Bad to the ozone
By Heather Smithon Aug 19, 2016Share
If you’ve ever wondered why a flock of motorcycles smells like a smog bomb made love to a junkyard, the secret is out. This week, Harley-Davidson agreed to pay $12 million in fines to the Environmental Protection Agency for evading clean air laws.
From 2008 to 2015, Harley-Davidson sold a device called a Screamin’ Eagle engine tuner (available in regular and pro variety), which allowed anyone to hack into their Hog’s emissions control software and dial it back to the simpler times of the 1950’s, when the kids were all excited about a hot new dance craze called the Twist, and America’s major cities were blanketed in a thick gray haze of Beijing-level air pollution.
As part of the settlement, Harley is required to stop making the tuners, to buy back and destroy all the ones currently for sale, and to spend $3 million on an as-yet-unspecified special project to reduce air pollution.
It’s no coincidence that Harley-Davidson was busted so soon after the Volkswagen emissions scandal, with the EPA taking a closer look at the so-called defeat devices auto companies have used to cheat emissions tests.
Odds are good that Harley’s won’t be the only wheels on the road that will be forced to clean up their act.
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Sorry (I Ain’t Sorry)
By Melissa Croninon Aug 4, 2016Share
What’s a car company to do when its name becomes synonymous with dirty emissions? If you’re Volkswagen, seek redemption.
This week, the German auto manufacturer announced the rollout of air pollution-cutting filters on 7 million of its new cars. The particulate filters, which should cut soot by 90 percent by 2022, will cause “significant reduction” in vehicles’ emissions, according to the company. Beginning in 2017, the Volkswagen Tiguan and the Audi A5 will sport the new filters.
This is a change — or, at the very least, a mea culpa — for the company whose environmental track record was demolished in the wake of a massive emissions regulations cheating scandal uncovered in 2015. The rigged emissions tests that Volkswagen programmed for 11 million cars released as much as 41,000 tons of nitrogen oxides (a group of gases that contribute to air pollution) into the air annually. They also earned the company multiple investigations into its emissions practices, a drop in stock prices, and, most recently, a lawsuit brought by the German state of Bavaria.
With the new filters, can we believe that Volkswagen is really turning a new, greener leaf? It’s a possibility — but not a guarantee.
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Volkswagen says it’s cleaning up its emissions, this time for reals
By Melissa Croninon 1 Mar 2016commentsShare
“It doesn’t need repairs. It’s a perfect car!” said Volkswagen automobile executive Juergen Stackmann, suddenly defensive when a protestor interrupted his speech and scurried across the stage at a Geneva Motor Show on Tuesday. Outfitted in a Volkswagen repairman uniform, the protestor, British comedian Simon Brodkin, pretended to install a “cheat box” on the car — a funny, fake version of events that were not funny and very real.
In 2015, environmental regulators discovered that Volkswagen had been installing “defeat devices” that tricked regulators into thinking its diesel cars met U.S. emissions standards, when they were actually releasing too much pollution to meet the standards all the time. The software allowed Volkswagen to “cheat” on emissions tests by detecting when the engine was being tested, and alter its performance.
According to The Telegraph, Brodkin is the same man who threw fake money at suspended FIFA president Sepp Blatter last year.
The prank lasted a glorious five seconds, with Brodkin even managing to poke his head under the car’s bumper. Alone on the stage for a few moments before security ushered the protester away, Stackmann did his best to fend off the weight of the biggest automobile scandal in decades.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you very much!” Stackmann said, probably praying for a swift and painless end to his living nightmare.
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Volkswagen protestor creates a glorious ruckus over emissions scandal
Mother Jones
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I guess it was just a few bad apples. That’s a relief:
Volkswagen has blamed its emissions scandal on a “small group” of people and has suspended a number of staff as Matthias Müller was unveiled as its new chief executive.
….Berthold Huber, the acting head of VW’s supervisory board, called the crisis a “moral and policy disaster”….“The test manipulations are a moral and political disaster for Volkswagen. The unlawful behaviour of engineers and technicians involved in engine development shocked Volkswagen just as much as it shocked the public.”
