How Could Volkswagen's Top Engineers Not Have Known?

How could Volkswagen's top engineers not have known?

- Dune Lawrence, Ben Elgin, and Vernon Silver

For the gearheads at West Virginia University, it was a minor commission. An environmental group, the International Council on Clean Transportation, had asked the school’s Center for Alternative Fuels, Engines and Emissions to test the tailpipes of diesel cars in the U.S., such as those sold by Volkswagen and BMW. Studies suggested that automakers’ diesel cars polluted more on the road than in the lab, and curiously, more in Europe than in the U.S. ICCT wanted to figure out what the automakers had done to meet America’s tougher emissions standards and how to repatriate these improvements for European car buyers.

The center, founded in 1989, is based on the rolling WVU campus in the foothills of Appalachia and occupies a warehouse-like space full of young men in T-shirts and jeans fiddling with jury-rigged equipment—and it smells like a gas station. Run by Daniel Carder, a West Virginia native, it mostly tests heavy-duty engines for trucks and locomotives. Taking sleek passenger cars on a road trip was a novelty. One student at the lab, Marc Besch, thought it sounded interesting and asked to work on the project. Besch grew up in Switzerland, and his family ran a dealership that sold mostly Opels, a German competitor to Volkswagen.

There was one problem: Carder, Besch, and their team couldn’t find any diesel cars in West Virginia. So they plotted test routes in California, where lots of consumers have bought into the marketing promise of “clean diesel,” which touts remarkable fuel efficiency without sacrificing muscular acceleration. Out west, they could also use the California Air Resources Board’s dynamometers, the hulking apparatuses used to measure the exhaust coming out of a stationary car.