The VW Scandal

What's the story with Volkswagen and emissions testing? How did the car manufacturer hide vehicle emissions? Scott Benjamin of CarStuff joins us to talk about it.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in technic technology with tech Stuff from Half Stuff.
Hey there everybody, and welcome to Tech Stuff. I am
Jonathan Strickland and joining me once again half of the
Amazing Car Stuff team. Scott, Benjamin, welcome back to the show.
How do everybody? Scott, It's great to have you here.
We just finished recording a show. I think these are

(00:26):
actually gonna play out of sequence. But I just finished
recording a show with your co host Ben Bolan, who
was spectacular, So I I expect you will do no
less in this episode. The pressure is on. But unlike
Ben's Ben, Ben didn't have to prepare anything. I specifically
told him not to prepare, whereas you, uh, fortunately have

(00:49):
talked a lot about this particular topic. We are going
to talk about the Volkswagen scandal. What happened, uh, what
the actual technical details are. Maybe get some information about
diesel versus gasoline cars, you know, kind of get an
understanding of what exactly happened and what will what what
the fallout is looking like so far? And spoiler alert, folks,

(01:13):
this is an ongoing story. It's not like we have
an end where we can say, and then they were
charged this much money and find no exactly, because even
now with the fixed information that we we now have
that we just got a few days ago, there are
still some unanswered questions in this in this fixed plan,
they say they've got the plan, but they're not quite

(01:33):
exactly telling us what they're going to do with it.
And only that, but they've also recently announced a a
different emissions possible subterfuge trick thing that's going to be
in the two thousands, or was supposed to be in
the two thousand and sixteen models, which currently are not
available here in the United States. They're quarantined at US ports.

(01:53):
Right there's a hold on all sales of Volkswagen diesel
vehicles from and some yours are being held back. You
can't get one right now exactly. And I'll talk about
what that particular possibly shady technology does. But before we
get into that, one of the things I wanted to

(02:14):
do is kind of lay the groundwork. I usually take
the first part of any episode to kind of talk
about what what were the conditions that led up to
this point, and really to look at this one. I
wanted to go way way way back, all right, because
I wanted to talk about the conditions that led up
to things like the Clean Air Act. So in order

(02:36):
to do that, you have to look at the dependence
upon the internal combustion engine as the primary means of
powering vehicles. Now, Scott, I know you are very well
aware that electric vehicles proceeded internal combustion vehicles. Their electric
cars were around before we had and internal combustion cars. Yes, yes,

(03:00):
they were in fact very prevalent. I mean taxi taxi
companies operated on all electric platforms at a certain point
in history. You can look at photographs of New York
and I don't know, we're talking to turn of the
century stuff, the turn of the twentieth century, where you know,
it's all every car that you see in the shot
is all electric. Um. Yeah, there was a point when
there were far more electric vehicles on the road than

(03:21):
there were gasoline vehicles. And they were efficient, they were fast.
One thing they were not was they didn't have incredibly
long driving ranges. But at first that didn't really matter.
And the reason it didn't matter is because with the
development of the automobile also came the development of the
road system in the United States. So here in the US,
at least, the place you were most likely to encounter

(03:45):
roads that were suitable for driving on were in cities,
which meant that your driving range didn't have to be
that far. You weren't doing miles and miles of driving
every single day. You might be doing a few miles
of driving, which was important for electric vehicles because there
was no real way to recharge once you hit the road. Yeah.
In fact, they had the uh, the the original idea.
I guess you know where Tesla is getting his battery

(04:06):
swap idea from. I'm sorry, Mosco. I guess I always
refer to him as Tesla, but that's not correct. Of course,
I'm sure he would love that. Actually, well, the Tesla,
the Tesla models that are proposing that, you know, they'll
be these battery swap situations where you can drive up
and leave your old battery, pick up a brand new one.
So that's a quick change, a relative quick change, and

(04:27):
then you're on your way and you have to return
for that battery. Uh you know, it's like a rental almost,
you have to come back and get it. But uh,
that idea is nothing brand new. Of course, these these
old taxis that I'm talking about would drive into a
station and they would swap the batteries and they're back
out on the road to collect the next fair. It
had as little downtime as possible. Yeah, and they ran
constantly around the clock, but you know they were constantly

(04:48):
getting new batteries as well. Right. And if you look
at the development of the roads. Once we got to
a point where roads were being built out beyond the cities,
where they were connecting different cities together, a lot of
people had the desire to travel those roads. The roads
were there by necessity, but now people are like, I
have an opportunity to go places I couldn't go before.
But the problem was the electric vehicles weren't the vehicles

(05:10):
that could get them there, because if it was further
away than say eighteen miles, you weren't going to reach
your destination. So the internal combustion engine had an advantage
over that, and that you could have fueling stations along
the way. And the other huge advantage was because Henry
Ford figured out how to do mass production, and through
mass production they were able to dramatically reduce the price

(05:31):
of a vehicle. So a an internal combustion engine car
cost about a third of what an electric vehicle did.
So you have this mass adoption of the internal combustion engine. Now,
this is why, the reason why I even lay that
groundwork is as the United States in particular becomes a
car culture, and as more and more people start driving

(05:54):
vehicles that use internal combustion, you have more and more
emissions from those vehicles, and it begins to accumulate over time.
And depending upon the type of fuel you're using, if
it's diesel, you get a lot of emissions that contribute
to smog. And then we start seeing super smoggy cities
in different parts of the country. And by the nineteen

(06:16):
fifties and nineteen sixties, you had people concerned about the
quality of air. True, and the cities are inherently bad
about this because they containe, they capture all this, they
get it all in place. And not only that, but
you've also got some cities that geographically kind of hold
on to that material it's expelled from these vehicles. Los

(06:36):
Angeles is the classic example here in the United States.
Exactly right. You can look at some old photographs of
smog in Los Angeles and you can't see buildings. So yeah,
it's it's like a heavy, heavy fog that hung over
the city and it eventually blow away. It would it
would go away, but um you know, not long you know,
not long after it blows out of there, it would
come right back again because there are so many vehicles

(06:57):
that were emitting so many um uh you know, bad
things for the environment. But the noxious gases, right, yeah,
stuff that was bad for the environment. It could cause
health issues if if it was really like if it's
a really smoggy day to this day, in certain cities,
when it's really smoggy, you will hear warnings on the news,
like limit your amount of time outdoors, especially on hot

(07:21):
days where it can be aggravated, because it can end
up either causing or aggravating health issues. Sure, and you
can see examples of this in China today, really really heavy.
I mean they're there's still um and in parts of
Europe too, you know, exactly right, Yeah, there's you can
look at modern day Beijing and see what you know,
Los Angeles look like several decades ago here in the States, right, So,

(07:44):
by the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, different regions in
the US, we're looking at ways of improving air quality
and limiting pollution. And it was really patchwork, you know,
for a long time until about nineteen sixties seven. That's
when the US Congress passed the Air Quality Act. Now
this was the predecessor to the Clean Air Act. The

(08:06):
Air Quality Act had a disadvantage in that it was
meant to have kind of a centralized organization headed by
the Secretary Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare to designate
air quality regions around the United States, and then the
states that those air quality regions were within were supposed

(08:27):
to come up with a plan for pollution control. So,
in other words, the federal government was saying, here are
the areas we have to be worried about, all right, Georgia, California, Texas.
You guys take care of those places. And this lack
of a cohesive approach meant that it was pretty much
doomed to not meet its its goals. And in fact,

(08:52):
after three years by they had fewer than thirty six
regions defined, less than three dozen of the had had
been defined at all, and no state had any sort
of pollution control uh comprehensive plan. And so the solution
then was to bring it all under the control of
the U. S. Congress. Right, Yes, that was when the

