Dieselgate: Inside the air pollution scandal of the century
New York Times correspondent and author of Faster, Higher, Farther, Jack Ewing, tells the inside story of Dieselgate, the Volkswagen emissions scandal
CLEAN DIESEL?
In the 1980s at Audi, a young Ferdinand Piëch, later Volkswagen’s chief executive, was working on a technological innovation that would have far-reaching consequences for VW, Audi’s parent company. It was one of the initiatives Piëch was later most proud of: diesel engines designed for passenger cars. Invented in the 1800s by Rudolf Diesel, diesel has long been in widespread use in trucks and ships, here it provided superior fuel economy and longer engine life. But it was much more difficult to deploy diesel in smaller vehicles.
In all automobile engines, much of the potential energy is wasted because the fuel does not burn completely. In a diesel engine, the fuel — distilled from petroleum in a process different from that for gasoline — is compressed with oxygen inside the cylinders until it becomes so hot from the pressure that it ignites. In a gasoline engine, by contrast, spark plugs cause the fuel to ignite. Diesel engines are less wasteful because the dense, highly compressed fuel and air mixture burns more thoroughly than in a gasoline engine. As a result, diesel engines go farther on a gallon of fuel than a gasoline motor. The disadvantage of diesels, at least until Volkswagen and other automobile makers began civilising them in the 1970s, was that they tended to be louder and smellier than gasoline engines, and they vibrated more, making the cars less comfortable to drive. In addition, the diesel combustion process produces more torque and places more strain on the moving parts inside an engine. The components of a diesel engine have to take the punishment, which means they are also heavier. All of these problems needed to be solved in order to make diesel practical for passenger cars.
Even in those days, when regulations were much less strict, Piëch worried about how to get a handle on diesel emissions. That was another of the downsides of diesel engines. Diesel emitted several nasty pollutants, in particular, nitrogen oxides that promoted the formation of smog and could cause or exacerbate health problems. Diesel also produced fine soot particles that could penetrate deep into human lungs and cause cancer.
But it became possible to reduce, though not eliminate, these alarming drawbacks by deploying a combination of technical innovations. Chief among them were advanced injection systems that could more precisely control the timing and volume of fuel being delivered to the cylinders. Combined with an electronic motor control system, which drew on advances in computer technology, the turbocharger and fuel injector could tailor the combustible mixture of air and fuel to whatever demands were being placed on the engine. Whether the car was idling, climbing a hill, or speeding on a highway, the fuel-air cocktail could be mixed and burned for the best result. The improved motor still had a bit of a growl, but it was no longer prone to blowing clouds of black exhaust like the diesels of old.
Volkswagen called the result TDI, or turbocharged direct injection. It took 11 years to perfect. Audi unveiled its first TDI model, an Audi 100 sedan, at the Frankfurt Motor Show in September 1989, a few weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Piëch was proud of the innovation, which used an onboard computer to manage the engine, then a novelty. The five-cylinder engine in the Audi 100 used 2 litres less fuel per 100 kilometres of driving than the competition, he bragged. At the same time, the car accelerated more quickly and ran more cleanly. Emissions were 30 per cent less, according to Piëch. (He did not define which emissions he was referring to, however.) In his view, TDI had revolutionised the image of diesel in the world, and Audi enjoyed a big head start in bringing it to market. As the man who had driven the development of TDI, Piëch could take much of the credit. For him, it was a professional milestone, one that gave him a personal stake in diesel technology. Piëch would continue to be a forceful advocate of diesel for the rest of his career.
Nearly 30 years later, diesel was one of the biggest financial successes of Volkswagen (and European car-making in general). But it was also about to become the industry’s single biggest problem…
DEFEAT DEVICES
By the 1990s, Volkswagen, now under Ferdinand Piëch, was conquering Europe with its fuel-saving diesels.
Meanwhile, a few engineers in the US and Europe were preoccupied with a related but inverse problem: how to make sure the increasing numbers of diesel vehicles on the road were clean? In 1990, sweeping revisions of the US Clean Air Act passed both houses of Congress with large majorities and support from the Republicans as well as Democrats.
The legislation was an ambitious effort to radically improve air quality in the US, particularly in urban areas where cars and trucks were the main source of pollution.
But while it was easy for Congress to say that cars should produce fewer harmful emissions, it was not so easy to determine whether carmakers were complying.
What comes out of the tailpipe of an automobile can vary radically, depending on many factors: the speed of the vehicle, the outside air temperature, whether the engine is warm or cold, whether the driver is cautious or lead footed. The challenge for regulators was to measure emissions in a way that was consistent and would produce fair comparisons among the dozens of makes and models on the market.
The standard approach was to test cars in the lab on rollers. That made sense in a lot of ways. A great deal of equipment was required to capture engine exhaust and measure its chemical components. It was obviously easier to bring cars into a lab than to put a lab inside an automobile.
The risk with all those finely tuned parameters, though, was that a lab test would be artificial. It would do a fine job at showing how much a car polluted under controlled conditions, but say little about the vehicle’s performance on the road.
