#emissions

Dieselgate

In late 2013, the International Council on Clean Transportation paid a small team at West Virginia University to put two diesel Volkswagens on the road from Los Angeles to Seattle, hooked up to portable emissions sensors. The team expected to find data confirming what Volkswagen's American marketing campaign had been claiming for years: that 'clean diesel' was real. Instead they found nitrogen-oxide emissions up to forty times the legal limit. Eighteen months later, on September 18, 2015, the U.S. EPA formally accused Volkswagen of installing software in eleven million cars that detected emissions tests and lied to them. By the end of the week, the CEO had resigned and Volkswagen had begun a six-year journey through $34 billion of fines and settlements.