Texas on the road to driverless trucks
Diesel pickup owners’ actions blamed for excess pollution
WASHINGTON — The owners and operators of more than a half-million diesel pickups have been illegally disabling their vehicles’ emissions control technology over the past decade, allowing excess emissions equivalent to 9 million extra trucks on the road, a federal report concludes.
The practice, described in a report by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Civil Enforcement, has echoes of the Volkswagen scandal of 2015, when the automaker was found to have illegally installed devices in millions of diesel passenger cars
worldwide — including about a half-million in the United States — designed to trick emissions control monitors.
But in this case, no single corporation is behind the subterfuge; it’s the truck owners themselves who are installing illegal devices, which typically are manufactured by small companies. That makes it much more difficult to measure the full scale of the problem, which is believed to affect many more vehicles than the 500,000 or so estimated in the report.
In terms of the pollution impact in the United States, “This is far more alarming and widespread than the Volkswagen scandal,” said Drew Kodjak, executive director of the International Council on Clean Transportation, the research group that first alerted the EPA of the illegal Volkswagen technology. “Because these are trucks, the amount of pollution is far, far higher.”
The EPA focused just on devices installed in heavy pickups, such as the Chevrolet Silverado and the Dodge Ram 2500, about 15 percent of which appear to have defeat devices installed. But such devices — commercially available and marketed as a way to improve vehicle performance — almost certainly have been installed in millions of other vehicles.
The report found “significant amounts of excess air pollution caused by tampering” with diesel pickup truck emissions controls.
The technology essentially is an at-home version of the factoryinstalled “defeat devices” embedded into hundreds of thousands of U.S. vehicles by Volkswagen, which was forced to pay $14.7 billion in the United States to settle claims stemming from the scandal.
The report said “diesel tuners” will allow the trucks to release more than 570,000 tons of nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant linked to heart and lung disease and premature death, over the lifetime of the vehicles. That’s more than 10 times the excess nitrogen oxide emissions attributed to the factory-altered Volkswagens sold domestically.
The report also found the altered pickups will emit about 5,000 excess tons of industrial soot, also known as particulate matter, which is linked to respiratory diseases and higher death rates for COVID-19 patients.
“A global respiratory pandemic is the worst time to find out that there is this massive cheating by the makers of these devices,” said John Walke, an expert in air pollution law at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group, noting recent studies linking higher levels of particulate matter pollution to higher rates of COVID-19.
“That is an astronomically high level of smog-forming pollution,” he added. “It’s happening at ground level where people are breathing the fumes. And if the problem extends to other vehicles, it’s almost unimaginable what the health impact will be.”
The EPA’S Office of Civil Enforcement, which largely is staffed with career civil servants, has been conducting the investigation into diesel tuners for about five years, since it discovered the cheating by Volkswagen.
An EPA official familiar with the report, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said it represents a significant milestone in the ongoing investigation.
The report was completed last week, although the EPA hasn’t publicized it or issued a news release, which stands in contrast to the media blitz assembled by the Obama-era agency for the Volkswagen investigation.
In this instance, word got out after Evan Belser, the deputy director of the office’s Air Enforcement Division, emailed a copy of the report to the heads of three state air pollution control organizations.
“The aftermarket defeat device problem is huge,” said Phillip Brooks, a former EPA emissions investigator who worked on the diesel tuner investigation and the Volkswagen case. “A lot of people just don’t understand what the problem is — your average person buys a vehicle and says, it’s my vehicle, I can do what I want with it. They may not even be aware that these devices are illegal.”
“But,” he continued, “the real question is impact. If 10 people do it, there’s no impact. But these are numbers that are meaningful for air quality.”
“This is not a great way to express how to be a free American, but there are a lot of people out there who think that way,” Brooks concluded.
Retailers generally sell the illegal defeat devices online and in public, the report said, but “operate in a secretive manner such that the nature and extent of their operations are not reflected in their business records.”
The EPA investigators found at least 28 companies involved with the manufacturing of at least 45 diesel tuners. The report doesn’t name the companies because, it says, the EPA’S investigation is ongoing.