No more vehicle emission cheating

OPINION

By now, everybody knows the Volkswagen Group got caught cheating on emissions tests, in a blatant, illegal move that saved it, and cost it, billions of euros.

Now, embarrassed that the cheat was caught in the US and not in Germany or even in Europe, new cars are being tested harder and harder than ever before. And while European governments have yet to uncover evidence of anybody else using a Volkswagen-style “defeat” device to run around the law, many of its rivals are not coming up smelling of roses.

In fact, the only inescapable conclusion to draw from all of this closing-the-door-after-the-horse-has-bolted testing and indignation from the EU member states is that the entire car industry cheats.

Most of the cheating that goes on isn’t illegal, like the Volkswagen Group’s software fiddle (that turned on a car’s maximum NOx-cleaning systems when it figured out it was in a laboratory, but didn’t bother when it was on a public road), but it’s every bit as widespread and has the exact same intention.

But whether it’s legal or not, a lot of what’s been going on is unquestionably wrong.

The car companies have argued they’ve been using the grey-area margins allowed for in the EU’s outdated New European Driving Cycle (NEDC) test, but the reality is they’ve been playing games that any outsider would tell you are unethical.

Mercedes-Benz, for example, had its all-new four-cylinder turbodiesel C-Class fail miserably in an independent real-world emissions test in The Netherlands two months ago.

It did so again in a 93-car test, costing more than €1 million, in Germany, but so did 16 others.

Questions about the failures so incensed Mercedes-Benz’s PR team that one of its operatives told a motoring journalist to 'f#@$ off', and accused him of attempting to lump it with Volkswagen to affect parent company Daimler’s share price.

But this is what happened, and you can be the judge: Mercedes-Benz fits three types of NOx-cleaning technology to its diesel-powered cars, one of which is Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR), which diverts exhaust gases back into the combustion chamber to burn off nastiest stuff. You know, the NOx that causes tens of thousands of deaths a year.

Except the Benz technology doesn’t always do that. At temperatures below 10 degrees Celsius, it just switches the system off completely (the Dutch test was conducted at six degrees). It does this, Benz insists, because the EU’s rules allow it to take measures under “unusual environmental conditions” to guarantee the EGR is still effective after 160,000km.

In Europe, at least half of the population can expect the temperature to fall below 10 degrees for about four months of the year, yet Mercedes-Benz defines it as “unusual”. If the world’s oldest car company is incapable of engineering a car to operate effectively for a third of the year, it can hardly claim “The Best Or Nothing” as a slogan, can it?

But if you think that’s bad, they do the same thing over at Opel, but lift the cut-off temperature to 17 degrees, which covers about nine months of the year.

Err, what?

The German government pulled in all 17 car-makers when it twigged to the ruse, and used its upcoming electric-car rebate as leverage to convince Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Opel, Volkswagen and Audi (but, pointedly, not BMW, which is looking increasingly like a clean-skin) to voluntarily recall 630,000 cars across the country to fix it.

Even then, the car companies insisted they were in full compliance with the law, which makes you wonder why they were in such a hurry to recall the cars, but not as much as you wonder what’s going through the heads of the 12 companies (Jeep, Hyundai, Kia, Mazda, Honda, Mitsubishi, Renault, Nissan, Citroen, Peugeot, Fiat and Volvo) who ignored the government’s suggestion.

Daimler saw its share price fall nine percent on the back of this hiccup, its profit figures and being hauled in front of the US Department of Justice (ominous in itself, as such matters are usually handled by the Environmental Protection Agency) to chat, and not casually by the fire over a snifter of port, about its emissions certification processes.

Peugeot, meanwhile, joined Renault on the list of car companies raided by the French Government’s fraud squad over the differences in its laboratory and real-world test figures. Its share price fell nearly three percent.

The Volkswagen Group, meanwhile, arrived at a very expensive, very expansive settlement with the US Government over Dieselgate, promising to fix or buy back its 482,000 cheater cars in the US and setting aside €17 billion to clean up the mess globally. Lovely, but it has repaired very few of the cheater cars in Germany to date, and has yet to fix a single machine in the UK.

