VW and the truth of engineering: say what you do, do what you say

Not that I was much of a boy racer, but the sexiest car I ever owned was a 1982 Volkswagen Scirocco with the lines of a paper dart and the cornering of a cheetah. I once drove it overnight from the City to Tuscany with a blind date who barely uttered a word, en route or afterwards. In an era when British factories could make nothing better than a laughable Allegro or a downmarket Escort, everyone coveted a German car — the top choice for twenty-somethings being the VW Golf convertible (Sciroccos were rarer) whose quality came as a revelation after years of broken fanbelts and burst radiators on unreliable Minis.

These were machines that spoke of Teutonic perfectionism and the will to win in global markets that we Brits had lost. Who would have thought that the second of those urges would one day overtake the first in the form of the ‘defeat device’ — secret software that generates false emissions data when the car is laboratory-tested?

But perhaps it’s a mistake to confuse perfectionism with integrity. I have long looked askance at Audi, a marque reinvented by VW under the mantra Vorsprung durch Technik (‘advancement through technology’) that was really no more than futuristic body shapes bolted on to standard VW substructures. The US version of the slogan, ‘Truth in Engineering’, looked lame this week as two million Audis were also revealed to have been fitted with defeat devices.

Hypnotising the consumer by clever image-making is one thing. Designing cars that lie to regulators by revealing only a tiny percentage of their emissions is something else altogether. The defeat device is the equivalent of a pharmaceutical firm adding a secret substance to a new drug to conceal the presence of an ingredient that causes nasty side-effects.