A federal district court panel on Tuesday consolidated cases in a mega-lawsuit against global automaker Volkswagen, seeking damages for the company’s deliberate misleading of regulators on emissions.
All cases in the litigation, a whopping 500 class-action lawsuits, will be centralized in the Northern District of California court, a U.S. multidistrict court decided on Tuesday.
Those 500 cases represent hundreds of thousands of class members and plaintiffs, according to lawyers.
Thomas Young, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, told the Washington Examiner that the action will begin the process of bringing the merits of the cases for review by a judge and be the first in the U.S. to issue an order on the auto giant’s fraud.
Auto dealers argue that all dealerships were defrauded by Volkswagen’s actions in the summer, when the Environmental Protection Agency and California air regulators found the automaker was intentionally violating emission regulations. Nearly a half-million diesel vehicles had software “defeat devices” that switched on emissions controls only when the car sensed it was being tested.
The multidistrict panel summed up the rigging in its Tuesday decision: “All actions involve common factual questions regarding the role of VW and related entities in equipping certain diesel engines with software allegedly designed to engage emissions controls only when the vehicles undergo official testing, while at other times the engines emit nitrous oxide well in excess of legal limits.”
The multidistrict court said the “litigation is international in scope,” adding that the four vehicles addressed by the EPA in the initial notice of violation represent a small fraction of the estimated 11 million affected vehicles worldwide. “Indeed, much of the underlying conduct at the center of plaintiffs’ claims likely occurred in Germany.