(09:13):
Congress ray convened and started to say, all right, well,
this this plan was noble in its intention. We wanted
to make sure we weren't imposing the federal will on
the states. But it's not working. So that's where the
Clean Air Act to tie all this together so that
you understand what's happening at that particular time. This is
this is well, well, you know, the I guess the

(09:35):
term that we're gonna throw around here a little bit
today maybe as the cafe standards and cafe standards were
enacted somewhere around nineteen seventy five, I think the regulations.
These are set of regulations that were enacted by Congress,
and nineteen seventy five, you're you're talking about like the
tail end of the arab oil embargo, so that you
know the fuel crisis. You know where um you see

(09:56):
the lines of people and you know the no gas
today rationing and all the rad with the odd even
system and all that. Um, that is that's the environment
that we're talking about. Yeah, so this was, um, you know,
this was a serious situation for multiple reasons. Also in
nineteen seventy that's when uh, you know, you had the
introduction of Earth Day. So you had this growing support

(10:17):
for a conservation and UH and and concern about the environment. Uh.
In at the same time where you have things like
the oil crisis. I mean, all this stuff is coming
to a head. So it's all fueling this. And we were, well,
we were starting to understand the effects on the human body. Yes,
just just exactly what that that smog was doing to
people that are walking around in the next cloud of

(10:39):
of you know, just awful stuff X in there and saying, hey,
you know, it's weird. We're seeing a lot more people
with asthma these days that kind of stuff, or or
bronchitis or things of that. People are dying of respiratory illness.
We can't quite put our finger on exactly what's causing it,
but it's happening frequently and and and even if you
were to argue that the pollution may not cause it,
it's certainly exacerbated it. So UH. This ended up creating

(11:02):
the Cleaner Act, which set the national standards for pollution
emissions eventually and created a timeline for it, which had
to be adjusted multiple times because, as it turned out,
the standards were uh the standards to make the engines
operate in what had been determined to be a safe
uh set of parameters meant that manufacturers couldn't find a

(11:24):
way to meet that and also make a car that worked.
So so those those um, those goals kept getting pushed.
There was there were uh they they started to look
at pushing the deadline back in seven. They pushed it
back again in um mainly because the technology to create
something that was able to operate under these standards and

(11:49):
do its job was not really an achievable goal for
something that wouldn't cost an astronomical amount of money. And
you know, one thing that I don't think we've even
mentioned yet is we say cafe standards that means corporate
average fuel economy, and that's across the line of vehicles,
across the whole fleet of vehicles. It's not like one
particular vehicle has to meet the standard. It has to
be an average of all vehicles produced. And I know

(12:11):
there's other there's other stuff that goes into this. There's
there's this big Vinn diagram that makes this all work.
But um, the standards are very very uh tough to meet.
I mean they're they're they're a strict set of set
of standards that especially the latest round which was UM
announced and I think it was two thousand eight, all
the way through the model year, and when manufacturers see

(12:32):
the list of what they have to meet, the goals
that they have to meet in order to be in
compliance with this agreement, to sign this agreement and say, yeah,
we agree to sell vehicles in the United States, we
have to meet these goals. Uh. It is a steep
set of standards. And I find it interesting that looking
back now, you know the agreement, the initial agreement in
two thousand eight, UM all those it was very stringent,

(12:55):
very very tough. UM major auto manufacturer signed that agreement.
You know, a bit begrudgingly. You know that they say, well, okay,
we can probably meet these but there's a lot of
back and forth. Volkswagen and Mercedes Benz had the biggest
objection to it. And I don't know if Volkswagen ever
signed that agreement. I I don't know how. I've been

(13:16):
looking all day trying to find out if they actually
signed the agreement, but I can only find information that
goes back into two two th eight where they say
Volkswagen has as of now not signed this agree. Interesting. Yeah,
one of those things where you can't find any definitive
update about whether they did or did not sign. Yeah,
and the reason was they said that it's UM and
i'll just paraphrase this is because they said that UM

(13:38):
it places an unfair, unfairly high burden on passenger cars
well allowing a greater flexibility to let's say, a heavier
light truck. So we're saying it's not exactly the way
that we'd like to see it happen, and it's penalizing
in all things, penalizing people that make UM passenger vehicles
with diesel engines. It's not fair to them. Its white

(14:01):
Mercedes and Volkswagen said, I don't know about this agreement.
I don't think we're gonna sign it, and I will
still dig into that and see if they actually ever did.
But around two eight that was kind of the talk
around the circles was why is not why is b
W NET signing this? And you know it's we'll get
more into the diesel stuff in a minute to explain,
you know, some of the issues that manufacturers run into,

(14:23):
like the scandal is pretty awful. That being said, I
also have at least some sympathy for the difficulty that
engineers face to make things that are satisfying to drive,
that operate within the the fuel economy and efficiency that

(14:43):
is dictated by the government, as well as work within
the emission standards. Okay, you just said the magic three. There,
that's the three things. It's it's fuel economy, performance and
emissions and you can it's have you ever heard the
phrase you can have it done quickly, you can have
it done well, or you could have it done cheaply.

(15:04):
You can pick two out of the three. Yeah, yeah,
and you're never going to find all three. R Well,
somehow folks I can manage to do all three with
their diesel engines back in two thousand. Oh wow, it
was magical too, as it turns out. But before we
jump ahead to that a little bit more just to
kind of cover our bases, uh, The Environmental Protection Agency
has given been given a lot of control as well

(15:24):
when it comes to the emission standards. They were able
to establish the National Ambient Air Quality Standards or in
a a q S. The next I gotta say, that's
a new one to me. Yeah, that's the one that
where the deadline had been extended a couple of times,
Like where where it was clear the states could not
meet that deadline. So I mean, what do you do, Like,
do you what's the well? I guess what's the fine?

(15:47):
And how do you define how much each place pays?
I mean based on what the offense is. Yeah, you
measure that again. And you know, because pollution also doesn't
doesn't necessarily obeyed geography. You could have pollution that is
produced in one place, but it's another place that's dealing
with it. Uh. And and in states where you have
big cities that are close to the border, it maybe

(16:09):
that one city is actually producing the pollution, but the
other city is the one that's really suffering from it.
Dumping into rivers is a great example. Yeah, you know
stuff like that where it flows downstream, Yeah, exactly, or
trucked into a different region. Just simple air patterns exactly.
You know, weather patterns can push it. So, uh, you know,
they they pushed the deadlines a couple of times. It
made me think of like if you're if you're a

(16:30):
parent of a kid and you say I need you
to pick up all these toys before five o'clock and
you're coming there and it's all the toys aren't picked up,
and you're thinking, well, all right, you need to pick
up all these toys before six o'clock because you're like,
I don't really want to punish you, but I really
do want you to pick up these toys where it's done.
But they've just thrown them in their brother's closet. Yeah, see,

(16:50):
pushing it down the road. Yeah, for me, it was
it was all just shoving it into the closet like
that's that. If it's out of sight, that means it's clean. Um.
So one of the things about the Clean Air Act
is that it it did have standards for what kinds
of emissions and how much how many you know, types
of emissions could be created by a car carbon dioxide

(17:12):
by the way, non that list carbon dioxide, didn't. You know?
That's the greenhouse gas, and it's something that we're concerned about,
but not on the list of the emissions that the
Clean Air Act was concerned with. Instead, it was things
like carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, and hydrocarbon emissions greenhouse gasses. Yeah,
except for carbon dioxide. That was the only one that
was kind of left out, But yeah, these are all

(17:33):
greenhouse gases. Yeah, and and diesel in particular is pretty
bad about um nitrogen oxides, and that's the kind of
stuff that contributes to smog uh formation. Yeah. You often
see it written is like n O X yes, and
of people yep. Yeah, hard knocks in that case. Uh
So the standards of the emission centers themselves. When I

(17:55):
say standard, it sounds like I could easily quote you.
You know, here's how much uh nitrogen ox side the
car is allowed to emit over a given amount of time.
Not that simple. It all depends on the type of vehicle,
like you were saying, between light trucks and passenger cars
for example, or the age of the vehicle that that

