“Cheating” Auto Companies Circle Their Wagons On Government Emission Testing
October, 2015
“Cheating” is too weak a word to describe poisoning people for more than 4 decades by big auto and government policies.
The NY Times reports:
LONDON — Despite the cloud cast by the Volkswagen scandal, automakers are proposing that they be allowed a 70 percent increase in the nitrogen oxides their cars emit, unreleased documents show, as part of new European pollution tests.
Under the new plan, cars in Europe would for the first time be tested on the road, using portable monitoring equipment, in addition to laboratory testing.
The automakers, which include Volkswagen, General Motors, Daimler, BMW, Toyota, Renault, PSA Peugeot Citroën, Ford and Hyundai, are essentially conceding what outside groups have said for some time — that the industry cannot meet pollution regulations when cars are taken out of testing laboratories. The move is occurring as Volkswagen, the world’s largest automaker, grapples with fallout from the discovery that 11 million of its vehicles were equipped with software meant to cheat emissions tests.
Tests of car emissions required in the United States and Europe take place in laboratories, where vehicles are run through drills on a dynamometer, which is the automotive equivalent of a treadmill. Automakers have found ways to cheat the tests since emissions were first regulated in the early 1970s. Seehttp://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/business/automakers-ask-europe-for-leniency-in-emissions-testing.html?emc=edit_tnt_20151002&nlid=37926955&tntemail0=y&_r=0
Disclosure:
In the 1971 I blew the whistle on EPA changes in the emission test procedures to favor auto makers. I was fired and sued the National Academy of Sciences for access to information supporting my arguments. Judge Sirica and judges up to the Supreme Court ruled against me denying me access to the documents. See https://www.careforcrashvictims.com/assets/EPA-Whistle-Blow.pdf
Decades later the Nixon Tapes revealed what I did not know at the time. In April 1971, Henry Ford II and Lee Iacocca met with Nixon in the White House and pressed for relief on emission standards and had already met with EPA Administrator Ruckelshaus to change emission test procedures. See https://www.careforcrashvictims.com/assets/Nixon-Transcriptions.pdf
For more on history of emissions by companies and government failures to protect people, see the Center for Auto Safety statement:“The only way to change auto company behavior is to put the responsible executives in jail. After a flagrant pattern across the auto industry of violating US health and safety laws, the Center for Auto Safety calls on the Justice Department to move to put the responsible VW executives behind bars as it just did with peanut butter manufacturers.” Seehttp://www.autosafety.org/volkswagen-emissions-defeat-devices-violate-epa-emissions-rules
I am sorry to say that history teaches that we also have to hold government officials in all agencies and branches of government to the same standards of accountability.
Lou
