How Engineers at West Virginia University Caught VW Cheating
By Philip E. Ross
“Some people have mischaracterized what our role was,” says Dan Carder, interim director of the University of West Virginia’s Center for Alternative Fuels, Engines and Emissions (CAFEE). “Some have used the phrase ‘tipped off the EPA.’ But we were just working under contract.”
The contracting organization, a European non-profit, had wanted to convince European regulators to emulate strict U.S. standards for diesel emissions of nitrous oxides (NOX). So it asked CAFEE engineers to gather data from the field. They rented VW diesels, measured their tailpipe emissions on the road and compared them to measurements on the same cars made in the lab.
The discrepancies were huge.“We presented this in a public forum in San Diego, in the spring of 2014; we said, these are two vehicles; we’re presenting what we can present,” Carder says.
“And EPA people were in the audience.” Meanwhile, the sponsoring group, called the International Council on Clean Transportation, published the results online as well.
The information was out there for more than a year. But the auto press missed its significance.
The EPA did not. It started testing with a vengence, going through all the necessary protocols before formally approaching Volkswagen. VW resisted for a while, then it admitted that it had deliberately cheated.
“What’s surprising to me was their total admission,”http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/advanced-cars/how-professors-caught-vw-cheating