One of the people who had doubts about the testing methodology was a young engineer in the EPA’s compliance division named Leo Breton. “Seeing a number of tests over a few years,” Breton said, “I would scratch my head, not having been there forever, really wondering if this had anything to do at all with what vehicles were emitting in the real world.”
Breton was involved in uncovering one earliest emissions defeat devices. In 1993, EPA testers discovered that cars made by General Motors’ Cadillac division emitted almost three times as much carbon monoxide with the air-conditioning or heating systems on than when climate control was off. It turned out that, following customer complaints that ’91 Cadillacs tended to stall, GM installed a computer chip in the cars that increased the ratio of gasoline to air inside the cylinders when the climate control system was on. The chip fixed the stalling problem, but worked only by overriding the emissions control system. The result was higher output of carbon monoxide. In legal terms, the computer chip qualified as a defeat device — a mechanism designed to reduce the effectiveness of the emissions system when the official testers weren’t looking.
With the climate control system on, the cars emitted up to 10 grams of carbon monoxide per mile, compared with the legal limit of 3.4 grams per mile. A US Justice Department investigation later concluded that 470,000 Cadillacs from 1991 to 1995 had defeat devices. The cars had released an additional 100,000 tonnes of carbon monoxide into the atmosphere, the Justice Department calculated. GM agreed to pay $45 million to cover penalties, the cost of recalling and fixing the cars, and measures to offset the emissions, such as buying school buses that polluted less than older models. At the time, the settlements were the largest ever for violations of the Clean Air Act by a vehicle manufacturer.
THE CHEAT
In mid-2006, the VW engine developers realised they had a big problem. Tests in VW’s own labs revealed that the exhaust gas recirculation system in the newly developed EA 189 diesel motor would place an unacceptable burden on the particle filter and cause it to wear out prematurely. As a result, the cars would not be able to pass emissions tests, especially in the US, with its stricter limits on nitrogen oxides. VW’s global ambitions had bumped up against the laws of physics. As VW later admitted in court documents, its specialists were not able to reconcile the conflicting goals of fuel economy and emissions “within the allocated time frame and budget.” An engineer who was involved in the development of the new motor put it more bluntly. “It was a bad plan,” he said.
VW was not without choices. For example, it could have put a special warranty on the particle filter, entitling customers to a free replacement when it wore out. That would have made it easier for the pollution control equipment to operate at capacity. Or VW could have built cars with better emissions technology. Faced with a similar quandary, BMW equipped diesel SUVs sold in the US with more robust equipment adequate to meet US pollution standards legally. But for VW cars aimed at a less affluent customer, the extra gear would have added hundreds of dollars to the vehicles’ costs and taken up space.
VW chose another route to solve the problem. In mid-2006, engineers in Wolfsburg were working on adapting software used by Audi in its diesel motors for VW engines. Audi already had motors that used common rail systems, so it made sense to borrow the software rather than start from scratch. As the engineers explored the software, which contained thousands of functions used to control engine parameters, they noticed something labelled in English as a “noise function”, also referred to as an “acoustic function”. It allowed the car to recognise when it was being tested in a lab on rollers. If the computer under the hood sensed that the car was being observed, it could adjust the engine’s behaviour to deliver optimal results. The software, the engineers realised, was a defeat device.
Someone — it’s not clear who — mentioned that Volkswagen could use the function to solve its emissions problem with the new diesel motor. The comment might have been meant only half seriously, but it gained traction. In November 2006, according to class-action complaints later filed by VW owners, which in turn were based on internal company documents, an engineer who was responsible for the software that would be used in the US diesel motors was asked by his superiors to formulate a way for the Audi acoustic function to be used in VW. The engineer was profoundly uneasy about the assignment. But he did as he was told.
That same month about 15 people responsible for diesel engine development and engine electronics gathered in a conference room, close to the offices of the top R&D executives. The PowerPoint presentation that the software engineer had reluctantly prepared was beamed onto a screen — it was just three pages long (tediously long PowerPoints were taboo in R&D). It explained how code embedded in the engine-control software could recognise the pattern of the agency’s so-called test cycle, which was public knowledge, activating equipment to reduce emissions whenever a test was underway. In other words, the car would behave lawfully only when the emissions police were watching. The program described in the PowerPoint fit the definition of a defeat device, and it was illegal both in the US and the European Union.
The meeting lasted less than an hour. The consequences would be felt for years.
AFTERMATH
If you were a German concerned about your country’s future, the worst-case outcome of the VW emissions scandal would be that the taint would spread to the other carmakers and threaten one of the pillars of the economy, perhaps even undercutting Germany’s reputation for engineering excellence. Two years after the scandal came to light, that is exactly what happened. Gradually, it dawned on the European public how fundamentally the automakers had deluded them about the risks to human health from diesel and the chasm between emissions as advertised and emissions in practice.
