The fallout from Volkswagen’s massive emissions scandal earlier this year is not nearly complete. While the auto company already faces rampant distrust and dismal sales, it’s also being ordered by federal and state regulators to fix all of its emissions-cheating cars—a huge, expensive task.
But dozens of Silicon Valley leaders—including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, former eBay president Jeff Skoll, and Energy Innovation CEO Hal Harvey—are arguing that it isn’t even worth it.
“A great sum of money [will] be wasted in attempting to fix cars that cannot all be fixed,” wrote 44 tech leaders in an open letter to the California Air Resources Board (CARB) last Thursday (Dec. 17).
Instead of focusing on fixing diesel cars, Musk and his colleagues said, Volkswagen should be required to put its resources toward becoming a zero-emissions car company.
The letter, which is available in full here, offers a detailed plan, proposing that CARB “release VW from its obligation to fix diesel cars already on the road in California;” direct VW instead to “accelerate greatly its rollout of zero emission vehicles;” and to require that VW invest in R&D or new plants “in the amounts that they otherwise would have been fined,” with the share of fine dollars that would have gone to California being used for investment specifically in California.
The letter authors note:
“In contrast to the punishments and recalls being considered, this proposal would be a real win for California emissions, a big win for California jobs, and a historic action to help derail climate change.”
At this month’s climate conference in Paris, 13 countries pledged to make only emissions-free cars in 2050 and beyond. Tesla, Musk’s own car company, doesn’t sell any cars that run on diesel.
Zero-emissions cars—”which by their very nature,” the authors of the CARB letter note, “have zero emissions and thus present zero opportunities for cheating”—are coming more and more into the mainstream nowadays. If California regulators were to heed the letter from Musk and his colleagues, Volkswagen—as the world’s biggest carmaker—would certainly be speeding up the global transition.