on their mileage on diesel vehicles.

Well, first there was General Motors, and over 100 people died as a result of a defective ignition switch that General Motors did not tell us about, and in the process just recently last week announced a fine of $900 million.

Where are our US regulatory agencies? What is the Obama administration doing about this in its regulatory agencies? Why are they not dropping the hammer on corporations and corporate executives that are purposely deceiving the American people about faulty automobile products that cause the loss of lives and property?

So it was General Motors. Then it was Takata air bags, which are in a lot of automobiles but especially in Honda and Toyota. And of course we know that a number of people have lost their lives, a number of people have been maimed, and they’re driving around with an air bag in the middle of the steering wheel, which now there have been millions and millions of recalls, and in the middle of that steering wheel is an explosive grenade because it hasn’t been replaced. And now today Volkswagen, Volkswagen admitted over the course of the last half dozen years that it has purposely deceived people on their diesel vehicles by deceptively telling them what the gas mileage was.

Well, has the corporate culture in what is an automobile society shrunk so low that we can’t be up front when our products are defective or when we are trying to gain competitive advantage?

And I lay this not only on the corporate culture, I lay it at the feet of the US regulatory agencies who ought to be doing their job, ought to be doing it in a forceful way, and then there ought to be some prosecutions and corporate executives that knew this and have done it ought to be going to jail.