(18:16):
plays a factor as well. Um so, and also whether
it's a gasoline powered vehicle or a diesel powered vehicle,
because the emissions will be different depending upon those. So
it's a little complicated, and I'm not going to be,
you know, spouting off specific numbers because it's just not
there's no point to it. A different podcast. Yeah, that's

(18:37):
that's the that's the the incredibly tiny standards podcast. I'm
not gonna get down to that. But to go to sleep,
yes the evening, and I don't mind if you guys
fall asleep to me. I don't do the listener mail
thing anymore. So at least you're not gonna be woken
up by a clackson. Um. So, like we said, the performance,
the energy efficiency or fuel efficiency, I should say, and

(18:59):
the emissions are these three things, and it is very
hard to meet the expectations of all three of those
at the same time because um As it turns out,
a lot of the emissions control mechanisms have an effect
on performance. Um they have an effect on and they
can have an effect on fuel efficiency. For example, it's

(19:21):
correlation is kind of a weird word, but there is
an association between a very fuel efficient diesel engine and
high production of nitrogen oxide. So you if you're an
auto manufacturer, you have to make an engine to make
your cargo, and you're using you know, you want it
to be a diesel powered engine. You have specific standards

(19:43):
you have to meet for fuel efficiency, that's one of
the things you've got to you know, you one of
the boxes you have to check off. But you also
have standards you have to meet for emissions. That's the
other box you've got to check off. And in this relationship,
as one goes up, the other goes down. In a
in the bad way, right, Like, as as one improves,
the other one is getting worse. So how do you

(20:06):
balance that out? Plus make sure that the car performs
in such a way that it's not just drivable that
people want to drive, that a consumer would actually want
to drive that vehicle. Because when you start playing around
with these three things that you've mentioned, Um, I'll argue
that consumers are and I know that this is I

(20:27):
guess maybe controversial, and that you know, some people say, no,
that's what I care about most. It's always gonna be
someone like that. But um, I would say that most
people care less about the actual emissions of the vehicle
than they do about the fuel economy and the way
that the car performs. Are fuels and drive right, because
the fuel efficiency is going to impact your wallet, right,
you know, it's how much fuel you're gonna have to

(20:48):
buy to get your car to go from place to place,
and performance obviously the way the car feels emissions. I
would argue for most people, they want the emissions to
be at a level that is acceptable for the region
their end. Well what I mean by that, and I
don't I don't mean to you know, spark any kind
of big controversy or anything. But what I'm saying is
that when you buy a new vehicle off the lot,

(21:09):
you assume that it's going to be compliant with current
CAFE or not cafe, but rather emission standards in that
area and in the U S in general. It's going
to pass. It's going to be a clean vehicle, and
it wouldn't be sold as a new car otherwise it
wouldn't be allowed to Well no, but I mean you
pick up a you know, and seven year old used car,
you take it in for the emissions test, you know,

(21:29):
as most people have to do now around big cities
at least um, you know, yearly before you get the
renewal of your tags or whatever. Um, there's always that
chance that they're gonna say, sorry, you're just over on
on this and UM here's the recommended fix. You've got
thirty days to make that fix. Otherwise you're not allowed
to drive this vehicle on Georgia Highways Georgia Rhodes and

(21:50):
UH and and you know, I think there's limits to
that too. You know, you can spend a certain dollar
amount on the fixes that I think you're limited, like,
you don't have to spend ten thousand dollars to get
your car client with whatever. But but you might have
to spend you know, a minimum or a maximum rather
of three dollars or whatever it happens to be. I
don't know the number, but they don't want you to
go crazy, you know, to have to make to make

(22:13):
the car twice as expensive as I find it's all
very funny. I find the whole emissions game kind of funny.
But yeah, because it's it's a balance between what is
supposed to be environmentally responsible, what is supposed to cause
the least amount of harmful effect on other people, but
also not supposed to break the bank. Yeah, I know,
but but you see what I mean though, And I

(22:34):
find this funny and we can talk about this maybe
in another podcast. I don't know, it seems to fit
here a little bit. But it's funny that if the
car doesn't pass, they say, well, you can spend three
dollars on it, and if it doesn't pass again, we'll
just kind of give you okay for this year. It's
like we're we're accepting that, you know, it's still not
compliant with our with our rules and regulations. And then
also your car can age out of this, so that

(22:55):
after ten years or fifteen years or whatever happens to me,
I think it's ten you don't have to have a
car emissions tested anymore to get your tags. And that
seems kind of stillyed me too, because at that point,
most of that stuff on your car is where and
out to the point where it's going to probably not
pass anyways. Right, the emissions are gonna be all right,
it's going to be beyond the emission standard. And those
are the heavy polluters, those are the ones that you know,

(23:16):
do admit more. So maybe they're thinking at that point
that you're not driving it as heavily as I don't know.
I mean, I'm I really when I look at this
from several different angles, the emissions testing thing, it's really confusing. Well,
I mean, and when we get into the Volkswagen stuff
in particular, it gets a little confusing because ultimately you
hear the news from the government saying, all right, if

(23:37):
you own Volkswagen, don't worry, you're not we're not going
to penalize you for that because it's not your fault.
So you're like, well, but it's still producing the pollution.
Let's say that I'll say I drove a Fiat from
I don't know. I'm gonna make this up ten years
ago or seven years ago, So it still has to
be emissions compliant. If that car doesn't pass, like I

(23:57):
just said, if it doesn't pass emissions, you have thirty
days to make the fixes. Otherwise you're not legally allowed
to drive that car. So they're saying, we're giving all
these Volkswagen vehicles that are on the road right now,
we that we know will pass the test, but they're
passing it. They're cheating, they're cheating, but we know that
they're not compliant, but we're allowing you the time until

(24:17):
Volkswagen comes back with a fix. So there's going to
be like this year or two years maybe where they
know what's happening. And again another confusing angle in this
whole thing. Yeah, because you know, it's like they're giving
a free pass. Yeah. And and I have some sympathy
for the for the government side of this, because how
do you deal with this otherwise do you just tell

(24:38):
I mean, you can't go and confiscate everyone's vehicle. You
can't take the keys from everybody's car and say this
is part until b W comes up with fix. Congratulations,
you've spent all that money on something that you can't use. Yeah,
it's it's a it's a complicated situation, all right. We
we talked about emissions. How do cars control emissions in
the first place, where the systems in a car, specifically

(25:00):
diesel engine car that are are designed in order to
reduce emissions of this nitrogen nitrogen oxide in particular, but
other stuff as well. And there are lots of things,
um that are part of this. Uh, there's their combustion
chambers that have been designed so that they can process
the fuel better before it gets released or burn it
off in a way where you're not gonna have nitrogen

(25:23):
oxide anymore as complete it burn as possible. Yeah, there
are some that are designed to use catalysts that will
make the nitrogen oxide break apart so as you get
nitrogen and oxygen, which that's there's no problem. There are
Our atmosphere is primarily nitrogen. Sure, and you're talking right now,
you're talking about after after it's gone through combustions, right. Yeah,

(25:46):
there are some that are in the combustion phase too,
like just the combustion chamber and fuel systems. Uh, lube
oil consumption can have an effect to if you if
you design your car so that it's much more efficient
with that or your engine, I should say, if it's
much more efficient than that. But there's also like particulate
filters on the on the end of it, Um, the
catalysts which can break up the nitrogen oxide into nitrogen

(26:07):
and oxygen. Are you talking about the the urea injection
systems which further burns the soot and so did the
particular filters those are those are kind of neat. Particular
filters are interesting to maybe because um, when I was
with Chrysler doing U technical training for you know, the
service people, um, the technicians there rather, UM, we were

(26:31):
talking about Dodge Ram pickup trucks that had a diesel
particular filter that would regenerate itself. So some of these
are single use where they fill up and one of
the byproducts of burning diesel fuel is soot. You get
a lot, there's a lot of soot that's left over,
and it's almost like an like an ash type product.
And you don't see ash really coming out of the

(26:53):
tailpipe of of diesel powered vehicles. So where does it
all go? Well, goes to these big filters and they're
called particular filters as you said, and the single use
ones that's pretty simple. I mean, the idea is that
it just fills up and eventually if you get it
emptied or replaced, kind of like a filter on a
on a like an air conditioning system. That's relatively rare
now I mean relatively there's still out there. But the

(27:14):
ones that really you're interesting to me. And oh the
other the other version of this would be the urea injection,
which further burned allows it to be further burned. Um,
and you have to refill that system every let's say,
every ten thousand miles or I think every five thousand miles,
and that's part of the fix will talk about. But um,
the regenerative ones. These things heat up to something like,
you know, six hundred degrees celsius or twelve hundred degrees celsius.

