Lessons learned from Dieselgate
Any scandal worth its 48- point headline will always require a heaping dose of blame apportioned. The process is always the same. After an appropriate amount of time has been allowed for the public to be shocked and appalled, one — or, if it’s particularly calamitous misconduct, two — miscreants are designated as fall guys, the populace needing its patsies to get over its outrage.
The big problem with Volkswagen’s Dieselgate scandal is that there are just so many whipping boys to choose from. Virtually every layer of European government — from Brussels to Paris — has colluded in perpetuating an emissionstesting system so lax it exacerbates the pollution crisis now gripping many European cities. The European Commission’s testing regime is so rife with loopholes that almost every diesel-powered car — not just Volkswagens — cannot meet its own pollution standards when driven on real roads.
Then there’s the automakers — again, not just VW. Every one of them knows full well Europe’s New European Driving Cycle testing ( the equivalent of the U. S.’s EPA five-cycle tests) is a joke, yet they continue to lobby through their respective governments for even more loopholes.
The EU recently announced diesel cars will now be allowed to emit twice as many nitrogen oxides ( NOx) as the official mandate. European automakers have long contended that, while their cars can meet the EU’s NOx emissions limits in lab testing, they cannot on real roads. So, with the commission threatening to impose Real Driving Emissions ( RDE) tests as soon as 2017, the automakers all pressured t heir respective governments for a continuance — a fudge factor, if you will — that would allow their cars to continue polluting during real-world driving.
The result is that European MEPs recently voted to allow what they call “conformity factors,” essentially permitting diesel engines to emit 110-per-cent more NOx than the current EU- regulated 80 milligrams per kilometre until 2020, and 50-percent thereafter. Yes, rather than trying to cut down NOx as the result of this scandal, the European Parliament just voted to allow more.
The cheating started long ago. This bending of rules didn’t start with these latest “conformity factors;” European automakers have long been allowed all manner of tricks of the trade to render their cars compliant. For instance, in European emissions testing, automakers are allowed to tape up headlights and other cracks in their cars’ bodywork to improve aerodynamics. They can also pry apart the brake pads (an old drag racers’ trick to reduce friction), overcharge the battery (preventing the alternator from becoming a drag on the engine) and even test the vehicle on as much as a onedegree downhill slope. Little wonder, then, that Europe’s testing results have little in common with real- world driving. Indeed, one recent study that compiled the results of independent realworld tests on 137 diesel cars ( not just VWs) found more than 80 per cent failed to meet the EU’s NOx standard.
It’s little wonder, then, VW isn’t getting the message. New Volkswagen Group chief executive Mat- thias Mueller further scandalized American authorities recently when he told National Public Radio that the company “didn’t lie” about diesel emissions and that the entire scandal was because “we had not the right interpretation of the American law.”
In Europe, such hubris is being lapped up. Penalties have been few, governments aren’t litigating and the fix Volkswagen claims brings the offending engines — the company’s range of EA189 fourcylinder TDIs — into compliance, at least in Europe, is laughably simple. According to VW, the only thing most of its diesels needed to render them NOx free was a simple half- hour software fix. Even the most difficult retrofit only required a dinky little piece of tubular plastic that looked like a cheese grater to be fitted to the intake manifold — $10 tops.
This raises the question: Why, if the fix was so simple and cheap, didn’t Volkswagen alleviate the problem long ago? The firm’s defence is that the deceit was the work of just a few nefarious engineers and no one in senior management knew.
Oh, but they did know. According to Automotive News, citing the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, “Volkswagen’s development of software to cheat diesel- emissions tests was an open secret in the department striving to make its engines meet environmental standards,” and that “the department faced an air of desperation in trying to meet U. S. emissions guidelines and produce a quick and inexpensive solution for a clean diesel engine.”
Indeed, a translation of the Sueddeutsche article claims the plan to circumvent U. S. emissions standards started in 2006, not 2009 as the company originally claimed, and that one senior manager, later appointed to Volkswagen’s board of management, was informed of the plan to circumvent the emissions regulations as early as 2011. In other words, this wasn’t s ome cockamamie plan hatched by a couple of disgruntled software engineers as initially claimed, but the result of what Sueddeutsche called a culture of “fear of the bosses,” in which “nobody had the courage to admit failure.
Moving forward. There’s so much blame to go around that I’ve just touched the tip of the iceberg in what is sure to be remembered as the biggest scandal in automotive history. Why didn’t the U. S. EPA, which claims to field-test 15 per cent of all cars annually, not discover VW’s impropriety itself ? ( The discovery was made in independent testing by University of West Virginia researchers.) And what of the hubris that still plagues VW? Let off easy by European authorities, it expected the same camaraderie from the EPA and California’s Air Resources Board ( CARB), only to be rebuffed because the authorities found VW’s solution “incomplete, substantially deficient and … far short of meeting the legal requirements” to return these vehicles to compliance.
Meanwhile, the French Economic Ministry is investigating Renault diesels for too much NOx, ironic because another part of the French government owns 19.7 per cent of Renault. Yes, one part of the French government, under intense pressure resulting from the VW scandal, suddenly decided to take another part of the French government to task, partly over something both parties have long known was a problem. Le cover up just keeps getting stinkier, non?