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Diesel Emissions “Cheating” Goes Deep in EU

09.20.16 | Blog | By:

According to a new report from NGO Transport & Environment (T&E), diesel emissions cheating by Volkswagen is just the tip of the iceberg. The study used emissions tests data from around 230 diesel cars gathered in tests by the British, French and Italian governments and public databases. France was the country with the most “dirty” cars on the road, with 5.5 million not reaching standards, followed by Germany on 5.3 million, Britain 4.3 million and Italy 3.1 million. The report notes that:

“…approvals are often done to support domestic manufacturers or as a business for the approval authority. This feeble system of approvals is exacerbated by technical services that are supposed to undertake tests but routinely only witness these in carmakers’ own labs and are paid for their assistance. Sometimes the testing and approval organisations are even the same. Once the vehicle has been approved there is virtually no independent on-road checks to verify its performance in use due to a lack of will or resources.”

In an ironic twist, Volkswagen’s diesel vehicles were the LEAST polluting as compared to the worst offenders, though they have the most vehicles on the road. Notably, the VW diesel engines in question were mostly of the previous Euro 5 era which were sold between 2011 and 2015. T&E estimates that there are around 29 million “dirty” diesel vehicles on EU roads, or about 76% of all diesel vehicles registered in the EU in the past 5 years.

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The problem, as I’ve noted in previous posts, is meeting tough Euro 6 NOx limits and the difference between meeting laboratory test with prescribed protocols under the diesel regulation versus real-world driving that consumers actually do. The EU is introducing a Real Driving Emissions (RDE) test and from September 2017 will ban diesels that emit double the lab limit for NOx.

To date no fines or other legal action has been taken by EU member states, which are charged with enforcing the diesel emissions regulation. The European Commission has promised to take action as well.  But it apparently goes much, much further, as pointed out by Forbes this week:

There has been general agreement that the test results in the lab do not correlate with regular driving,” former EU Industry Commissioner Günter Verheugen told an investigative committee of the EU Parliament a few weeks ago. “Everybody knew that.” Everybody knew it, but nobody wanted to look. One after the other, former high-ranking EU officials claimed that because it was unimaginable that automakers would cheat, there was no inquiry into the cause of the glaring discrepancies.

Der Spiegel found additional documents that appear to suggest that regulators and the auto industry in Germany were working in concert:

“More and more documents about VW’s diesel fraud emerge, and increasingly sharper becomes the focus of a bureaucracy that sets strict limits for auto emissions, only to look the other way when the emissions are to be monitored. It’s as if there was a tacit understanding between regulators and the regulated.”