VW is in the business of selling vehicles, and has a real interest there to push the envelope as much as possible.
FedEx is not in the business of selling used vehicles. These vehicle sales likely don't impact their core business in the slightest - making an organization-wide scandal just silly to even think about.
Looking online, these types of "vans" sell for anywhere between $5,000 and $30,000 (with 4 digit miles)[1]. Seriously... FedEx isn't going to blink at any of this.
These class actions are always brought by bottom-feeding lawyers that use serial-plaintiffs. The reality is the class action bit will be retracted, and the lawyers, err, plaintiff will receive a "go the hell away please" payment. That's the game here...
[1] https://www.auctiontime.com/listings/trucks/auction-results/...
As I understand it (sorry, I don't have a citation handy) was that VW was gaming the tests, but in order to make their vehicles' operations MORE efficient. That is, the tests are dumb because they concentrate on start-up emissions with less attention to warm running. VW wanted to also optimize the warm running, but to do that they had to game the software to still appear to optimize only for the cold start.
That is, aside from the ethical problem of cheating the regulation (a big aside to be sure), they were acting more responsibly than most.
If that's the case, then any possible scandal here would be squarely on the company selling the vehicles - not FedEx.
FedEx might just be a tacked-on name. You see that quite often with Prop 65 cases. The plaintiff attorneys add anyone even remotely related to the case, just to drive up pressure and chaos, hoping for quicker/larger settlement offers.
In this situation, even if FedEx has nothing to do with vehicles sales, they might opt to settle and write a check just to make the bad publicity go away. If you think that sounds like a shakedown, you'd be right.
VW's cheating is in essence the cars have two modes to run the engine; compliance mode and performance mode, and they run in compliance mode when the car starts up until the steering wheel is turned (more or less).
In compliance mode, the engine control follows the rules to meet the emissions test standards. In performance mode, operating temperature is allowed to increase, which increases performance, increases fuel efficiency, idles better, etc, but increased operating temperature leads to more NOx emissions.
Additional, for models with diesel emissions fluid, performance mode injected much less DEF than compliance mode; DEF reduces operating temperature as well as directly reacting withe NOx. This reduced use of DEF allowed a smaller DEF tank to be used; regulations require passenger car DEF tanks to have enough capacity for normal use within the regular service interval; if the vehicle was operating in compliance mode the whole time, you'd need to fill the DEF tank between oil changes (or have a larger tank, which needs to fit somewhere).
In the end, the big tradeoff is fuel efficiency (and therefore CO2 emissions) vs NOx emissions; which is a fine tradeoff to consider, but you can't give drivers what they want and regulators what they want without cheating.
This is so irresponsible of you to just assert without evidence, and is so out of context to portray VW as the good guys here. They did not break the rules and flaunt regulations to make their system more efficient. They did so to cover up their failure to deliver on a new generation of "clean diesel" tech. VW thought they could do it, they invested billions in it, and they couldn't figure out how to do it without emitting way too many other pollutants. So they built their cars to lie to regulators.
The tests cover an extensive range of use cases, mostly warm running. There were two modes, one that was more fuel efficient but emitted NOx above regulations, and one that was less fuel efficient but was within NOx regulations. They detected when the tires were on suspension that simulates real-world driving for testing. They got caught by academics who wanted to test real-world vs simulated suspension.
Here is actual source, Bloomberg, which isn't some kind of environmentalist or anti-business publication: (https://web.archive.org/web/20160312181801/https://www.bloom...):
"The road tests captured a variety of conditions: high elevations up Mt. Baldy; stop-and-go urban errand-running in San Diego; freeway driving around Los Angeles. The two Volkswagens’ emissions exceeded standards by 5 to 35 times. The BMW’s didn’t. [...] The Lean NOx Trap is a system of concessions. To get cleaner exhaust, you’d need to use a squirt of fuel every few seconds to burn up nitrogen oxide. Or, in the other direction, to get better fuel efficiency, you’d need to spew out dirtier exhaust. Managing this trade-off requires a complex calibration of the onboard computer, the engine control unit, so it can adjust constantly to variables like temperature and speed and optimize both emissions and fuel usage. The trouble was, Volkswagen hadn’t been able to get its new engines to comply with the stringent U.S. standards."
The reason is they had invested in a "clean diesel" engine tech that was supposed to be their market differentiator. VW invested billions into it. Yes, it was more fuel efficient, but it was supposed to also stay within existing pollution emissions regulations. Nobody else made such big investments in clean diesel because they couldn't figure out how to make it more efficient without also emitting pollutants at much higher levels. But everybody was so bought into it that they felt they had to cover it up.
