How Could Volkswagen’s Top Engineers Not Have Known?

October 23, 2015

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by DuneLawrence, Benjamin Elgin, Vernon Silver (Bloomberg Business) ... From February through April 2013, they (researchers from West Virginia University's Center for Alternative Fuels, Engines and Emissions) tested three diesel cars: a Volkswagen Jetta, a Volkswagen Passat, and a BMW SUV. Besch took charge of the initial assessment, using the dynos, and he was impressed. The cars emitted almost nothing, prompting some crowing from Besch about European engineering. When Besch’s fellow investigator, Arvind Thiruvengadam, joined him to take the cars on the road, however, the results were different. The road tests captured a variety of conditions: high elevations up Mt. Baldy; stop-and-go urban errand-running in San Diego; freeway driving around Los Angeles. The two Volkswagens’ emissions exceeded standards by 5 to 35 times. The BMW’s didn’t.

First, they assumed the results were wrong, so the team recalibrated the instruments and kept on driving. Eventually they realized that, yes, they were seeing something noteworthy, if not exactly shocking. What comes out of a tailpipe on the road is always going to differ somewhat from regulatory targets met in tightly controlled environments. Speed, elevation, and temperature all affect the result. To isolate the cause, Besch pored over a two-part paper, published by Volkswagen’s top engineers in 2008, that described purportedly groundbreaking emissions control achieved by the new TDI 2.0 liter engine. And he pursued a theory related to the exhaust filtering system. He still couldn’t explain the full extent of the emissions.

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What the West Virginia team didn’t realize was that they’d exposed one of the biggest deceptions in the history of the auto industry. On Sept. 3, 2015, VW admitted to U.S. and California regulators that it had not only been selling high-polluting cars but that it had deliberately outfitted them with “defeat devices” that sensed when an official emissions test was under way and temporarily trapped the worst of the exhaust—chemicals that contribute to smog and acid rain.

“Device,” actually, is something of a misnomer. The cheat is merely several lines of software code in the computer that controls a Volkswagen’s engine and exhaust systems. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, when the car detects a test—certain steering patterns; speed; barometric pressure; only two wheels spinning instead of four—it switches into a cleaner mode called “dyno calibration,” after the testing machines. The cars can run cleaner, but they can’t run cleaner without sacrificing fuel efficiency or some of the engine’s power.

... (VW's) U.S. chief, Michael Horn, told a congressional committee ...: “This was a couple of software engineers who put this in for whatever reasons,” he said.

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When Horn testified before the House, Representative Michael Burgess, a Texas Republican, told him he couldn’t believe the fraud involved only a few renegades—not at a rule-bound, Teutonic technocracy. “It wasn’t written by one person in their basement in the dark of night,” the congressman said. “You’re going to integrate that into the supply chain of a multinational corporation, and nobody knows a darn thing about it?”

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Is it really possible that a German company run by engineers believed the diesel engine had suddenly become clean?

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(A)s fears of climate change helped drive increasingly stringent emissions rules, especially in the U.S. Federal and state regulators, notably in California, began to lay down timelines for new requirements that would demand ingenious feats of engineering.

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But at Volkswagen headquarters in Wolfsburg, a bit more than an hour by commuter train west of Berlin, executives were dismissive of newer technologies.

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They (diesel engines) were cheaper than hybrids and packed more muscle under the hood yet still often got more than 40 miles to the gallon. VW, which aspired to surpass Toyota as the largest carmaker in the world, saw the U.S. as a growth market for a new diesel engine, one that could be branded as green. The trick would be to engineer a way to strip sooty exhaust of its pollutants to meet the new U.S. rules.

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Hatz (Wolfgang Hatz, the former head of engines and transmissions development at VW) scrapped the BlueTec deal in a classic case of not-invented-here syndrome, according to an executive involved in the project. That decision, at the start of 2007, boxed Volkswagen engineers in as they tried to meet emissions targets and protect the driving experience and fuel efficiency.

The new team wanted to avoid urea tanks, which were expensive and took up precious space in tiny cars. Instead, they created a system with traps in the tailpipe to catch some of the harmful substances. They also devised a method to scrub away nitrogen oxide by pumping extra fuel into the engine’s cylinders and onward to the exhaust system, where it reacted with other pollutants to form harmless waste. They called it a Lean NOx Trap.

In 2008, VW brought its “clean diesel” to the U.S. with a publicity worthy of Barnum. ... averaged 58.8 miles to the gallon ... “You don’t have to sacrifice power to be environmentally conscious,” declared one of the slides.

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“That is the story of Santa Claus,” says Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, director of the Center for Automotive Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Without the urea system, “it’s not possible to meet the standard.”

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VW installed sensors on some 1973 models that turned off emissions controls outside a certain temperature range.

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One of the clearest explanations so far has come from VW board member Stephan Weil, head of Germany’s Lower Saxony state, which is VW’s second-biggest shareholder. He explained in an Oct. 13 speech to his state parliament how the new diesel engines couldn’t meet the U.S. requirements, and rather than addressing the issue, VW covered up with the software cheat. “In subsequent years there followed a use of this software in other models and other countries,” said Weil. Perhaps the engineers told themselves that the cheat was a stopgap, and they’d address it later. If so, they didn’t.

It’s not credible that top managers were unaware corners had been cut, says Dudenhöffer, who worked at Porsche and other carmakers before entering academia. ... VW is a company where the engineers are in charge. It’s always claimed that an engineer-filled executive suite was a precondition of building top-quality cars.

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All U.S. regulators had to do was look across the pond to Europe to see evidence that “clean diesel” did not live up to its name. A 2011 study sponsored by the Joint Research Centre, the European Commission’s in-house scientific research body, found that on-road nitrogen oxide emissions from diesel cars were 90 percent higher than emissions limits. A second study by the JRC, published the next year, found nitrogen oxide emissions 130 percent higher.

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The regulators at CARB, meanwhile, continued to test VW cars to see if the recall had fixed the problem. It was concerned that real-world road tests couldn’t confirm that the software patch was working. Sure enough, nitrogen oxide emissions were still in violation of California and U.S. laws. The agency shared those findings with Volkswagen and the EPA on July 8.

At VW’s Oxnard facility, the level of paranoia was rising in July and August, according to a person who worked there. In one instance, a manager accused a low-level employee of being an EPA plant. READ MORE and MORE (Financial Times)

Excerpt from Financial Times: "In a letter to Antonio Tajani, the European commissioner in charge of industrial policy, written in February 2013, [then-EU environment commissioner Janez] Potocnik said ministers from several EU countries believed the significant discrepancy between how cars performed in the real world compared with in the testing laboratory was the 'primary reason' air quality standards were not falling to levels required by EU law." READ MORE