(27:37):
It gets really really hot, and it's it's hot enough
to burn soot. And when it happens is very interesting.
It happens on the highway when you're driving, because I mean,
imagine something underneath your vehicle that heats up to the
point where it's twelve hundred degrees Celsius's pretty If you
were parked on you know, grass like dry grass somewhere,
it would ignite the grass below. Parked on an asphalt,

(27:58):
you would melt it. If you're standing next to it,
I mean it would it would burn your leg. And
it's a it's a hot, hot thing. I mean that's
it's twice the temperature of a of a pizza oven. Um,
it's it's really really hot. And it was interesting to
see how they developed a way to to decide exactly
when it happens. And it's all electronically controlled. It's all
very precise in the way they do it. And it

(28:19):
has to be, obviously because if it if it weren't,
it wouldn't be safe for anybody you put in your garage.
And if it's still doing this regenerative thing, your house
is up in flames. Yeah, it's something we generally considered
to be a bad thing. Yeah, that would be. So
they had to be very careful about how they designed it,
but also very precise. And that's and that shows you
how um carefully they can decide when things happen electronically

(28:42):
in your car. So just one example, I guess. Yeah,
And so the the These systems are obviously the things
that allow a diesel well really any any engine for cars,
but we're specifically focused on diesel. These are the sort
of things that allow diesel engines to operate within those
emission standard parameters. But they do have an effect on

(29:03):
fuel efficiency and on and really on performance. And so
here's where we get into what Volkswagen did and where
the scandal comes in. So you've mentioned emission testing. That's
something that if you are living in certain cities you
have to go through before you can go and get
your tags renewed for the next year. I remember growing

(29:24):
up in rural Georgia that was not a thing. I
didn't know anything about it until I moved here to
Atlanta and I saw these kind of tent like structures
outside of usually you know, like a like a mechanics
or something you see and say emission testing bucks or
whatever it is, and I kept thinking like, well, what's
that for. And it wasn't until we didn't own a
car at first, to me and my wife, and when

(29:45):
we finally got one and we found out like, oh, okay,
that makes sense because you're in a you're in a
dense populated area where there are a lot of people,
especially in Atlanta, which is a very car centric city,
it makes sense for it to be there, but just
I had never in countered it before. Gets me every time.
It's your birthday because you're renewing your tags, so there's
you know, a hundred bucks right there they have to

(30:06):
pay out or whatever, and then they hit you with
another twenty dollars for emissions if your car fits that
certain parameter those you know, the year or whatever. You know, Yeah,
it's it all depends on like what year you bought
the car, and what model it was, and and how
how old is it and all that kind of stuff. Um,
I always feel like I need a degree to figure
out whether or not you get get the emissions testing.

(30:27):
You know, it's even more frustrated to me. I live.
I live in the extreme northern part of this county
the Atlanta is in. It's an odd shaped county, so
it's way way far away. It's like thirty miles away.
Not I mean, not even half a mile down the
road is the next county where they don't do emission
They don't do emissions testing, so I'm not even anywhere
near the city. But I still have to do this
emissions testing in the county. Yeah, exactly. Well, uh so

(30:50):
what was going on with the Volkswagen one was that
the car quote unquote new when it was being tested,
and it would turn on all the emissions controls, essentially
shutting out off emissions for the effectively shutting off emissions
for the duration of the test, so that during the
test phase, this clean diesel engine, which is the way

(31:12):
it was marketed as clean diesel vehicles, was remarkable. It
had performance, it had it was meeting the emission standard,
it had fuel economy. This was a miracle machine. Yeah,
and other manufacturers at the time we're kind of marveling
and how Volkswagen had done it. Now, Volkswagen have been
in the diesel game for a long time, so they thought, well,

(31:34):
this is superior German engineering. They've got some kind of
idea of how those works, and we just we just
can't seem to get the performance angle out of this
whole thing. You know, we can do the emissions, we
can do the fuel economy, we can't do the performance
where we can do It's that it's that old you
can do you know, pick two of those things. But
they were all scratching their heads like, well, how is
Volkswagen doing this? And it turns out this this hear

(31:56):
the term defeat device, and a lot of people will
picture a physical device you could hold in your hands. Yeah,
something something you would shove inside the exhaust pipe or something. Yeah.
So this term defeat device is a little bit deceptive
and that it's it's really just um, it's a software
code and that's all it is. It's a very cleverly
written line of soft incredibly clever because you know, my

(32:18):
first my first thought when I heard about the scandal
that they had installed software that would defeat the emissions
testing by by incorporating the emissions controls during the test
and then turning them off afterwards. So you get that
fuel efficiency and performance back, but you're emitting much more pollution.

(32:39):
At that time, my first reaction was, I wonder if
it's just when they connect the computer system like it
it it uh, it detects when the computer system gets
connected to it. No, it's way more subtle than that,
because there are other situations where you would use that,
and we knew that they knew that. You know, people
have their own home diagnostic tools can plug in we're

(33:00):
talking about the the O B D two ports, the
diagnostic ports on the driver's side, and it's it's it
goes far deeper than that because it takes into account
the wheel speed, it takes an account the position of
the steering wheel. Everything is read all you know, your
your car is talking all the time to other models,
are talking to other modules and figure out what's going on.

(33:22):
And they determined that they knew exactly the the parameters
that were set because these are government standards that are
in place for a vehicle emissions test and they're the
same everywhere. So it's very very easy to say, when
this condition is met, then you do this, and when
this has meant you do that, and if these two
things are met, then you do this. And it's so

(33:44):
it's so simple for them to cheat this way. I
don't know why other people haven't tried this in the past.
If well, maybe they have. It's possible, but this was
one where where it was found out. Yeah, it was.
It's like you said, it's very simple. It's an if
then right, if conditions are equivalent to a testing situation,
then engage the emission controls like that. That's that's basic

(34:06):
computer programming is the if then statement, and they obviously
we're oversimplifying for the purposes of this discussion, but that's
that's the basic model they followed, which is incredibly subversive
and brilliant at the same time. Yeah, I mean there
could I don't know how many parameters they've got here,
but there could be ten different indicators that the vehicle
is an emissions testing bedpoint and and then you react

(34:29):
this way. But then once you unplug all that and
you're on your way, we don't want that. We don't
want it to react that way. Because the driver was saying,
you know, I went in for emissions testing in the
car fels like it's broken so wrong. It's not responding
the way it should. I'm not getting the fuel economy
that I was getting before. Why do you guys do
to my car? So? Uh. One of the two thousand
sixteen thing that I was mentioning before, Volkswagen has revealed

(34:51):
that it has an emission control system that might only
engage during tests. I got the feeling like this the
way it's been reported, it sounds like someone who's it
had been caught doing something wrong. And then when they
are directly asked, hey, did you also do this like
it might be well, not against the rules. It plays
right into why would they build the models any different

