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I have said since January after driving our car on a long road trip and investigating the EPA test cycles and everything else that Ford took a calculated risk here. I doubt they planned for this decision to cost them upwards of $15 million in the cash payments, not counting the brand image damage, stock price hit and lost sales. I'd figure the stock damage alone could be hundreds of millions of dollars depending on how the market reacts today to this news. I wonder now how many people will lose their jobs who were part of the decision to save a maybe a few tens of thousands of dollars by not testing the C-Max separately (I have no idea what it costs a manufacturer to run the EPA cycles on their cars so I'm just guessing) when that decision will now cost Ford hundreds of millions. Some people place the blame squarely on Ford for this saying that they were unethical. The objective of a public company is to bring a return to their shareholders, ethics is not a part of business. I know that many of us likely go through yearly ethics training at work, but I also analyze and audit our employees' p-card usage and I see employees bending the rules and pushing the limits every single month. Just as individual employees think that way, the collective decision making of most companies thinks the same. If companies behaved ethically of their own accord we would never have had the Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, et al scandals. If companies behaved ethically there would be no need for Sarbanes Oxley. We aren't privy to the internal discussions between Ford executives and the EPA to know what happened, but I would venture a guess that the EPA tested the C-Max, got lower numbers and they gave Ford the chance to address it. Ford technically didn't break, or even bend, any rules, but the EPA would have had to release their results which would have made Ford look bad. I think that just as much blame belongs with the EPA as with Ford for having such stupid rules that caused this to happen in the first place. If the EPA had better rules, i.e. mandating all 5 cycles for all vehicles and no more of this letting one vehicle determine the ratings for another when the cd is so different that it will have a material effect on the results. It's also important to note that Ford isn't the only company to do this. Honda just released a new hybrid in Japan that beats the Prius on the Japanese test cycle for fuel economy, but everyone knows that the Honda hybrid will not beat the Prius fuel economy in the real world. Honda merely programmed that car to ace the Japanese tests. So what? Buyer beware is still the adage that we should all live by.