VW emissions scandal

British newspaper The Guardian just released its second report investigating the real-world emissions of diesel vehicles, and it’s not pretty: Models from Mercedes-Benz, Honda, Mazda and Mitsubishi all put out more than the legal limit of NOx, the pollutant at the center of the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal.

In testing, Emissions Analytics analyzed about 50 Euro 6 diesels, and 150 Euros 5 diesels, and found only five had real-world NOx levels that matched the regulatory test. The Guardian report was based on data from Emissions Analytics, which is now saying the story is misrepresenting its data.

The emission testing policies have faced a lot of criticism ever since Volkswagen admitted that 11 million of its vehicles had software created to skirt around emissions tests. The company eventually fessed up to the crime, which led to a major press relations disaster, a precipitous drop in the stock market, and ultimately Chief Executive Martin Winterkorn’s resignation from his post. Tests carried out on Honda models show that they emit six times the regulatory limit of NOx pollution.

Nick Molden, of Emissions Analytics, told the Guardian the problems with VW diesel cars in the US “threw a light on a slightly different problem” in the European Union – that of “widespread legal over-emissions”. “There is no evidence of illegal activity, such as the ‘defeat devices’ used by Volkswagen”, Carrington writes. Honda, on average, produced over 2.6 times the legal level.

Essentially every diesel vehicle on today’s roadways emits more emissions during everyday road driving than they do in testing.

As well as failing to meet government-set targets, these cheating cars are said to have pushed pollution to illegal levels to many places across the United Kingdom, added billions of pounds in national health costs and caused thousands of premature deaths.

“Since real-world driving conditions do not generally reflect those in the laboratory, the consumption figures may differ from the standardized figures”, a Mercedes-Benz spokesperson told the Guardian.