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Diesel car woes could fuel electric vehicle industry

Scott Tilley

When you think about it, the phrase “clean diesel” is an oxymoron. All you have to do is stand beside a diesel truck while it belches noxious fumes into the air in nasty black clouds to see for yourself. But it was a great marketing gimmick.

The CEO of carmaker Volkswagen (VW) stepped down this week amidst a growing furor concerning the use of so-called “defeat devices” that VW installed in over 11 million diesel-powered cars worldwide. These devices are actually software programs that detect when the car’s emissions are being tested and adjust the emission control systems to burn fuel more cleanly. But when the car is in normal use, on the road, the device reduces the emission controller’s effectiveness in favor of higher performance.

When you have a car in California, you have to take it to a mechanic to perform a smog test. I had to do it myself in the past. It’s this sort of test that the VW device was designed to trick, and it worked very well. Until now.

The world reveres the abilities of German engineers. Their brands are built on the image of superior craftsmanship and innovation. But circumventing those pesky EPA pollution guidelines by fraudulently altering the data is not what we expect from a global organization like VW. Consumers rightly expect VW engineers to focus their considerable efforts on actually reducing NOx emissions, and not getting creative when it comes to developing code to circumvent the problem.

This soon-to-be Harvard Business Review case study raises another interesting possibility, one that is much farther reaching than for diesel cars alone. What if there are similar devices (hardware and/or software) installed in other cars that have been misreporting data such as miles per gallon? Software can be developed to do just about anything these days, so I see no reason why slipping a bit of code into the engine control systems to fiddle with the numbers would be far fetched. Quite the opposite: it would be a much simpler way of achieving mandated environmental targets without all that tiresome engineering.

This may also put the final nail in the coffin of diesel cars. Very few companies still make them, and apparently for good reason. However, it is a wonderful opportunity for manufacturers of electric cars to tell their story.

The fallout from VW’s deceitful actions is far from over. There are reports the German government was aware of the defeat devices for some time. If true, I would expect to see a number of very expensive lawsuits emerge from this PR fiasco.

Scott Tilley is a professor at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne. Contact him at TechnologyToday@srtilley.com