Illegal tampering by diesel pickup owners is worsening pollution

The owners and operators of more than a half-million diesel pickup trucks 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 new federal report has concluded.

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 is the truck owners themselves who are installing illegal devices, which are typically 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. “Because these are trucks, the amount of pollution is far, far higher.”

The EPA focused just on devices installed in heavy pickup trucks, such as the Chevrolet Silverado and the Dodge Ram 2500, about 15% 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 was completed last week.

“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.”