Martin Winterkorn lost his job as Volkswagen’s boss because the carmaker cheated emissions tests
writes
Andrew Morriss, Dean of the
Texas A&M School of Law, to The Economist (“
Dirty secrets”, September 26th).
Yet the heads of the environment agencies in America and Europe are
still at their desks. This is despite the fact that the only way they 
wouldn’t have known that engine software might be detecting test
conditions and adjusting the engine was if they had spent the past two
decades on another planet.
… It is impossible for any competent regulator to have been unaware of what was going on with other diesel engines after 1998.
You called for criminal prosecutions of executives that engage in
this sort of behaviour. When will you start to hold regulators to the
same standard?
Glenn Kennedy adds that the
VW scandal raises questions about a 1970s-era regulatory regime that
is based on a one-size-fits-all emissions standard set at a national
level, when the reality is that air quality is largely an urban,
regional and sometimes seasonal problem.
Indeed, preferring a reduction in NOx emissions at the expense of
lower efficiency and therefore higher carbon emissions has a possibly
negative environmental benefit for a car driving along a deserted
interstate in Montana, compared with a stop-start commute through
smog-choked 
and densely populated Los Angeles.
But if VW’s technically
brilliant “defeat” software is able to discern the purpose of the car’s
operation and adjust its pollution output accordingly, then surely with
GPS technology it should be able to detect its location and make the
same adjustments. Feed real-time atmospheric condition data to the
vehicle and it might dynamically adjust this trade-off in urban
environments, preferring efficiency on clear, windy days, and lower NOx
emissions on still, smoggy ones.
Put to a nefarious purpose, VW’s algorithms could well lead to its
demise. But combined with updated, technology-driven regulation, this
same code could contain the seeds of a smarter, more efficient approach
to reducing transportation emissions.
Finally, Hovione's
Guy Villax points out that
in Europe our regulators are asleep at the wheel. Football and diesel
cars are small in America and big in Europe, but it is the American
authorities who have taken action in those two scandals. How much longer
will Europe allow non-compliance to be a competitive advantage?