In the same week, Mitsubishi was discovered (by Nissan, of all its possible interrogators) using cheater high tyre pressures to illegally lower fuel consumption in lab tests – for the last 25 years.

It seems unavoidably obvious those emissions laws are being treated with cavalier contempt and that the whole thing is a sport waiting to be gamed, for a profit.

As all this was going on, the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA) insisted that all the vehicles implicated in the 17-brand German investigation were “compliant with current regulatory requirements” and that the NEDC the real-world figures were deviating from was an obsolete measurement.

“This is why we have been advocating for many years for an updated laboratory test – WLTP – as well as an additional new test to measure pollutant emissions on the road (the Real Driving Emissions, or RDE test),” ACEA Secretary General Erik Jonnaert suggested.

“These results show again that we now need to move forward with the new testing conditions in order to bridge the gap with the lab test.

“RDE represents a tremendous effort for Europe’s car manufacturers, both in terms of investments and production, but our industry will take up this challenge.”

That’s all lovely, though it’s thoroughly disingenuous. Sure, they’ve advocated for it, but Reuters has reported that the ACEA Chairman (and the boss of Renault-Nissan) Carlos Ghosn doesn’t believe any significant progress can be made on NOx before 2019 and that, even then, the ACEA would prefer to raise the EU limit by 70 per cent (or up to more than three times the US limit), rather than lower it.

It’s also massively disingenuous because while they want the new test in place, they only want it on the terms that suit them (why else do you suppose it’s been delayed so often?) and they’ve demanded some form of compensation for the current fiddles any such real-world test would rob them of.

Most of these legal “cheats” are coming to light now only because the carmakers are admitting to things that will be banned under either the WLTP or the RDE, in an effort to pry some sort of numerical compensation out of the EU.

Greg Archer, the Vehicles Programme Manager at non-profit lobby group, Transport & Environment, isn’t surprised. He’s also got a long list of legal “cheats”, just like the temperature one, that are only just coming to light and which go a long way to explaining why there’s such a huge difference between NEDC laboratory consumption figures and fleet data, which suggests real-world fuel economy and emissions haven’t actually improved in decades.

Archer arrives at his lab-to-real world differential figures by looking through the European Commission’s correlation exercises, designed to ease the shock of the switch from the lab-based NEDC to the real-world tests.

“The manufacturers have been saying that ‘we do this and that in the NEDC but we are not allowed to do these things in the real-world test but we want to be given credit for them.’

“If you add all these things up you get to a gap of between 40 and 45 per cent.

“The companies with the lowest gap in CO2 to real-world tests are Fiat and Toyota, consistently, but I suspect only because they don’t make use of every flexibility they are offered.”

Companies who loudly insisted, in the wake of the Volkswagen scandal, that their NOx testing was completely legitimate have shown huge discrepancies between their test figures for CO2 and the real-world figures. Archer claimed last year that the gap was biggest at Mercedes-Benz, at well over 50 percent.

“We don’t know enough flexibilities in the test to make them add up to 50 percent, so something else is going on,” he noted four months ago, presciently predicting the temperature-control scandal the company is now embroiled in.

“I am not saying that means there is a default device but they need to explain how they achieved such low levels in the laboratory and got more than 50 per cent more in the real-world test.

“How they can be producing such incredibly low overall CO2 figures in a laboratory but not when these vehicles are operating on the road? Where are they designed to operate if not on the road?

“From what we know about the different ways manufacturers manipulate the tests, they should not be able to get more than 40-45 per cent difference between test and real-world figures.”

If all of this isn’t enough to get the attention of the German car-makers, this last part might: the Deutsche Umwelthilfe environmental group this week sued the city of Stuttgart to get diesel-powered cars banned from the city, because Stuttgart has the highest airborne NOx pollution levels in Europe.

Stuttgart is also home to Mercedes-Benz, Porsche and Bosch, but if they won’t take the respiratory health of their own families into consideration when they come across emissions laws they don’t like, do you still believe they’ll consider yours?