(35:11):
than they did because fourteens and all the way back
to oh eight, because they knew what worked and they
hadn't been caught at that point yet. They had already
manufactured those cars. Yeah, and the two thousand sixteen one
has the additional element and that it heats up a
pollution control catalyst. And that's the thing that I was
talking about, you know, separating out the nitrogen and oxygen,
the nitrogen oxide into nitrogen and oxygen. That's what the

(35:34):
models have. Yeah, they had installed Lean Knox traps and
in certain vehicles and in other vehicles, you know, like
after two thousand twelve they installed something that called the
selective catalytic reduction systems and uh in you know, I
guess that's the one with the liquid urea solution that
was sprayed into it. So it's a it's a much
more complex system than the Lean Knox traps. But um

(35:57):
that that him self is gonna be a problem for
Wagon because they have to deal with all these different
vehicles in different ways. They need different things for the fix.
And I can outline that later. Yeah, just a quick
example if you if you look up the news that
you hear that like some of the models of the
facade were had twenty times the the allotted you know,

(36:19):
the allowable amount of emissions when it was in its
normal driving operation and I'm outside of the emissions test, right,
And the Jetta was even worse. It could be between
fifteen and thirty five times. Some of them were up
to forty times the allowed amount of emissions of nitrogen oxized. Here,
I'm gonna guess that those are the ones that were
just the lean, the Lean Knox Traps equipped ones, because

(36:41):
that's kind of other manufacturers were saying, how can you
get these these standard? He can you meet these standards
with just a Lean Knox trap It's there's just no way.
We can't. We can't do it. How are you doing it? Yeah?
That was the magic. Where's the lepre con inside your
engine that's allowing this to happen. So here's a fun fact. Uh,
did you did you run across the name of the

(37:02):
engineer who who is credited as discovering this. He's got
a perfect name, all right. So it's Volkswagen that has
been called out on this. The name of the engineer
U S engineer whose discovery essentially led to the unveiling
of this scandal is John German. No way, yeah, really

(37:23):
he's he's German, the engineer, but not a German engineer. Yeah.
And this is a private agency, right, yeah, Actually he was. Um,
so he also works not just with engineering, but he
works with a uh kind of an environmental protection sort
of organization. But he's not with the US government. No, No,

(37:45):
he was not. Uh And so originally, in fact, he
handed that information over to the US government. So originally
what he was doing was purely he didn't suspect Volkswagen
of doing anything hinky. What he was doing was he
was looking at the nitrog an ox side emissions, the
NOx emissions in Europe and seeing how how out of

(38:05):
control they were in certain regions, and then looking at
the data for the United States and saying, well, I mean,
obviously there's a difference between the number of diesel vehicles
on the road in Europe and those in the US.
But he was saying, but he was saying, well, you know,
there's there's something clearly happening over here in the US,
like the Volkswagen cars are amazing. Uh, maybe we can

(38:28):
look into the engineering of the Volkswagen cars and give
advice to European automakers to help out Europe. So it
was it was purely in an approach to help someone
else out that he even started looking into this. But
he's then essentially what he did was he was measuring
these levels on the road as like a highway travel
or city travel versus in a lab environment. Yes, he

(38:51):
specifically started looking at how the cars were performing in
various environments and discovered there were vast inconsistencies, So real
world's situations versus lab situation exactly as dramatically well in
this case, well extremely different in the case of Volkswagen
in particular. Yes, and so at this point he's saying, huh,
something is really off about this, and was tempted to

(39:15):
even perhaps call it a defeat device at that stage,
but he did not. He instead handed the data over
to the e p A and as a courtesy, handed
the report over to Volkswagen as well in two thousand
fourteen May two thousand fourteen, so it's been more than
a year since this data got to Volkswagen, and German

(39:38):
says the reason he sent it to Volkswagen was because
perhaps it was legitimate oversight, something like maybe it was
a fault in part of the engineering that could be
addressed and fixed, that there might be an honest mistake here.
And you know, he was giving them a huge benefit
of the doubt. Sure, he might even be thinking that
it's in this one particular line of vehicles, maybe there's

(40:00):
a problem with that, or maybe it's a it's very
it could be very very simple for you to change this.
But he had no idea that this was the tip
of the iceberg. So the e p A starts looking
into it, and it wasn't until September of this year
that Volkswagen essentially came out and said you got us.
Oh boy, yeah, you know what. I Okay, they've known
about it for a while. You you do have to

(40:21):
give them some some credit, uh, to come right out
and say like, yeah, you you got us, you got
us fare and square out. They they said that due
to some rogue software developers, like no one has come
out to the point in Volkswagen to say this was
a decision like they're not willing to say this decision
goes all the way to the top. Yeah, it's more

(40:43):
like someone lowered down made this decision without our our knowledge,
and that's and we're suffering for although the top guy
did step down. Yes, yeah, so I mean it's uh,
it's it's definitely affected uh, their corporate structure as well. Yes,
in the last month, it'll and it will continue to
affect them heavily in the oncoming months. Yeah. Yeah, this

(41:03):
is so far reaching. I mean I I sometimes sit around,
like at my desk, I'm thinking about like just the
the sheer volume of vehicles not only here in the
United States but worldwide vehicles or so, Yeah, we have
wet half a million here and it's a big deal here.
I can't imagine what it's like over there, What's what
they're going through over there. But I just think about
like the pure logistics of this whole thing, with some

(41:26):
of the fixes that they're proposing and all that, and
the time involved and the money involved, and you know,
are they you know the bigger questions are they going
to come back from this? Are they gonna what's this
gonna do to Diesel's reputation not only not only here
but worldwide. I mean, everybody kind of bought into this.
It's you know, we get listen and we get listener
mail all the time from listeners in Europe that prior

(41:48):
to this, we're saying, why aren't you guys on diesel,
like we are over here in Europe, why aren't you
Why aren't you doing that? And I mean it's one
of those things where you look at it and you
think it's a lie that we want to believe. Right,
it's a venient lie because it gives us the feeling
that we're not contributing to pollution and we're getting the
the performance we want out of our vehicles and the

(42:09):
fuel economy we want out of our vehicles. If you
tell me that lie, I am probably inclined to believe
it because it's to everyone. It seems to be to
everyone's benefit until you strip away the lie and realize
how much pollution is actually being dumped out there. A
lot of people felt really good about driving you know,
clean diesel engines. I mean, it's right there in the
name clean diesel. So people felt really good about going

(42:31):
to VW and picking up a you know, t D
I equipped t D equipped vehicle and being happy about that,
like I'm doing my part, yeah, Like I'm being responsible adult.
I'm not getting one of those gas guzzlers that's eating
up gasoline and pouring out tons of carbon monoxide out
into the atmosphere. Uh yeah. And according to the Guardian,
this is something you guys covered on Scott You were

(42:52):
on an episode of Forward Thinking with Joe and Lauren
while I was out on vacation and talked about this.
But the Guardian estimated that it could have been around
nine almost nine fifty thousand metric tons of nitrous oxide
or nitrogen oxide emissions every year that this was this
technology was out there. See what the numbers are just immense.
I mean, it's it's all of this, this whole thing.

(43:14):
And when you go back all the way to the
two thousand eight model, you're you thinking that, well, this
has been happening for seven years, for eight years now
at this point, I guess model years. Um, it's just
such a big, big problem. It's so enormous in all aspects.
I really am having a hard time seeing how Volkswagon
recovers from this. Right. And and as we pointed out earlier,

(43:35):
if you already have one of these vehicles, then until
there is a fix, you're going to continue to contribute
to that that pollution. And it's not because you're a
bad person. It's because the car itself, the way it's designed.
That's that's just how it works. I mean to put
it bluntly, you were sold a lie and you bought
that lie. But you know why, it wasn't your fault.

