Faster, Higher, Farther by Jack Ewing

Author:Jack Ewing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2017-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

Exposure

BERND GOTTWEIS, Volkswagen’s head of product safety, was known inside the company as the Red Adair of quality control. Adair was a Texan famous for his ability to extinguish runaway oil well fires. Gottweis, a Volkswagen veteran who reported directly to Winterkorn, also had a talent for putting out fires, in his case the kind that occurred when there was a serious defect in a Volkswagen product. Soon after the West Virginia University researchers reported their results, Gottweis was among the first to get a copy. In May 2014, after taking stock of the situation, Gottweis wrote a one-page report that was included in the packet Martin Winterkorn’s aides put together for him to read over the weekend. The packet was known internally as “Wikopost” (“Wiko” was one of Winterkorn’s nicknames). It contained some unsettling news.

One of the Volkswagens tested by the team from West Virginia had emitted fifteen to thirty-five times the permitted amounts of nitrogen oxides during road tests, Gottweis wrote. The other, the Passat with the urea-based SCR system, was five to eighteen times over the limit. The West Virginia team had also tested a BMW as part of its work for the International Council on Clean Transportation, Gottweis noted. The BMW had not shown a discrepancy between emissions on the road and in the testing lab, except when the car was driving up a mountain and the engine was under particular strain. The reason, although Gottweis did not say so, was that BMW had not scrimped on the antipollution technology it used in cars sold in the United States. Whereas the Volkswagens had either a lean NOx trap or an SCR system, the BMWs had both.

CARB had already declared its intention to do further tests, Gottweis wrote. The California regulator had also asked Volkswagen for technical details about the pollution control equipment, including how the engine software regulated doses of the urea solution.

Gottweis was blunt about the bind that the testing had created for Volkswagen. “A thorough explanation for the dramatic increase in NOx emissions cannot be given to the authorities,” he wrote. “It can be assumed that the authorities will then investigate the VW systems to determine whether Volkswagen implemented a test detection system in the engine control unit software (so-called defeat device) and, in the event a ‘treadmill test’ is detected, a regeneration or dosing strategy is implemented that differs from real driving conditions.

“In Drivetrain Development, modified software versions are currently being developed which can reduce the real driving emissions,” Gottweis continued, “but this will not bring about compliance with the limits, either. We will inform you about the further development and discussion with the authorities.”

Gottweis’s memo delivered a clear warning to the very highest level of management that Volkswagen had been caught using a defeat device, and that it had no excuses and could not easily rectify the excess emissions. Although Volkswagen does not dispute that Winterkorn received the Gottweis memo, Volkswagen has argued that there was no proof that Winterkorn actually read the memo, which was included in a stack of other documents.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.