Before the shift there was an influx of tiny cars with tiny diesel engines which had emissions <= 99grams CO2 / km.
Now it's NOx all around. In fact, The Netherlands has limited daytime speeds on highways to 100km/h vs 120/130km/h just for this purpose.
I do doubt FedEx would be in any way involved in the details of selling leased vehicles. I can say with a high degree of confidence there never was a meeting with FedEx execs where they pitched the idea of increasing residuals by swapping odometers...
It would've taken just one case of a mismatch between the digital and physical odometer without it being mentioned for a huge stink to be thrown up. And it'd also be the auction house's name on the block, because they should check these things themselves. If this is as widespread as they claim it to be, then even the occasional spot checks would show it.
A project to cut an ongoing vendors costs is about the only way for a large cap procurement specialist to meet and exceed targets with no possibility of additional valid free market bids. That opens them right up to questions of liability, with managers knowing or avoiding knowledge, workarounds, special advice to other divisions, etc.
You don't have to go to jail to lose a lawsuit.. I worked for a company that put together a whole system for reporting these kinds of ethics irregularities in the companies favor. I don't think that was a charity, they act as a defense or at least lower punitive damages a judge is likely to award when violations still occur.
Underlying U.S. and EU emission standards
The Volkswagen and Audi cars identified as violators had been certified to meet either the US EPA Tier 2 / Bin 5 emissions standard or the California LEV-II ULEV standard. Either standard requires that nitrogen oxide emissions not exceed 0.043 grams per kilometre (0.07 g/mi) for engines at full useful life which is defined as either 190,000 kilometres (120,000 mi) or 240,000 kilometres (150,000 mi) depending on the vehicle and optional certification choices.
This standard for nitrogen oxide emissions is among the most stringent in the world. For comparison, the contemporary European standards known as Euro 5 (2008 "EU5 compliant", 2009[5]–2014 models) and Euro 6 (2015 models) only limit nitrogen oxide emissions to 0.18 grams per kilometre (0.29 g/mi) and 0.08 grams per kilometre (0.13 g/mi) respectively. Defeat devices are forbidden in the EU. The use of a defeat device is subject to a penalty.
While the some book keepers will care, in its grand scheme of operations that amount is negligible to the point where it may cost them more in man power than what they recoup from doing so.
Say the lawsuit is originally against just Holman Fleet Leasing and FedEx is the one legally liable (Maybe FedEx is the one that is doing something naughty. Maybe there's some contractual language around Fedex assuming all legal liabilities for the vehicles sold.). You're going to spend a bunch of time in court arguing with Holman about if they're even the right party to sue, and your case is either going to get thrown out or you're going to lose. Meanwhile, the statute of limitations is still ticking, so if it takes a long enough time to adjudicate the case against Holman, you won't even be able to refile the same case with the correct respondent. Oops. but if the statute of limitations miraculously hasn't run out yet, that's not even considering the possibility that the kind of person who would roll back an odometer would also have a punishingly short document retention policy, so all the documents that still existed at the time you filed against Holman have long since been shredded and destroyed, so your discovery in the new case against Fedex is going to be a single email saying "yeah, we don't have anything going back that far. Oops again.
Now consider the lawsuit filed initially against both Holman and Fedex. Assuming your list of respondents is complete, the case isn't going to get thrown out because you sued the wrong person. Liability will still be adjudicated (and the case amended to drop respondents as the proper liability holder gets determined), but now you don't need to worry about the statute of limitations running out as you wait for the determination of liability against the first respondent. And the document retention clock starts with that lawsuit and covers the time where you're just determining who hold liability, so now they can't delete those documents even if they other wise would be. Both of them are now going to be legally required to retain all the stuff you list in discovery for the duration of at least their involvement in the case. Sure, they could destroy those records anyway, but that sort of thing is regularly used to infer guilt of the respondent with the worst possible inferences when it's destroyed in violation of discovery.
I've learned over time, it doesn't matter how righteous your defense is - all that matters is the money it'll cost to make the issue go away. Turns out, it's almost always cheaper to write a check than defend yourself.
A company the size of FedEx has accountants and actuaries watching leases of this scale like hawks. It's simply not believable that Fedex never "noticed." And if they noticed they were getting much better than normal resale values but didn't ask why, that's very much the definition of complicity.