I have no doubt that the extra pollution is doing health damage. I strongly want more air pollution regulation. I don't trust Volkswagen, and I had one of the super-polluter TDIs, and sold it back to VW.
But this claim of 1,200 premature deaths by up to a decade seems goofy. If VW's 2.6M cars in Germany alone were taking a decade off anyone's life, it seems like we'd all be dead already. The world has over a billion polluting motor vehicles, and we're not even talking about airplanes, fires, factories, natural sources of NOx, or energy production. Car emissions are a minority of the total.
For sure, lots of people are getting sick from pollution in Europe and globally, but I wish the authors had stuck with person-years of life rather than try to state it as a specific number of people affected. Whatever actually happens, assuming it was even possible to pinpoint VW, which it's not, the probability that number of people affected in Europe is near 1,200 is almost zero. So, I guess at least consider calling it what it is: someone's estimate.
http://news.mit.edu/2017/volkswagen-emissions-premature-deat...
They won't be killed by the cars physically running them over or otherwise going out of control, true, but that's because the untrustworthy people chose to be untrustworthy in emissions standards and not in handling or self-driving algorithms or anything. You can't rely on them always making that choice, because they're untrustworthy.