Volkswagen comes clean

Volkswagen is pouring money, engineers and (whisper it) software coders into an upgrade that will leave its Golf diesel engine using more fuel than it did four years ago.

The Volkswagen Group’s 'Evo' development of its 2.0-litre EA288 turbo-diesel, due to appear in the 2020 Mk8 Golf, should sneak beneath the 90g/km barrier for CO2 emissions, with the company’s development boss suggesting it might drop to around 89g/km.

That sounds a lot less impressive when you go back to the launch data of the Golf Mk7, a facelifted version of which is now being launched in Europe ahead of its mid-2017 Australian release, which boasted its eco-friendly 1.6-litre TDI emits only 87g/km.

On the surface, it looks like Volkswagen’s turbo-diesels are going backwards, but all is not what it seems.

Volkswagen has, engineering boss Dr Frank Welsch admitted, quietly changed its official fuel consumption and emissions figures to better reflect real-world driving data.

“We changed our measurement process, that’s why the numbers went up,” Dr Welsch admitted.

“Once we had 87 grams in the Golf 1.6 TDI. If you go into the package today it’s about 95 to 96 grams for that same car,” Dr Welsch admitted.

“If you compare the CO2 of a Golf today, in certain cases it’s more than it was. In our special situation, we wanted to bring down the numbers between what we say and what it is in the real world for owners.”

That “special situation” is, of course, the Dieselgate emissions-cheating scandal and its $20 billion fallout. Dr Welsch insisted moving to more realistic economy and emissions figures had short-term pain, but was a way to restore public faith in Volkswagen’s credibility.

“The 2.0-litre TDI will have a next generation. The EA288 Evo will get down enormously in CO2. That’s where we will invest and we will start selling that in 18 months to two years.

“But below 80 grams is not possible. Just having the new generation of this may bring it down by seven or eight grams. Maybe we get it back to 89 grams, but it will be much closer to a real-life 89 grams.

“We use tolerances more like the real-world driving test course now. We have a wide range of tolerances we can use (to calculate official economy data) and everybody is using it so the CO2 goes down.

“But today we are using smaller tolerances so we have a bit higher CO2 values and we think the customers will see this as a positive and see it as a better engine because they can achieve the claimed figures.”

It was the very act of maximising these tolerances for both Europe and the US that lead Volkswagen down the bumpy path to Dieselgate for its EU4 and EU5 cars.

A group within the diesel engine development operation programmed the car’s software to understand when it was in a testing laboratory and switched it to its cleanest running mode. Among the troubles with that were that it was classified as an illegal “defeat device", it left millions of cars not compliant with the road rules and it effectively didn’t have any exhaust scrubbing whenever it thought it wasn’t in a lab.

It left unchecked NOx and, especially, NO2 emissions burping out of its cars all over the world, to the point were the World Health Organisation (WHO) has now declared urban air pollution a “public health emergency” and pointed the finger at transport pollution as a cause.

It insisted NO2 emissions alone lead to 72,000 premature deaths a year in Europe, including 21,600 in Italy 14,100 in the UK and more than 10,000 in Volkswagen’s German homeland.

“Right now, we go up and we are much more far away (on emissions). In our situation it’s difficult to compare what it was (the figures).

“The former times it (the figure claimed) was all legal. We wanted the lowest tolerances and so did everybody else.”

Volkswagen’s new stance is vindicated by Belgian-based NGO, Transport Environment, which late last year released a report showing that Volkswagen’s EU6-compliant diesels were not only the cleanest in Europe, but also the closest to their claimed mileages in the real world.

The study, compiled from data from the UK, Germany, France and public databases on 230 different models, found every other diesel car-maker in Europe had higher emissions than Volkswagen.

While Volkswagen’s EU6 cars emitted just double the EU limit, the fleets of Fiat and Suzuki emitted 15 times the limit, Renault-Nissan 14 times and GM’s European arm, Opel, 10 times.

The only car-makers remotely close to Volkswagen’s relative cleanliness were stablemates Seat, Skoda and Audi, along with BMW, MINI and Mazda.

Still, it insisted emissions from Volkswagen’s EU5 diesels, built from 2011 to 2015, were the worst in Europe, and there were 29 million unchecked EU5 cars still on European roads.