Editorial: VW betrays us with its big dirty lie

Volkswagen’s admission that it cheated on emissions tests for nearly a half-million diesel VWs and Audis should infuriate everyone who draws breath in this country. But for Californians, it’s a particularly big blow.

Diesel exhaust is inherently filthy, and packed with the particulates and nitrogen oxide gases that have given this state some of the worst air and asthma rates in the country. That’s why, decades ago, California decided to severely restrict it.

In fact, when this state became the first in the nation to regulate tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases, foreign car makers despaired because it appeared the diesel cars so popular in Europe would be permanently cut out of the U.S. market; California, with its great size, shapes the nation’s automotive standards, and indeed the 2002 law was historic, setting the stage for the modern age of Volts, Priuses and Teslas.

So when foreign automakers claimed they could manufacture “clean diesel” vehicles green enough to meet California’s threshold, it sounded like a win-win. Alas, it turns out that at least one automaker was just cynically gaming California’s rules of the road.

Last week, after an independent study accidentally stumbled upon the German automaker’s malfeasance, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency charged Volkswagen with rigging its automotive software to artificially lower emissions readings during testing. Inside the laboratory, a so-called “defeat device” enabled the company’s diesel Beetles, Passats, Golfs, Jettas and Audis to meet U.S. pollution standards, even though, on they road, the cars threw off as much as 40 times the allowable amount of smog-producing pollutants.

We know that, at the very least, taxpayers were taken to the cleaners: A Los Angeles Times analysis this week estimated that, based on the fraudulent emissions testing, the federal government paid out as much as $51 million in federal green car subsidies.

Federal authorities have called on the automaker to recall all the affected vehicles and modify emissions system. It could also face billions of dollars in fines, not to mention potential penalties from civil lawsuits.

Fine. But here where the lies have done the most damage, there should be special penance. If these allegations are true, Volkswagen has secretly spewed six years’ worth of illegal fumes all over California’s freeways, and tarnished the good name of local car dealers who will pay the crushing price of a top-down corporate betrayal.

Perhaps, in the reckoning, there’s a place for the punishment to get creative – fleets of Volkswagen-subsidized electric vehicles for the San Joaquin Valley, or a massive investment in asthma research.

Or maybe the executives who approved this big lie could do time in a closed room with their diesel products, just trying, like the rest of us, to breathe.

This story was originally published September 22, 2015 at 9:09 AM with the headline "Editorial: VW betrays us with its big dirty lie."