(43:57):
The government bought that lie too, because because they the
wool was pulled over its eye. Yeah, I just kind
of come clean. I drive a Volkswagen, but it's not
a diesel. I think I mentioned that in the Forward
Thinking episode two, and I love it. I mean I
have it's a great engine. It's a lot of fun,
but it's a gasoline burning engine. So I'm not involved
in all this. And I gotta say that when I

(44:17):
when I see a Volkswagen on the road now, I
consciously look to the lower right corner of the back
end of the vehicle and I try to see if
it's a t d I equipped and a t D
equipped vehicle, And I just think, like, what is that
person going through right now? They're dealing with, you know,
they bought a car that they thought was you know,
all the things we said it and it's not. Uh,
they're gonna have to deal with the dealership very soon

(44:39):
about you know, what they're going to do to fix
this and how they're gonna do it. Um, it depends
on what make and model you have, what they're gonna do,
how they're gonna handle it. Um. It's not gonna cost
you anything except it is going to be very very
inconvenient for you in the near future. And do you
continue to trust that manufacturer with with those people? Buy
another Volkswagen when all this is said and done. Yeah,
when when the two thousand seventeen models, presumably assuming that

(45:02):
Volkswagen is able to produce them, when they come out,
would they buy a diesel engine two thousand seventeen Volkswagen
and well, other people that maybe we're kind of on
the fence about Volkswagen, you know, they were considering it
up until this point, or maybe someone just narrowly missed
buying one or just bought one the day the things
that this scandal broke. What do they do? I mean,
there's so many individual situations that I'm really curious about

(45:23):
right now, and it ripples out so far. So we've
heard the term that that they could be facing billions
of dollars in fines and In fact, early on in
this story, it was said that Volkswagen had already set
aside like seven point three billion dollars for fines. Right now,
the Guardian estimates that the amount of fines may accumulate

(45:45):
to around eighteen billion dollars. Now that matches what I
heard initially. The very first number I heard was like
eighteen points seven billion dollars in d p A finds
strictly here for the United States. Now going beyond that,
there's gonna be is to pay elsewhere well, because they
have agreements with European nations as well. So I don't

(46:06):
know how you come back from something like this, I
really don't. I mean, you can save, you can put
money away, and they and you know, they have profitable quarters.
I'm sure that you know. I haven't looked at the
numbers of how much they make per quarter up to
this point. But there's no way they're squirreling all that way.
They're using it for new products, they're putting it back
into the business. Of course, they desperately need another love
Bug movie. That's that's gonna do it. Huh yeah, Well,

(46:30):
if you wonder now if Disney will ever show the
love Bug ever again after this, Uh, that was not involved. No, no, no,
are you trying to implicate Lindsay Lohan in this. I'm
talking about the new one. I'm going back to the
original because I loved the original. Yeah, I love that.
It was fantastic film. I love it. Um No. One

(46:51):
of the other things I wanted to mention, though, if
you were talking about ripple effect, this gets super crazy.
This could contribute to a severe economic downturn in Europe
for multiple reasons. UM. One is that the confidence of
a major European manufacturer has gone into sharp decline for
obvious reasons UM. And it has prompted several strategists, equity

(47:16):
strategists over at Bloomberg to readjust what their predictions were
for the stocks Europe six hundred index, and they have
adjusted it lower than what they had predicted. And because
of Volkswagen's association with China as well and the Chinese
markets which are very uncertain, this whole mess could get

(47:37):
really ugly from an economic standpoint, which I'm not gonna
get into because this is not an economics podcast and
I am in no way qualified to talk about that
that aspect of it. But it's kind of like when
you start pulling back and pulling back and pulling back,
you keep asking, am I am I back far enough?
Am I seeing the full picture yet? You know, just

(47:58):
just to tell you that, this last weekend, I was
out with a couple of friends, my wife and I
and uh, this couple that we were out with said
that they were um buying Volkswagen stock right now because
it's at a low point. And I was thinking, I
don't know, is that a good move or is that
a bad move? And I was thinking at the moment,
I said, you know what, that's probably a good move

(48:19):
because it's probably gonna come back. It's probably gonna you know, rebound,
and everything's gonna be fine. But the more I hear
about this, the last couple of weeks that I've been,
you know, studying this, and especially this last week, when
the enormity of this situation is really just finally hit
me how big this is, I don't really know. I
don't know if that is a good investment or not. Yeah,

(48:40):
I mean, I can't say for sure. And the stock
price went from like a hundred and sixty seven dollars
before the announcement of the discovery of this cheating or
at least the public unveiling that you know, this was
a thing uh today when I checked it earlier, it
was a hundred and two dollars. So it does the
smart money buy right now? Or do you wait and see?
Because if you're talking about a company that maybe facing

(49:03):
up to eighteen billion dollars in fines and we don't
know that that's the full extent yet, I would be
nervous to put money in that because I would think
like this company might fall a little further before it
bottoms out. It's probably not not the bottom yet. I
think we can both agree with that. I mean, and plus,
you know these fixes that they've outlined just this last week, Uh,

(49:24):
these don't begin until and some of some of them
it's like a three phase thing. Some of them don't
begin until late seen. This is this is a long
term problem for Folkswagen. It's not something that's gonna go
away overnight. And it's uh, if you haven't read about
it or you don't know exactly what they're gonna do
for the fix, um, it's going to be very very

(49:47):
costly for them. In addition to the fines that we're
talking about, which are already enormous. What they're proposing is
ridiculously expensive for a company to do. And yeah, and
it costs not just money but also put potentially in
moments of your vehicle, which also means it's gonna cost
and customer satisfaction and loyalty. I mean, the costs here

(50:07):
go beyond a dollar amount, you know. Can I just
can I just run through this real quick, dieing dere
I've mentioned about four times now, but I will quickly
go through it, and I'll tell you what they're doing.
And this is this is UM. The plan has laid
out by my um, the current us CEO, Michael horne Um.
He spent several hours testifying in front of a congressional
panel just this last week, and it's all about the

(50:29):
you know, the emission scandal. And uh, you know the
senators that he was in front of, they were you know,
they're angry at him. They were incredulous, you know that
that this this car maker would try to cheat the
buy in public like this and the U. S. Government
and uh, you know, sidestep all these these standards that
they in place. And and the funny thing is, and
I don't know that really say funny, but he's agreeing

(50:51):
with them throughout this whole testimony. He's saying, you know what,
I'm angry at the manufacturer as well, are you know
my company? Angry at them for doing this. I didn't
know that this is all happening. Um, you know, I'm
also upset. And so he has a bit of sympathy.
I mean, he gets That's how he gains, I guess,
is his sympathy with the people that are listening right, UM,

(51:12):
believe it or not, you know, whether you want to
or not. So there's like three different groups here, and
I'll quickly go through it. I'm not going to list
all of vehicles or anything like that, but UM basically
covers two different engine types. And you can kind of
group these into three groups. And you'll understand when I
read it. But it's an old the older engine is
the E N engine, and the new one is the
E A to A eight engine. And the first group

(51:35):
is it affects his sixty seven thousand vehicles. This is
the smallest of the three groups here in the United States.
And the fix is just an updated software fix. And
so these are for you know, like the newer two models,
and these are the ones that have the new e
A eight eight engine. UM. Again the easiest fix, and
that's because they're fitted with a selective catalectic reduction system

(51:58):
or exhaust after treatment system that I mentioned earlier. UM,
but really they're only going to need a software fixed
to become compliant. And then the next group, this is uh,
the the I guess in between group, you know, not
not the biggest group that we'll get to last. Uh.
This is just a through passat t d I, and

(52:18):
this one will require an updated software fix and a
possible hardware modification. So these are cars that have both
a Lean Knox trap that we mentioned and an scr
UREA system as well. And of course, you know the
software hardware modifications that they're talking about. They're not really
specifying what the hardware modifications will be for this specific vehicle,
but vehicles are affected with that. So that's kind of

(52:41):
like phase two and that's going to begin in mid
That first one was early And as a side note
on that first one that I mentioned, UH, they do
know that you know, fuel economy will likely stay the same,
but they said performance might be slightly affected, and that's
bad news for people that own those vehicles sixteen you know,

(53:03):
golf OUTI Jetta, you know, those vehicles are the ones
that affected. So they don't know what it's going to
do to the pisat t D I well. And the
worst part about that is saying that they could be
slightly affected me it even if it wasn't perceptible. By
saying that it's going to be slightly affected, then you
know the drivers are going to at least feel like

(53:24):
there's a change in performance, even if it's not detectable
on a meaningful scale. If you know, if you've heard
that your vehicles performance might be slightly affected, that's enough
to psychologically push you to believe that it doesn't feel well,
you're gonna be sensitive to You're gonna be overly sensitive
to that. You're gonna you're gonna think that whatever you're
feeling is not what you should be feeling in your car.

