I was fooled by VW’s clean diesel hype
The media had a role to play in emissions mess
I’m sorry. The Volkswagen emission scandal is going to last for many news cycles. There’s no dodging the fact that it’s going to grow, not lessen, and the implications will start becoming more clear every day. This quote from the Guardian is stunning:
“A Guardian analysis found those U.S. vehicles would have spewed between 10,392 and 41,571 tonnes of toxic gas into the air each year, if they had covered the average annual U.S. mileage. If they had complied with EPA standards, they would have emitted just 1,039 tonnes of (nitrogen oxide) each year in total.
“The company admitted the device may have been fitted to 11 million of its vehicles worldwide. If that proves correct, VW’s defective vehicles could be responsible for between 237,161 and 948,691 tonnes of (nitrogen oxide) emissions each year, 10 to 40 times the pollution standard for new models in the U.S. Western Europe’s biggest power station, Drax in the U.K., emits 39,000 tonnes … each year.”
All eyes are on the corporate disaster unfolding, but mine are on the consumers, those of you who spent much time and more money on making just the right purchase, after sorting through an incredibly crowded midway of new cars, each yelling louder than the next about its reliability, its quality, its value. And you listened to sales people and websites and people in newspapers. You listened to people like me.
We’ve been taught the technological side of these cars. We sit in seminars led by engineers — not all press trips are skittering about the Alps in search of the next luncheon spot — to grasp information we will pass on to our readers. Diesel was initially met with just as much skepticism from the industry as it was from drivers: Grandpa drove a dirty diesel.
We learned from all the big guns — including Mercedes, Porsche and, yes, Volkswagen — about how they’d found a road to clean diesel.
From urea injectors to scrubbers at the end of the exhaust cycle and many details in between, we could now confidently understand why, for some buyers, diesel was at last the way to go.
I’ve recommended the cars now in the crossfire, and so have my colleagues. Our highmiler readers and viewers loved the extra torque. Our early adopters would source out a station selling diesel (initially a bit of a scramble in some parts of the country) in order to get 800, 900, even 1,000 kilometres to a tank of fuel.
They could figure the math on paying the surcharge up front to invest in a diesel engine and know when they were ahead — it was often in as little as two years, with an engine that could potentially handle much more mileage during its life.
I think of the public relations people who set up the opportunities for us to test these cars, the engineers and company representatives who show us the angles and put up with our cynical questions about everything from selling tactics to technical innovations.
They always start with the big sparkly achievements they’ve made, and we always start by asking how.
I’ve driven the whole lineup of Volkswagen diesels through the fabulous Rocky Mountains.
It was a press trip, but we were essentially turned loose. It’s the closest I’ve come to matching posted government fuel consumption — you know, those little stickers of paper that tell you how much fuel you can expect your new car to use every 100 kilometres. The figures are always off because they’re carried out in incredibly controlled, perfect-world scenarios, and I’m stuck telling angry buyers why they will never get the posted numbers. We’ve been promised more realistic numbers, and I’m eager to test those, too.
But the Volkswagen diesels got closer than anyone else. It was my starting point for comparison shoppers who were using those stats as their starting point.
“Your driving style, weather and conditions are going to impact that number, but I’ve always found Volkswagen to be the closest to posted,” I’d repeat, over and over. And it was true. Sometimes the discrepancy has a lot to do with the driver, sometimes it’s the car, but the VWs gave me a ground zero.
I’ve heard that some people just don’t care that their car, which they love, is allegedly spewing out 10 to 40 times the emissions claimed. They should care. It’s a huge deal. I find it hard to think we haven’t evolved past the point where people can play a ridiculous game of air quality no-see-ums: if I can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. Emissions exist.
But this note is an apology to car buyers who believed what I and many of my colleagues also believed: that we were telling you the truth. I have no idea how far the accusations and admissions will go in the tiers of that company, but I believed what I was taught. I still believe in the people who taught it to me. I believe in the people who put us in those cars so we could bring that information to you, and I believe the people standing in showrooms who took your order.
Two of my closest friends are asking me what will happen with their cars. I have no idea.
I’m sorry.