Volkswagen scandal highlights european stalling on new emissions tests

Andrew Higgins, from New York Times



European legislators got a jolt this month in their long-running effort to update auto-emissions standards when a German member of the European Parliament suddenly proposed exempting a whole class of vehicles.

“This was a huge loophole, and everyone was asking: Where does this idea come from?” recalled Bas Eickhout, a member of the Dutch Green party who sits on the committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety.

It did not take long to discover the origin of the contentious proposal: Volkswagen Group. What had seemed a proposal by a legislator was in reality the work of the German carmaker.



This was just one particularly brazen example of how European automobile manufacturers have for years sought to thwart or water down regulation of their industry. And it helped explain one of the biggest mysteries left by the announcement this month that Volkswagen had installed software in 11 million diesel vehicles to ensure that they provided false information about emissions: Why had Europe, which has far more diesel cars than the United States, failed to uncover and halt this ruse?



“The answer is very simple: The car industry has been too powerful,” said Karl-Heinz Florenz, a German member of the European Parliament who sits on the environment committee.

It has been well known for nearly two decades that emissions tests can be easily manipulated and that they often produce results that wildly underestimate the real level of pollution produced by normal driving.

But European automakers have lobbied hard here to stall the introduction of a more rigorous testing regime that would involve normal driving conditions. They even hired a law firm to quibble over the meaning of “normal,” a maneuver that, along with other interventions, has drastically slowed progress toward a system that would prevent abuses like those by VW.

As long ago as 1998, a Swedish researcher published a detailed study of how manufacturers could deploy technology for “cycle-breaking,” the falsification of results obtained during test cycles used by regulators to assess pollution levels.

“The emission test allows manufacturers to design cars to pass the test rather than have low pollution levels on the road,” wrote the researcher, Per Kageson, an environmentalist and a transportation expert who runs Nature Associates, a private consultancy in Stockholm.

Even scientists working for the European Commission, the European bloc’s executive branch, have for years been warning about the gap between test results and reality. A 2013 study by the Commission’s Joint Research Center included a review of “defeat devices,” the technologies used to skew test results.

The study described how such devices could “deactivate emissions control systems with the purpose of either enhancing the effectiveness of these systems during emissions testing or reducing the effectiveness of these systems under normal vehicle operation and use.”



The Joint Research Center recommended a shift toward on-road testing, instead of just in a laboratory, to make the analysis “more effective in limiting the application of defeat strategies.”
Matthias Groote, a German member of the European Parliament and former chairman of its environment committee, said he and others had for years been pushing the European Commission for tests that better reflected true emissions. The response, he said, was nothing but “blah, blah, blah” about how complicated that would be.



Governments in many of the bloc’s 28 member countries, he added, also showed little enthusiasm, particularly those with big auto industries, like Germany, France and Italy.

“Let us be honest, the car industry is a major industry in Germany and has a lot of influence,” said Mr. Groote, whose constituency includes two Volkswagen factories.



Europe and the United States gauge the level of a vehicle’s pollutants in laboratory tests that are easily cheated on and generally show far lower levels of emissions than so-called Real Drive Emissions tests.

The cheating can include simply removing mirrors, spare tires and seats to reduce the load and taping up doors to reduce drag. It can also extend to the method used in VW’s diesel cars: the introduction of sophisticated software that activates emissions controls, which reduce power, only when a vehicle is being tested in the laboratory.

Mr. Kageson, the Swedish researcher, said the discrepancy between reality and laboratory test results was already so well known in the 1990s that he had expected quick steps in Europe to “make it much more difficult for manufacturers to beat the tests.” But nothing was done, at least not in Europe.

“There was great unwillingness among politicians and in the European Commission and, of course, resistance from manufacturers, who were very content with the existing system,” Mr. Kageson said.

The Volkswagen Group, critics of the company say, has made particularly strong efforts in Brussels to shape legislation in its favor but, as a result of the scandal over its cheating on emissions, has lost even its friends in the European Parliament.

Albert Dess, the German member of the European Parliament whose staff members recently circulated the Volkswagen-drafted proposal to exempt certain vehicles from strict emissions standards, dropped the proposal as soon as the scandal broke. He did not respond to requests for comment. Volkswagen also declined to comment.

Jos Dings, the director of Transport & Environment, a research group in Brussels, said the current problem at Volkswagen was a direct consequence of the auto industry’s attitude that environmental standards must be resisted every step of the way, first by gutting legislation and, if that fails, by avoiding enforcement.

“They have piled so much pressure on regulators not to do anything that this approach is now coming home to roost,” Mr. Dings said. “This inflicts far more damage on the industry than compliance ever would.”

Scrambling to counter accusations that it had ignored the cheating on emissions tests that its own scientists have long warned about, the European Commission last week acknowledged that it was aware of “defeat devices,” which have been banned in Europe since 2007, but insisted that responsibility for enforcing the rules lay with each of the bloc’s member states, not with the leadership in Brussels.


In the United States in 1998, the Environmental Protection Agency imposed large fines on truck engine manufacturers for installing software designed to outfox emissions tests. But the European Union has no equivalent of the E.P.A., only a jumble of 28 national regulators.


“We are not an enforcement arm that looks into electronic devices,” a commission official said, speaking to journalists here on Friday on the condition of anonymity.