(53:46):
Even but honestly, it's probably gonna affect low end torque.
It's gonna affect acceleration. And that's and that's the two
things that you would really notice. That's the two things
that make a car fund to drive. I mean, in
most situations, you know, to can out top end speed
because most people don't hit the top ends. Well, yeah,
there's very few opportunities to do if this if this
fix somehow affected the top end, like maybe dropped it

(54:08):
down five or something. You know, from the top end,
not many people would ever experience them. But when you
remove acceleration from say a stoplight or trying to get
on the freeway, Uh, that's going to affect your your
customer base. People are gonna say, we don't want it.
So the last group, and this is the biggest one,
this affects Now, this is a bad group to this
effects two thousand nine through two thousan fourteen jetted T

(54:32):
D Eyes, Golf T D Eyes, Beetle t D Eyes
out e A three's. So you know how many of
these vehicles you see on the road, They're everywhere, all
these cars. These are the ones that have a Lean
Knox trap only. So these are the ones that may
require the most work. And it's the largest group. Yeah,
so it's probably going to require a a well, of course,

(54:53):
it will require software, you know switch, it's gonna require
hardware modifications that probably include adding a complete um SCR system.
You know that that the cleaning system that we talked
about the UREA system, and they've even talked about for
this group. This is how complex this would be. They said,
it's gonna take you know, between five and ten hours
to make this type of fix and per vehicle, which

(55:16):
is an enormous cost to the to the manufacturer for
the time of the technician to do that, plus the
parts the park. Can you imagine what that costs. So
they're talking about for this specific group of vehicles, this
last group that they won't even start touching until late
It affects oh, by the way, three thousand of the
four hundred and some that I think it's fours here

(55:38):
in the state of the Yeah, they're talking about um offering,
you know, like cash cash back offers. They're talking about
the entire vehicle buy backs, which is huge. I mean,
there's been very few times in US history there it's happened,
but very few times when the manufacturer says that car
will no longer be on the road, we're buying back
every one of them and they'll be shredded or whatever

(56:00):
they happen to do with them. I don't know what
the plan would be for this, but if they do
a car buy back, the situation. They're likely just going
to destroy those vehicles. It's yeah, it's it's hard to
even comprehend. Really, Yeah, you wouldn't buy back the car
and then fix it and then try to sell anything.
So it only makes sense. It's logically making sense to
me that they would buy them back and shred them
in some way just for them. So this is a

(56:22):
do you see what I mean? It gets worse and
worse all the time. Yeah. The more you look at it,
the more you realize, Wait, no, I I don't have
the full comprehension of everything that can happen. And as
the story unfolds, will probably learn even more, like maybe
we'll learn exactly where this decision was really made and
maybe it was a group of rogues software engineers who

(56:46):
are just desperate to have Volkswagen engines appear to meet
all of these specifications. Um, you don't just one more
quick thing. I mean, it's super quick, but think about
the thing. I think about the awards that this thing
is one, because you know, it wins engine awards. Of
course it wins in two thousand eight, which is the
first year that we're talking about the VW Jetta t

(57:07):
D I clean Diesel won the Green Car of the
Year award at the l A Auto Show. UM now,
what do you do with that? Do you go back
and do you remove that award? I mean, yeah, I
would imagine you have to strip the awards from the
from the different models. Just this year, the Volkswagen Golf,
now not not particularly the t d I, but the
Volkswagen Golf was awarded the North American Car of the

(57:27):
Year award at the um at the Detroit Auto Show,
the North American International Auto Show. UM. So this thing
along the way, that's just two. It's won many awards
along the way, and it has long been luded as being, uh,
you know, kind of like the solution. This is this
is what diesel should be here in the United States
or really worldwide. Yeah. Well, I mean that was why

(57:48):
German was looking into it in the first place. So
I apologize for interrupting there. But the awards thing, I
just had to get get that out there because they're
they've been so heavily awarded for all these Diesel engines
that what do you do with all that? Now? It's
again part of the big problem. I guess it goes
back to that phrase. You know, if it seems too
good to be true. It probably is right in there.

(58:08):
Why didn't they look into it when it did seem
too good to be true? Again, I think it's one
of those things where, well, you would either think, well,
no company would be so bold as to as to
try and fake their way through because the consequences, as
we see now, the consequences are so dire for any
company that would attempt that, it seems unthinkable that they

(58:29):
would try and do that. Now, had they caught this
in say two thousand nine or two uh, this would
be dramatically different, would be a much smaller number of
vehicles are affected. It would be an easier thing for
VW to fix and say like a Holly, you gott USU,
or or even for them to say like it would
be even more believable for them to say, uh, this
this was something that was uh, you know, not intended,

(58:53):
but we will fix it like you could if it's
if it's for a year, then you might say, well,
there was something going on in the man manufacturing process
where uh, someone had this brilliant idea or they thought
it was a brilliant idea and the implication wasn't completely realized.
Within the company, you could at least plausibly make that point.

(59:13):
But we're eight years into this, eight model years into this,
it's a lot harder to make that plausible argument. It is. Yes,
and and even this eighth model year that was scheduled
to come in, as you said, has been embargoed because
there's a hold on Those vehicles are quarantined and not
able to be sold here. So um, again, it's just
a real head scratch all around. Why would they do this?

(59:35):
Why why would a company allow this to happen? It
is a little crazy. Now on, on a related note,
I have a thing to wrap this up with, because
obviously this is a story that's still going so it
maybe a couple of years before it maybe actually a
decade or more before we really see the full extent
of how the story plays out. But uh, I have

(59:56):
a related thing to ask you because it was something
I had not heard of before, but I imagine you
probably have. Have you heard about the practice called chipping? Yes, okay,
this was new to me. So chipping is essentially an
aftermarket approach to do pretty much what Volkswagen did, except
this time it's a customer doing it on purpose to

(01:00:17):
their vehicle. Yeah, to gain performance gains, so um, okay,
or sometimes just to be a jerk face game. Let's
be honest and I'll have a story about that in
a minute. Okay, Okay, Well, I don't know what. I
don't know what you're gonna come at me with you,
but um, a lot of people that I've known have
chipped their vehicles or have replaced the e c U

(01:00:38):
or you know whatever that the flash upgrade or whatever
the terminology was what they did. But there's a lot
of different ways to do this. You can completely replace
the the engine control unit and make your vehicle think
that it's a different model year that has different performance
specs or it's a you can make your US US
spec vehicle think that it's a European spec vehicle and

(01:00:59):
that it uh, it boosts the performance, you know, it
allows a greater output you know, horsepower, tork, etcetera. Um,
because you're not you're not electronically limiting your vehicle to
whatever the standards are in the place that you are currently,
So you're you're upping the manufacturers restrictions on your vehicle electronically. Yeah. Yeah,
And whether that's the top end restriction or it's a

(01:01:21):
low end torque thing or shift points or whatever happens
to be. Um, it's it's it's a common practice among
tuners to do stuff like this of of you know,
smaller vehicles, you know, like performance import type vehicles or
even big trucks. A lot of diesel guys do that.
In fact, they're programmable to the point where they can,
you know, kind of change things around frequently as much

(01:01:42):
as they want toy with the numbers and you know,
make it really good for pulling and for towing, or
they can make it, uh, you know, like performance gains
for diesel engines. You get crazy great performance numbers out
of a diesel engine if you just have it chipped correctly,
which you know, again you you're getting great performance at
the expense of the legality of the emissions from your vehicle.

