The dirty truth of the air on our roads
THIS book, which races along like Jenson Button, tells the inside story of the Volkswagen scandal.
The car maker had steadily built up a reputation for automotive excellence over many years, business writer Jack Ewing explains. Such goodwill is impossible to quantify, but if your brand is deemed to be as trustworthy as Volkswagen’s was, you obviously mess with it at your peril.
Little did outsiders know, though, that throughout the Nineties and 2000s, the company was run almost as a personal fiefdom by Ferdinand Piech, a grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, who designed the original Beetle. Piech did not scream or shout, he just raised a brutal Teutonic eyebrow and crushed inferiors with a single cutting comment.
Even when Piech was pushed upstairs to become company chairman, his replacement as CEO was a protege of his, Martin Winterkorn, a huge bear of a man who did scream and shout at absolutely everyone. Between them, these two men inculcated a regime of fear and loathing at Volkswagen. Do what I want you to do or I’ll fire you.
The firm was at the forefront of the introduction of diesel engines to massmarket cars. Motor industry lobbyists had persuaded most political leaders in Europe that diesel was environmentally friendly, which was true to an extent — it produces far less carbon dioxide, which heats up the atmosphere and promotes climate change, but what they neglected to mention is that it spews out far more nitrogen oxides, as well as very fine, carcinogenic soot particles.
As Ewing explains, there are various widgets on the market to reduce the amount of nitrogen oxides emitted by diesels. But they are all expensive and take up space in the car. So Volkswagen installed something called a ‘defeat device’ into the software that runs all this stuff. This could tell when a car was being tested on laboratory rollers and reduce the amount of nitrogen oxides being emitted. It was a cheat, basically.
It took the regulatory authorities some years to catch up with this. A research team at West Virginia University tested on the roads a Volkswagen Jetta and Passat, which issued more nitrogen oxides than a modern longhaul diesel truck. So enormous was the output that the researchers assumed their equipment was faulty. Later on, U.S. regulators found that some VW vehicles were issuing 40 times the legal limit for nitrogen oxides.
As a result of one court case, Volkswagen had to cough up $15 billion (£11.6 billion). But Ewing thinks it will survive.
Nonetheless, the goodwill and the reputation are gone for ever. And whose fault is it? Piech and Winterkorn blame junior engineers and claim to have known nothing about it. Indeed, no senior executive has been charged with any crime and business goes on much as before.
It’s the old, old story, and Ewing tells it quite beautifully.