Volkswagen’s clean diesel scandal leads to massive recall

Volkswagen will pay up to $14.7 billion to compensate car owners and settle lawsuits in the United States over its clean diesel scandal, in which the company rigged thousands of cars with software so that they polluted less in testing than they did on the road.

Under the terms of the deal, announced on Tuesday, the automaker will set aside $10.03 billion to compensate affected US car owners. That includes offering to buy back nearly 500,000 diesel vehicles that have so-called “defeat devices” installed, as well as providing affected car owners between $5,100 and $10,000 in compensation.

Volkswagen has been in deep trouble this past year. Last fall, the German automaker was caught rigging more than 11 million of its “clean diesel” cars in the US and Europe so they polluted far less during testing than they did on the road. The scandal could ultimately cost the company $18 billion in recalls, repairs, and fines.

So now VW is engaged in an image makeover. On Thursday, the company announced that it would go all-in on the electric vehicle craze that’s starting to sweep the globe. At a press conference, CEO Matthias Mueller said Volkswagen would introduce 30 plug-in electric vehicle models by 2025. It aims to sell between 2 and 3 million electric vehicles per year.

This week, Volkswagen admitted that it had secretly rigged as many as 11 million diesel cars worldwide so that their pollution controls only worked when they were being tested by regulators. The rest of the time, while the cars were actually being driven, they emitted smog-forming nitrogen oxides at 15 to 35 times higher than the US legal limit.

So how much extra pollution is Volkswagen’s deception responsible for? And, since we know air pollution is harmful, how many additional deaths could those extra emissions cause? What follows is a very rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate based on what we know so far. (Spoiler: the premature death numbers range from single digits to hundreds per year. Like I said, it’s rough.)

Revelations that as many as 11 million Volkswagen cars have been cheating on their emissions tests have become big news this week. But the research that demonstrated that VW’s diesel vehicles were generating excessive pollution has been publicly available for more than a year — ever since a team at West Virginia University published their findings in the spring of 2014.

Volkswagen reportedly programmed its vehicles to behave differently during emissions testing than in real-world driving conditions. To detect this, the West Virginia researchers developed a method for measuring a vehicle’s emissions performance as it drove down the highway. Here’s what it looked like:

One basic fact to understand here is that there are two main types of combustion engines widely available today: diesel and gasoline. And there are real trade-offs to each.

Diesel engines have long been popular in Europe, and one of their major advantages is fuel economy. Diesel fuel contains more energy per gallon than gasoline, and the diesel engines work more efficiently. Put it together, and the typical diesel car can travel up to 30 percent farther on a gallon of fuel than its gasoline counterpart.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

The Environmental Protection Agency has ordered the repair of nearly 500,000 Audi and Volkswagen vehicles based on allegations that their onboard computers were programmed to operate differently during emissions tests than they do the rest of the time. The scheme allegedly allowed Volkswagen’s cars to effectively cheat on the emissions tests, and to emit more pollutants than the law allows the rest of the time.

The problem afflicts Volkswagen and Audi vehicles from model years 2009 to 2015, meaning that it took the EPA six years to discover it. The story is a reminder of a huge change that’s happening across the car industry. Cars are becoming increasingly computerized. And the government agencies that regulate cars — from the EPA to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — are going to have to beef up their technical skills in order to regulate them effectively.