This is ridiculous. What incentive do low-level engineers and technicians have to do this on their own? Hell, they couldn’t even take on a project like this unless their managers OKed the time to do it, and their managers wouldn’t do it unless they were being pressed by higher-ups. Anybody who’s ever worked at a big corporation knows this perfectly well. And according to Bloomberg, that’s exactly what happened:
Volkswagen AG executives in Germany controlled the key aspects of emissions tests whose results the carmaker now admits were faked, according to three people familiar with the company’s U.S. operations.
….Their accounts show the chain of command and those involved in the deception stretched to Volkswagen headquarters…. Ulrich Hackenberg…. Wolfgang Hatz are among those who will leave the company in the wake of Winterkorn’s resignation two days ago, two people familiar with the matter said. The two previously ran units at the heart of the affair — Hackenberg, a Winterkorn confidant, was responsible for VW brand development from 2007 to 2013, while Hatz ran the group’s motor development from 2007 to 2011.
Will it go even higher? Stay tuned. However, I’ll call BS on UBS, which apparently thinks this scandal “could signal the eventual end of the combustion engine.” Please. There’s no difficulty “amassing accurate data” on engine emissions, as one of their analysts suggests. VW amassed very precise data. They just chose to hide it by means of a calculated, premeditated, multi-year fraud. Anyone who hasn’t done the same should be in fine shape.
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VW Tries to Blame Engine Emissions Fraud on Low-Level "Engineers and Technicians"
Mother Jones
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Days after Volkswagen admitted that half a million cars it sold in the US contained software enabling them to evade clean air laws, top Environmental Protection Agency officials said they are planning to toughen emissions testing for all automakers. The EPA now plans to examine vehicles for so-called defeat devices.
In a letter released this morning, the EPA said that federal regulations allow the agency to “test or require testing on any vehicle at a designated location, using driving cycles and conditions that may reasonably be expected to be encountered in normal operation and use, for the purposes of investigating a potential defeat device.” The EPA said it planned to begin conducting these additional procedures when vehicles undergo emissions and fuel economy testing, and it warned that the new procedures “may add time to the confirmatory test process and…additional mileage may be accumulated.”
“We are stepping up our testing,” Janet McCabe, the EPA’s acting assistant administrator, told reporters. “We take seriously our responsibility to oversee the enforcement of clean air regulations. The VW violations have made it clear that we need to adapt our oversight.”
Last Friday, the EPA issued a citation to Volkswagen for equipping nearly 500,000 diesel-powered cars sold since 2009 with software that can detect when the car is undergoing federal testing for smog-forming emissions. During the test, the cars meet the standard; under normal driving conditions, emissions are up to 40 times higher. Similar devices were installed on some 11 million VW cars worldwide, producing illegal air pollution that may contribute to thousands of deaths. The resulting scandal devastated VW’s share value and forced the ouster of its CEO.
The EPA is currently investigating the full extent of the illegal software program and could ultimately deliver up to $18 billion in fines. Today’s announcement doesn’t affect that investigation. Officials said that no recall has been announced and that if one is eventually called for, VW drivers will hear about it directly from the company.
EPA chief Gina McCarthy said the agency is concerned that other automakers could have similar devices that have gone undetected. Even if they don’t, VW is responsible for a new raft of regulatory headaches for all companies that want to sell cars in the US.
Chris Grundler, director of the EPA’s Office of Transportation, wouldn’t say how exactly his agency would sniff out defeat devices. But it would add additional time and rigor to the testing process, he said.
“We’re not going to tell them what the test is,” he said. “They don’t need to know.”
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The Feds Have a Secret Plan to Stop the Next Car Pollution Scandal
Mother Jones
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On Friday I saw a bunch of headlines about Volkswagen facing possibly huge fines for violating EPA rules. There have been a lot of headlines like this recently, so I sort of shrugged and moved on.
It wasn’t until yesterday that I actually read a couple of the stories and realized what Volkswagen had actually done. Once I did, words failed me. So let’s just hand the mike to Mark Kleiman:
The story reads like the most paranoid anti-corporate fantasy, until you get to the line where the firm admits what it did….In the VW case, code was written into the engine-control software to detect the pattern of pedal and steering operations characteristic of an emissions test. Then, and only then, the car’s emissions-control machinery would kick in. Once the test was over, the software noticed that, too, and returned to normal — that is to say, illegally and dangerously dirty — operations, at about 40x the permitted — and advertised — level of nitrous oxide emissions.