(01:02:03):
And you know, see there's the thing is that you
can go back with a scan tool and change that
back to whatever you needed to be for the emissions.
It's exactly the same thing that Volkswagen is doing, except
on a more manual basis. Yes, yes, and other people.
You know, if you're outside of that tenure window or whatever,
you don't have to have emissions testing. Then you know,
it's fun to make your jeep Cherokee think that it's

(01:02:24):
a cop car r and that can happen. You can
do stuff like that. So one of the other things
that you can end up doing with this. Okay, here's
where we get to the jerk face part. Right. Yeah,
So sometimes when you chip a car of diesel powered
vehicle and you activate it, one of the things that
your vehicle might do when you pressed down on the

(01:02:45):
accelerators belch out an enormous cloud of black exhaust. So
you're talking about rolling coal, rolling coal, coal rolling or
rolling coal. So Scott, I walk home. Oh no, it
is a three mile walk from from here to my house.
And there's a point that I like to rest at.

(01:03:07):
It's it's a little more than halfway to my house.
And usually at that point, especially on a hot day,
I like to sit down on a bench that's outside
of a lovely little flower shop in in uh the
Kendler Park area of Atlanta, and I sit down and
I rest for a few minutes before I continue on.
It's it's lovely, you know. I I collect my thoughts,

(01:03:31):
I relax, and then I get up to walk the
rest of the way. There was a day not long ago,
Scott although back when it was much hotter. When I
sat down on that bench, got up, I'm ready to
start walking. Well, it's at an intersection that's a four
way stop, and it's a busy intersection with a four
way stop, which is a little tricky for pedestrians because

(01:03:51):
you have to make sure you have the attention of
the drivers before you walk across. There's no light to
time it with hazardous situation. Yeah. So there's a large
red Diesel pick up to my left as I'm about
to cross the street here and you can hear that
loud knocking noise. You know, it's Diesel. So I am
about to cross the street, but they decide they want
to go. So not only do they go, but they

(01:04:14):
flipped the switch and I am covered from head to
toe in black exhaust as they turn right. So they
turn in front of me. Uh so, because they were
on my left, they turn right, so they go down
the street. I was about to cross and belch out
that black smoke while cackling and driving down that jerk

(01:04:35):
faces Yeah that you know what that is a jerk
face move. I agree, I agree that that whole that
whole thing bothers a lot of people. I mean, other
people say it's my right to do this, and I'm
gonna do this no matter what you know, and and uh,
I guess you could say that. You know, people have
been doing this for exhibition for a long time. Like

(01:04:56):
you know, we go to a like a tractor pull
event or something like that. You see all those vehicles
are belching smoke like that, and they're doing it because
it's a there is a performance gain when you do
it as well. But the situation that you're talking about,
they were doing it just simply to be it's an
effective to uh envelope you in this cloud of soot,
and that's terribly dangerous for you. It's not nice on

(01:05:19):
their part. It was dangerous for them to let's be honest,
because at that point I was not happy. What it does,
and just everybody knows is when you flip that switch,
it just dumps a bunch of extra fuel into the
engine and then that unburned fuel can't quite get burned
off the way it normally would. And you know, with
all those exhaust scrubbers that we talked about, you know,
the particular filters and all that, it bypasses all that,

(01:05:39):
and then you end up with this cloud of smoke
that looks like um, like it's coming out if you
don't the little trains that burn coal, it looks like that,
and that's what they call it. They call it rolling coal.
And uh, just so you guys know, out there, out
there and listener land. According to John Swanson of California's
Air Resource Board, any modification to a pollution control system
is illegal unless the manufacturer of that product had proven

(01:06:04):
that the modification doesn't result in any adverse impact on
the environment. Yeah. Now again, any place that I've seen
this happen in real life was has been like an
attractor pullet or something like that. But I've never seen
anybody actually had this done to them outside of video clips. Yeah,
I wish that. No, I don't know that. The second
guest I've seen in traffic, I've seen some some uh

(01:06:25):
you know, diesel trucks that are emitting quite a bit
of smoke, but they're traveling at such a speed that
I can't tell if they've done that. At a slow
speed is very apparent what happens because it's a dramatic
difference in the output of exhaust gases rather the cloud
of smoke or whatever. Sot uh. I can't say for
sure that I've never seen it happen in real life,
but but I don't think so not intentionally. Like you know,

(01:06:46):
when they there's a big truck and a priest is
following it, you know, they they flip the switch because
I think that's funny. Or a walker. A lot of
times you'll see you can see videos of this where
they go buy bikers or walkers or whatever and shoot
these mean spirited videos where they the same to me
did to you. It wouldn't surprise me if there's some
video on YouTube where you see a an exhausted, sweaty

(01:07:07):
bald podcaster coated in soot, Well, I'm sorry to hear
that happened to you, man. That's yeah. As a as
a pedestrian who already considers himself somewhat environmentally friendly, it
was it was like it was like a cherry on
top for my day at any rate. Yeah. By the way,
car Stuff has a podcast on Rolling Cole. Oh wow, okay, yeah,

(01:07:28):
go check that out. Guys. That's not it's a completely
shameless plug because there's no shame to be had. Uh yeah,
definitely check out car stuff guys. Scott, thank you so
much for coming on the show and kind of talking
about the scandal and the technology behind it. Uh, this
is a little bit of a departure from our normal
tech stuff episodes, but I thought it was really important

(01:07:48):
to talk about because it's something that's been in the news.
It does have to do with the tech and in
the software of the car, and there's a lot of
stuff we could have touched on, but this this show
has gone pretty long, so I don't want to continue
it on anymore. But I mean this also ties into
other elements of why it's it's harder and harder to

(01:08:09):
tell what's going on with your vehicle, at least to
tell and be sure that that's really what's happening. Sure you.
I mean look at the false bill of sale that
that all these VW owners were handed and it really
kind of opened everybody's eyes to the fact or to
the idea of what manufacturers could do to kind of
toy with these things. Uh, that how much control they

(01:08:30):
have over every little situation that your car can be in.
I mean, it's very very specific and it's very very
devious what they did, but um, well they got away
with it for about eight years. But too bad for them,
they had caught. Yeah, it was the wrong time to
get caught. If they were gonna get caught and and
somehow escape this, it should have been earlier. They thought
they were gonna get away with it forever. And that's

(01:08:50):
one of those points where you realize, like you are
all in. By the way, thanks for having me on
the show again. I appreciate it. It's it's always fun
to talk with you here about the stuff. And and
really there's so much more that we could talk about
this whole thing. I mean, there's so many angles to
this VW story and it's going to continue for years.
As you said, Yeah, well, and if there are any
major developments further on down the line, like several months

(01:09:13):
from now, maybe we'll have you back on. We'll talk
a little bit more about it and to kind of
explore uh more of the that that element about how
uh the technology of cars is making it possible for
us to first of all, it's making it harder for
us to work on our own vehicles, and secondly, it's
making it harder for us to even understand what's happening
with our vehicles here. I think that's an interesting conversation

(01:09:35):
and it's it's one we've kind of touched on in
the past when we talk about autonomous cars too, so
maybe we'll revisit that. Guys, if you have any suggestions
for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a topic
or a guest host or an interview subject or anything
like that, let me know. The email address you can
send that information to is tech Stuff at how stuffworks

(01:09:56):
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