The Environmental Protection Agency’s massive legal settlement with the automaker Volkswagen over the company’s use of “defeat devices” has a glaring problem.
The settlement reveals an inconvenient truth about EPA’s case against VW: there’s no engineering fix for the problem.
What EPA admits in the consent decree is there’s no way for VW’s diesel cars to meet federal emissions standards while maintaining high vehicle performance in the nearly 600,000 affected vehicles. The conclusion suggests there could be a problem with EPA emissions rules for diesel cars compared to other countries, like European nations.
VW has agreed to pay out $14.7 billion and buy back vehicles from customers as a result of being caught cheating on emissions tests, but the settlement admits there’s no practical engineering fix for the affected vehicles.
“At the present time, there are no practical engineering solutions that would, without negative impact to vehicle functions and unacceptable delay, bring the 2.0 Liter Subject Vehicles into compliance with the exhaust emission standards and the on-board diagnostics requirements to which VW certified the vehicles to EPA and CARB,” reads the 225-page settlement.
That complicates things for VW. EPA also gave VW the option of modifying affected vehicles if their owners don’t want to sell them, but the company has yet to propose any modification plans. Indeed, they may not be able to come up with an engineering fix while also maintaining vehicle efficiency. One the other hand, what VW owner would want a modification that could impact their engine’s performance?
VW Group CEO Hans-Dieter Potsch admitted in December the massive technical problems with meeting U.S. emissions rules, which are stricter than in Europe. Potsch said VW engineers “quite simply could not find a way to meet the tougher” nitrogen oxide limits from EPA.
So instead, the company developed software meant to trick EPA emissions testing equipment into thinking the vehicle was complying with stricter NOX standards. VW embraced the technology and used it to sell its diesel vehicles to Americans.
“We are not talking about a one-off mistake, but a whole chain of mistakes,” Potsch said.
The cascading engineering problem for EPA means other companies selling diesel vehicles could be pulling similar stunts in order to get around the seemingly unworkable rules.
Still, not everyone agrees with VW and EPA there’s no fix for their diesel cars.
“Throughout this whole thing, my main point has been that I just don’t understand why they can’t find a fix,” John German, an engineer at the International Council on Clean Transportation who helped expose VW’s cheating, told ClimateWire.
“It’s very difficult to believe it’s not possible,” he said.
German may have a point, but if there were a clear fix for the problem, it’s likely VW would have gone with it instead of creating devices to trick government emissions tests. Now they have to pay out billions of dollars for selling cars that emitted up to 40 times the amount of nitrogen oxide that’s allowed under federal law.
“Today’s settlement restores clean air protections that Volkswagen so blatantly violated,” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said in a statement.
“And it secures billions of dollars in investments to make our air and our auto industry even cleaner for generations of Americans to come,” she said. “This agreement shows that EPA is committed to upholding standards to protect public health, enforce the law, and to find innovative ways to protect clean air.”
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