Why is it such a shock? I've seen so many emails, messages and tweets from people this past few weeks saying that they'll never trust a car maker again, or that they'll always be sceptical of what the industry tells them. Volkswagen's exam cheating seems to have raised a level of ire that I find a touch baffling. After all, when you take a group of highly educated, talented and clever engineers and marketing people and give them a set of rules to work to, why are we surprised and shocked that they start looking for loopholes and work-arounds? Volkswagen's emissions-test software may have been deceitful and cheating, but it was also clever stuff, if you look at it from a certain angle.
There is also an entire other column to be written about an economy and emissions testing regime that ACTIVELY ENCOURAGES CAR MAKERS TO TWEAK, MODIFY AND CHEAT (capitals authors' own) the emissions test - if Volkswagen cheated it's in large part down to the fact that an acceptance of cheating is ingrained in the system.
It's worth remembering that every major car maker, every one, takes out spare tyres to save weight, removes wing mirrors and tapes up body panels for better aero, fits lower rolling resistance tyres that are then over-inflated to the point of bursting and even disconnects parts such as the alternator and air conditioning to reduce drag on the engine, all in order to score as high a fuel economy and as low a CO2 figure as possible. You physically couldn't drive a car, for any appreciable distance, in the conditions in which they are tested and this is (capitals again) ALL OFFICIALLY ALLOWED AND LEGAL. Against a culture of official cheating such as that, was Volkswagen's crime really so great?
Besides, working the system is ingrained in the car industry as it is in every industry. Regulation and oversight are there to be endured and circumvented, not followed to the letter. Appalling cynicism? Maybe, but that doesn't make it true. Have you counted the rodent hairs in your yoghurt to make certain that they're not in breach of food safety guidelines? Do you read the fine print of the safety leaflet before plugging in a new electrical appliance? Did you actually read the Spotify Terms and Conditions before clicking OK? Car companies are not the only ones to push the boundaries of the rules, here.
Perhaps it's in the DNA. After all, we always say racing improves the breed and car makers have been using motor racing to improve and develop new technology since the end of the 19th century. And all through motor racing there is a thick (and often highly entertaining) seam of cheating. One of my favourites is the tale of the legendary NASCAR driver 'Smokey' Yunick, who said that, one season, NASCAR officials decreed that the size of the car's fuel tank could only be such-and-such as many gallons. "Fair enough," said Smokey. "But they never said how wide the fuel pipe from the tank to the engine could be." Yunnick was caught red-handed when he mischievously decided to run two laps of the track while officials actually had the fuel tank of his car removed for inspection...
Or how about the Tyrrell F1 team? Beaten on power by the big turbo-engine teams of Ferrari, McLaren and Renault in the eighties, Tyrrell decided to make its cars as light as possible to squeeze all available use out of its Ford Cosworth engines. So much so that the cars were illegally light. No problem - just fit a big tank in the car and fill it with water, for a much-needed 'brake cooling system'. If the seal on that tank just happens to break on the first lap, letting all the water (and therefore weight) out, well, we'll just have to try and get to the end of the race without the brakes being cooled. Ahem. Honestly.
Clever circumventions of the rules have always been a part of general motoring too, although perhaps here they're somewhat less entertaining. Consumers in Ireland and the UK were rightly furious in the early 2000s when they found that many of the 'new' cars they were buying had actually been stored in open fields for months before, often causing premature rust on the cars' undersides and even the brake discs.
You want more devious than that? How about the 1987 Chrysler scandal, when it turned out that Chrysler employees were using company cars with the odometers disconnected, allowing the company to give them a quick valet and then sell them on as new six months or even a year down the line? We forgot about that one pretty quickly, didn't we?
Ford famously saw an internal memo leaked to the press in the seventies, stating that the cost of modifying the fuel tanks on its new Pinto model, to make it less likely to explode in a crash, was more expensive than the likely cost of any law-suits from the public. Cynical calculation at its best, and now nearly 40 years in the past, but more recently Ford managed to shovel blame for a spate of accidents involving the late-nineties Explorer SUV onto its tyre supplier, Firestone - and 271 people had to die before either company owned up.
Two years ago, Ford (again), Kia and Hyundai were fined by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for lying about how economical some of their cars were, in some cases only by 1mpg. Toyota and Audi got nabbed for similar fuel economy claims padding, on the A6 and Prius.
So what I'm saying is that for all the hand-wringing and headline-shouting over the Volkswagen case, there is nothing new here. In fact, there is nothing even that bad here. Yes, nitrogen oxide is a nasty gas, and Volkswagen should have been more honest about what it was doing, but how many of us read the headlines, became disgusted with Volkswagen and then went down to McDonald's for a big plate of cholesterol and additives? Pollution of rivers, air and land doesn't seem to stop us buying smartphones, computers, TVs or, for that matter, food. How many acres of palm forest have had to be burned so that you could have a new bottle of shampoo? How many square miles burned and tilled so that you could have a burger?
I'm not trying to excuse Volkswagen's actions, but we need to have some perspective here.