Volkswagen to hit Pikes Peak with electric racer

Volkswagen had hoped that today's long planned Pikes Peak announcement would help it clear the toxic Dieselgate air in its weakest market of the United States.

After all, what better way to draw a going-forward line under the emissions-cheating scandal than by attacking the most American of all motorsport events with an all-electric racer and a French Le Mans 24 Hour winner?

Romain Dumas has won Le Mans twice, as well as another six 24-hour races and the 2016 World Endurance Championship with Porsche, and run successfully at Pikes Peak's Race to the Clouds before.

But that was all before the Volkswagen Group's latest ethics scandal broke on Sunday, with confirmation that it pushed Daimler and the BMW Group to test exhaust emissions on both monkeys and people in an effort to convince the world that it's diesel engines were safe.

Suddenly, a one-off racing car trying to break the battery-electric record up a Colorado mountain in June looked too little, too late.

If Volkswagen was looking for a good-news boost less than a week after admitting it pushed the European Research Association for Environment and Heath (EUGT) down a morally bankrupt path, it didn't get it.

Instead, Germany's media focused on why the EUGT research group, which increasingly looks like a sham funded by the BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen groups to counter a World Health Organisation's negative findings on diesel emissions, invented immoral tests.

Far from being surprised about it all, Volkswagen's legal department was fighting in US courts to keep the monkey test results out of Dieselgate revelations as recently as last Friday (January 26).

No findings were ever published or reported, largely because the tests didn't support the argument that modern diesels were cleaner than older ones. Emissions from the 1990s F150 Ford truck irritated the monkeys respiratory systems less than the 2013 Volkswagen Beetle, much to the EUGT's surprise. Even when the Beetle was a Dieselgate emissions-cheater car.

Volkswagen's chief lobbyist, Dr Thomas Steg, offered himself up on Tuesday as a sacrificial lamb for the car maker, and his superiors quickly accepted.

"The methods used by EUGT in the United States were wrong. They were unethical and repulsive," Volkswagen Group CEO Matthias Mueller said on Monday.

"I am sorry that Volkswagen was involved in the matter as one of the sponsors of EUGT. Over the weekend, we had to learn once more that there is still a long way ahead of us to regain lost trust," he added.

Yesterday, Daimler suspended an unnamed employee and hired an external law firm (it did the same thing after its "thermal switches", which turn off the NOx-cleaning systems in cold weather, became public knowledge) to investigate its role in the EUGT.

"The Board of Management of Daimler AG has decided to suspend the employee, who was a member of the board of EUGT," Daimler said in a statement. It went on to repeat that it was "appalled by the nature of the studies and their implementation."

So hoping for a race announcement to deliver a positive PR kick start to a new era of zero-emission, electric cars either showed how shockingly out of touch with the public mood Wolfsburg's senior managers really are.

Not only them, though, but the car industry's main lobby group, the VDA, too.

"In view of the recent headlines, I would add that the companies involved swiftly distanced themselves from the events and emphatically and clearly criticized the procedure," the departing VDA president, Matthias Wissmann, said.

"I can assure you, this industry has learned from past mistakes."

"The awareness within this industry that we must remain within the borders of what is socially and ethically responsible has grown recognizably," he insisted.

The Pikes Peak story could have been so good, too, with today's announcement carefully planned for months.

Volkswagen intends to deliver the first IQ-branded electric car next year on its way to 20 models by 2025, and, besides, it had unfinished business on the 4302-metre peak.

"The Pikes Peak International Hill Climb is a big challenge, because every driver only has one attempt," Dumas said.

"There is one big advantage of having an electric car in the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb: the power remains constant over the entire 20km route.

"By contrast, vehicles fitted with combustion engines lose a significant amount of power in the thin mountain air. I had to live with that in my previous appearances here.

"I am really looking forward to being able to drive from the start at 2862 metres to the finishing line at full power for the first time," he said.

Dumas is gunning for a new electric-car record on the mountain, which Volkswagen Motorsport's director, Sven Smeets, insisting it's a strong possibility.

"Romain is one of the fastest drivers to have ever entered the Pikes Peak race. What's more, he has thousands of kilometres of experience with racing prototypes under his belt. This makes him the perfect driver for Volkswagen as it makes its debut with a fully electric racing car," Smeets said.

"The rules allow a lot of freedom, which allows us to demonstrate the efficiency of Volkswagen's future battery and drive train technology in a competitive environment."