Now just think about the depth of corporate depravity involved. This wasn’t one rogue engineer or engineering group at work. People up and down the chain had to be party to the crime. And note that the conspiracy held together for six years, and was finally broken not by an internal leak but by the work of outside scientists at the University of West Virginia.
In a nutshell: a whole range of VW and Audi “clean diesel” models were spewing immense amounts of nitrous oxide—a precursor to ozone formation—into the air we breathe. But if you took one of these cars in for a smog check, its engine-control software temporarily put it into a special mode that would pass the test. As soon as the test was over, the engine returned to its smog-spewing ways.
This goes far beyond most safety issues with cars. Whether we like it or not, car manufacturers always face tradeoffs between cost and safety. Having those conversations is a normal part of engineering life. Even in infamous case like the Pinto gas tank, what you have is a normal conversation that went way overboard. As bad as it is, it’s understandable that stuff like this happens occasionally.
But that’s not what this is. There was no cost involved. In fact, writing the code to do this cost Volkswagen money. Nor was it something that took place just among a small group of product managers with bad incentives. This was coldly premeditated. It required substantial testing to make it work right. It happened across not just different models, but across two different nameplates. It lasted for six years until it was discovered. And it was done not as a tradeoff of some kind, but solely to make the car peppier during test drives so that VW could sell more diesel models.
How far up does this go? It’s hard to believe it doesn’t go up pretty far. And it must have left behind a significant paper trail. So what’s next? Given the calculated nature of the crime, and the fact that it almost certainly killed people, Kleiman doesn’t think civil fines are enough:
When people conspire to commit a crime that harms the health of untold numbers of people, shouldn’t criminal charges at least be considered? And not only against the company, but against every official in it who can be shown to have known about the conspiracy….The most horrible thing about this case is that very few if any of the people involved will have lost any sleep over their guilt in making sick people sicker (and killing some of them) and none will lose face among their friends and neighbors. Even if some are found guilty of felonies, life won’t be nearly as bad for them as it is for someone who gets caught committing burglary: someone whose contribution to human suffering can’t hold a candle to what the VW conspirators pulled off.
In Georgia, a CEO is about to go to jail for a long time—maybe for life—because he approved the sale of tainted peanuts across state lines. The result was a nationwide salmonella outbreak that sickened hundreds and killed nine people. The CEO’s brother and a quality control manager at the plant also face prison time.
Did VW’s actions sicken hundreds and kill at least nine people? A quick swag suggests that VW emitted about 3,000 excess tons of nitrous oxide in Southern California alone over the past six years, which may have caused as many as a dozen or more incremental deaths. If we can put a peanut CEO in prison for this, why not an auto CEO?
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Mother Jones
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Volkswagen produced hundreds of thousands of cars with a device made to intentionally evade air pollution standards, according to a citation issued today by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The EPA alleges that nearly 500,000 VW cars sold in the United States over the last several years were equipped with the device, which the EPA says enabled the onboard computer to detect when the car was undergoing an emissions test. At that time, the engine would operate in a way that complied with emissions standards; at all other times, the car would produce emissions of harmful gases up to 40 times greater than allowed by federal law. The primary gas in question is nitrogen oxide, which causes smog, which is a leading cause of respiratory ailments.
This table from the citation lists the models that were allegedly outfitted with the illegal device. All of the cars in question had diesel engines:
EPA
The EPA cites a 2014 study by the International Council on Clean Transportation that found a troubling gap between real-world and laboratory emissions in some diesel cars, without naming specific manufacturers.
“When you test it in the lab, they looked great,” said Anup Thiruvengadam, one of the study’s authors. “But when you actually drive them around, emissions were much higher.”
The citation issued today lifted the curtain on the specific cars in question and delineates the federal laws VW is accused of violating. The EPA is continuing to investigate the charges and has passed the citation to the Justice Department, where it will be up to federal prosecutors to prove the charges. Volkswagen could be compelled to fix all the cars and pay up to $3,750 per car (roughly $18 billion altogether) in fines.
In a statement, a Volkswagen spokesperson said the company was cooperating with the investigation but declined to comment further.
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The Feds Just Accused Volkswagen of an Unbelievable Scheme to Evade Pollution Laws
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