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The popular German automaker Volkswagen used “defeat devices” to falsely reduce vehicle emissions and cheat on emissions testing, according to a British court.
Campaigners have been urging the company to address the issues surrounding its vehicle emissions for a long time, concerned that VW vehicles produce considerably higher pollutants (bad for both the environment and for people’s lungs) than allowed by law, according to The Guardian.
The VW scandal is a significant blow for the reputation of diesel vehicles, which the auto industry once pushed as the new green alternative due to lower emissions of greenhouse gas.
However, what diesel vehicles do emit is also bad: tiny particles and irritant gases, including nitrogen dioxide. In 2015, it was revealed that Volkswagen vehicles emitted far more pollutants on the road than they reportedly did under test conditions.
When in testing conditions, the devices were in a mode that operated differently than it would on the road, and under these conditions, its emissions were low. But on the road, out of test mode, the engines reportedly emitted nitrogen oxide pollutants at extremely high levels—up to 40 times more than what is allowed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the United States, according to the BBC.
Air pollution is a serious issue, of course, but not only because of its effects on the environment—air pollution is estimated to be the cause of as many as 800,000 premature deaths in Europe each and every year, higher than the global average.
The potential effects of air pollution include heart disease, stroke, lung cancer and more. And across the globe, about 8.8 million premature deaths each year can be attributed to air pollution—more than what is caused by smoking tobacco, The Guardian reported.
Volkswagen is facing a significant collective action from about 91,000 claimants in England and Wales. Claimants allege they purchased vehicles that had been represented to them as compliant with emissions regulations but were actually noncompliant to extreme degrees.
This is the largest such class action in the UK. Class action litigation is in and of itself a rarity in the UK; group litigation orders work differently in the UK than they do in the United States where more than a thousand class action cases are filed each year.
In 2015, VW admitted to duping emissions tests for 11 million vehicles globally, leading to the company pleading guilty to two criminal charges in the United States and the payment of a whopping $4.3 billion in civil and criminal penalties. The company is estimated to have paid $21 billion in the scandal, all told.
In Australia, VW settled a major class action for between $87 million and $127 million, though that settlement included no admission of guilt.
In Europe, however, VW continues to deny that it used illegal defeat devices to cheat emissions tests.
But the high court’s preliminary finding brings VW’s actions regarding its emissions testing into fresh light.
The judge, Mr. Justice Waksman, wrote in his summary: “[After considering the arguments made by Volkswagen] the upshot was that I found that the software function in the vehicles here did indeed amount to a prohibited ‘defeat device’ … I also concluded that VW’s attempt to relitigate the issue here was an abuse of the process.”
According to the judge, “A software function which enables a vehicle to pass the test because (artificially) it operates the vehicle in a way which is bound to pass the test and in which it does not operate on the road is a fundamental subversion of the test … it destroys the utility of the test.”
In the U.K., the government is phasing out the sale of new diesel and petrol vehicles, along with coal-fired power, in an effort to clean up air pollution.
This change will be substantial in the UK, especially when compared to the United States, where relatively few diesel cars are in use. Nearly half the vehicles in the European Union are diesel, compared with 3 percent of passenger cars in the United States.
In the UK, emissions from diesel cars may cause approximately 5,800 premature deaths annually.
“[In the U.S. it would be] nowhere near the effect it would have in this country and in the rest of Europe for that matter,” said Professor Martin Williams of King’s College London. “If you were to make the cars emit at the legal limit you could reduce those deaths by at least a factor of two and maybe more. Maybe a factor of five.”