The vast majority of VWs with tainted software were in Europe, but the company’s biggest legal problems were in the US. Once the scandal was discovered the American system moved pretty quickly and came up with a settlement that compensated owners. They also fined Volkswagen and indicted people responsible. Most of those people were in Germany, out of reach of the US justice system.
The initial settlement for owners in the US was $15 billion. The actual fine was much smaller, but when you add it all up together, for Volkswagen, fines and settlements have reached above $30 billion — mostly from the US. Some in Germany feel it was too harsh but regardless it sent a very clear signal.
Whereas in Europe the story is quite different. Germany fined Volkswagen €1 billion, Audi was another €800 million. Aside from the reputational damage and the damage to diesel sales, there haven’t really been that many consequences for Volkswagen in Europe. If it hadn’t been for the US, this could’ve been a minor issue for Volkswagen.
That’s the biggest takeaway from the whole dieselgate scandal: on paper, the European Union had pretty strong emissions rules. But we found out from the Volkswagen case that there was virtually no enforcement. Big loopholes basically led carmakers to believe they didn’t really have to follow the rules as long as they could get somebody to say that the car was compliant when it was at a garage being tested. It revealed how things work in Brussels and what a sham their emissions testing programme really was. Everything was just on paper, it had almost no meaning in the real world.
Since then, environmental emissions tests have supposedly got tougher. They’re now doing road testing of diesels and the regulators are seemingly much more alert than they were because they know it will make them look bad if there’s another case like this.
But, environmentally, it’s still too early to say whether enough has been done to improve the testing standards. There are obviously still some flaws in the system. For example, a car company gets to pick which country they can get their car tested by — it could be Slovakia, Estonia, or a lot of people go to Germany because the officials are known to be very friendly to the car industry there for obvious reasons. And once it’s approved in that country then every other European Union country has to accept it. And yet, there’s no European level enforcement mechanism, or enforcement agency, like you have with the Environmental Protection Agency in the US. Even in Germany, enforcement is done by the Motor Vehicles Agency, not by the Environment Agency. They naturally have very close ties to the car industry.
In Brussels, there are cases (which are referred to in my book) where the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, intervened in European lawmaking to try to weaken the regulations. There’s even an anecdote about Merkel visiting California and complaining to the person in charge of air quality about diesel standards being too strict and hurting German carmakers. That’s an extraordinary level of involvement by a head of state in the concerns of a specific industry.
But a year ago, I reported about Volkswagen testing on monkeys to try to show that the new diesels were clean. The stories caused a big furore in Germany and even prompted a debate at the Bundestag. Today, as a result, the German government are being less openly cosy with the car industry.
But the damage is already done; cars were polluting a lot more than they were supposed to. There’s even a study by the UK government where they tested a range of diesel cars, not just VWs, and almost all of them were polluting more than they were supposed to. It was just a matter of to what extent? Some were three or four times above the limit others were more like 20 times.
It made people realise how much nitrogen oxide they were being exposed to and wonder what the health effects of that might be?
One of the difficult things about this whole case is that it’s very hard to identify the victims of the air pollution dieselgate caused. It’s well established that nitrogen oxide is harmful. We know that many cities, including London, have much higher levels of nitrogen oxide than are healthy. But we can’t follow nitrogen oxide molecules out of a tailpipe into somebody’s lungs and then say that they got asthma or lung cancer because of it.
It’s almost abstract, but we know that it’s very real. I was just reading a piece in The Guardian not too long ago about a young girl in London who died of asthma. Her parents are trying to amend her death certificate to say that she was killed by the effects of air pollution. That’s the first time I’ve ever heard of someone claiming directly that air pollution was the cause of death.
Maybe the silver lining is that now you see the European car companies seriously producing electric cars and making serious investments in electric cars because that’s really the only way they can meet the CO2 standards that regulations require. The car companies have marketing people who’ll try to make themselves look virtuous. But I don’t think they’re making electric cars now out of the goodness of their hearts, they’re doing it because they have regulations they need to meet.
In Volkswagen’s case, they are making a big investment in electric cars and partly because they realise that’s the only way they’re going to get past the scandal long-term. They have to come up with some other technology and they acknowledge that diesel is dead. And so, they seem to be making a serious attempt to build decent electric cars that people want to buy and that will be available for a reasonable price.
There’s still a lot of institutional resistance at the carmakers and that’s the big question over the next couple of years. You have companies who’ve made cars with internal combustion engines for 100 years. It’s challenging for them to change their orientation in such a short period of time, getting all the engineers on board, winning over the sceptics, and sending the message: “This is real, this is what we’re doing now.” For big companies that’s a very, very difficult task.
Then there are the new challengers like Dyson or Tesla that have no internal combustion history at all.
They’re totally focused on electric cars. That gives them a certain advantage because electric is their whole raison d’être.
They may be in a position to be more innovative. From a journalist’s point of view, it’s a very exciting time to be writing about the car industry.
Words: Jack Ewing, author of Faster, Higher, Farther; The Inside Story of the Volkswagen Scandal (published by Penguin, 2017)
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