Mining cinematic gold from Volkswagen emissions drama
Das Auto, the movie — in which a squad of starched-shirt executives find themselves stuck in an airless boardroom in Wolfsburg as they are hunted down by German prosecutors — has reached the Act II turning point.
This is good news for moviegoers fond of high drama; less so for Volkswagen AG, which sailed through the beginning of Act I on promises of becoming the world’s largest automaker by 2018, not just in profitability and units sold but, as erstwhile CEO Martin Winterkorn once told Forbes magazine, on achieving the highest level of customer and employee satisfaction. And I quote: “Only an automaker who can achieve all those goals can really call itself No. 1 with justification.”
In scriptwriting terms, the narrative’s inciting incident was a doozy: the intentional cheating of those same customers via “defeat devices” installed on millions of diesel autos sold throughout Europe and North America going back to 2009.
This is the moment in which we argue about the merits of flashbacks in films: yea or nay?
Say “yea,” and the film unspools a fourdecade-long drama between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and various carmakers found to have installed such illegal devices.
A1995 settlement between the EPA and General Motors is just one example, in which that auto company paid out approximately $45 million (U.S.) in civil penalties and fix-it costs after recalling approximately 470,000 Cadillacs.
GM had installed the device to address a stalling problem on four Cadillac models. Attorney General Janet Reno had another take. The device was “improperly placed to defeat pollution controls,” she said at the time.
“It is simply not fair to burden people’s health to improve the sales of automobiles.” Carbon monoxide emissions surpassed the legal limits by as much as three times, and one EPA official noted that such emissions were enough to cover Washington in a 30-metre thick layer of poisonous carbon monoxide.
Three years later, the EPA struck a $1-billion settlement with seven manufacturers of heavy-duty diesel engines, including Volvo Truck Corp., for violating the Clean Air Act through what the agency had started to call “deceit” devices. “The affected engines emitted more than 1.3 million tons of excess NOx in 1998 alone,” the EPA said in a press release. “This is equivalent to the NOx emissions from an additional 65 million cars being on the road.”
Volkswagen itself was found to have unauthorized defeat devices in some of its cars. In 1973.
At this juncture, the director intercuts to Michael Horn, the head of Volkswagen’s U.S. operations, appearing before a congressional subcommittee in the present day.
Horn is artless in the role. He’s not an engineer, he says too many times. No, he does not know how defeat devices work. (At one point, he grasps an imaginary steering wheel and theorizes that the trick might lie within steering sensors, thus explaining why emissions are not detected when the automobiles are tested on a “dyno,” or dynamometer, where the steering wheel remains inert, as opposed to on the road, where, obviously, it doesn’t.)
Asked what measures the company took as a result of the prior infractions, he replies (a touch smugly I thought), “In 1974, I was 12 years old.”
Full marks to Paul Tonko, D-New York, who in a cameo performance swiftly responds: “Well, history is history.” Chastened, Horn offers that the ongoing investigation will likely “go back into this time.”
There has to be a cliffhanger. For this, Chris Collins, R-New York, appears to have scripted his own lines, though they did have the ring of Hollywood boilerplate.
“The response so far is inadequate . . . It’s a sign of arrogance. It’s a sign of not admitting the severity of your problem,” he said.
“I cannot accept VW’s portrayal of this as something by a couple of rogue software engineers.”
Dismissing what he clearly sees as a fairy-tale version — he likens the tale of the rogue engineers to the discovery of “pixie dust” — it falls to Collins to set the scene for Act III.
“I can tell you that suspending three folks? [The problem] goes way, way higher than that.”
The camera pans across a vast landscape of Volkswagens adorned with car magnets proclaiming clipped and clever outrage. “VW. German for FU.” And, cleverer, “Färfrumlegal.”
Legion of car owners will not be appeased until the car company that pushed so hard to be Number 1 is itself pushed to buy back all those autos. The sun sets on Wolfsburg. Fade to black. jenwells@thestar.ca