The Volkswagen diesel scandal pointed out something even more important, the failure of the European Diesel Auto in spite of it’s good intentions went very wrong. Over at VOX Brad Plumer explains.
But there’s a much broader, far more consequential problem here that a lot of coverage has danced around or hinted at only indirectly. So let’s say it: Europe’s longtime promotion of diesel vehicles as a “green” transportation option has been a complete and total disaster — for reasons that go well beyond the Volkswagen scandal.
Ever since the 1990s, European governments have been encouraging drivers to buy diesel cars as an alternative to traditional gasoline-powered vehicles. The rationale was simple: Diesel engines use fuel more efficiently, so the switch was supposed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and help stave off global warming. Thanks to tax breaks and other incentives, diesel cars now make up one-third of Europe’s fleet, whereas they’re a sideshow in the US and Japan:
Well intentioned policy does not always produce desirable results.
Europe’s diesel push might have seemed sensible once upon a time. But 20 years later, with the benefit of hindsight, it looks like a huge mistake, an impotent climate policy that had all sorts of unintended consequences.
The biggest drawback of diesel cars is that they emit higher levels of other harmful air pollutants like particulates and nitrogen oxides. And those ended up being far harder to clean up than experts initially predicted. We now know that Europe’s regulators have failed spectacularly to control diesel pollution, relying on weak rules and flimsy testing procedures. Lots and lots of automakers — not just Volkswagen — have been manufacturing diesel cars that emit far more gunk than they’re supposed to. As a result, cities like London and Paris are clogged with dangerously high levels of air pollution, causing thousands of premature deaths each year.
Diesel autos do indeed produce less CO2 but the produce more smog producing NOx and more carbon particulates. It was thought that technology could find a solution to this and in fact it did but it was so expensive that small autos would not have been competitive. The Europeans reduced the emission standards for diesel powered cars and reduced the tax on diesel fuel but even this wasn’t enough. Not just Volkswagen but none of the European auto makers could meet the standards. So what did they do? They cheated and although Volkswagen was the most deceptive they were all doing it.
New vehicles were tested in laboratories, where cars were placed on giant treadmills, spun through a few exercises, and measured for pollution.
Trouble was, these tests turned out to be incredibly flimsy and easily gamed, explains John German of the International Council on Clean Transportation. Automakers could send cars to labs that were optimized for testing: stripped of excess weight, with the air conditioning turned off, and so on. The test cars complied with the pollution limits just fine. But the cars that were actually being sold to consumers were quite different, with much higher emissions. (German says this sort of subtle gaming was technically legal, unlike Volkswagen’s more elaborate deception, which involved illegal software that only turned pollution controls on during tests. Still, even if Volkswagen was the most flagrant cheater, it was hardly unique.)
Another downside to the European’s emphasis on diesel was European automakers spent little or no effort trying to develop electric power trains. That is changing, BMW before all of this had announced it had plans to be nearly all electric or hybrid by 2020. After the scandal VW has accelerated it electric vehicle research.