Volkswagen's Lies Highlight Car Journalism's Failures

Last year, the 2015 Volkswagen Golf won a ton of awards. It got honors from the North American Car and Truck of the Year jury, won Yahoo! Autos top prize, and was named best of the best by a variety of other publications.

You won’t see anyone, including us here Yahoo, running out to rescind the award, despite the confession from Volkswagen that it intentionally deceived the public for seven years about the cleanliness of its diesel engines. We won’t be doing that because the awards were given to all the different varieties of Golf engines, including the gas engines which make up the bulk of sales.

But there’s another reason why we won’t be taking back the awards. It’s because the awards aren’t designed to tell you which car is really the best car out there. Honestly, we have no idea.

Here’s what an automotive award really tells you: Is this car fun to drive? Does it look cool? And does it—in its most brand-new, shined-up version—deliver on the marketing promises the automaker makes in its commercials?

That’s it. Can we tell you if the airbags are going to work when you get in a crash? Nope. Can we tell you if the airbags will accidentally blow up in your face when you hit a curb? Nope. Can we tell you if some low-level manager ordered a cheap part that goes into some crucial piece of equipment that is doomed to break after 40,000 miles and leave you careening precariously down a steep mountainbank? Nope, not that either. Can we even tell you what kind of fuel economy you’ll get in the car? Not really. We’ll say that’s because everyone drives differently, which is true, but it’s also true that the automakers have a tendency to fudge those numbers. And we’re never really sure when they’re telling the truth.

The auto industry needs good, strong watchdogs, and the media does not really fill this role. It is filled by non-profit consumer advocates, an insurance industry group that pays attention to safety issues, and some cash-strapped overworked government agencies that often rely on the automakers to police themselves. That’s what happened with VW: Volkswagen was self-certifying its pollution information and handing those numbers over to the EPA. But corporations are working hard to keep watchdogs in the dark, making it easier to cheat, says Autoblog’s Pete Bigelow. And that would hurt us all.

In retrospect, perhaps someone should have known something was up at VW. For a few years, until 2008, European automakers were loudly complaining about U.S. requirements that would require a costly urea-injection system to clean the nitrogen oxides out of diesel fumes that lead to dangerous smog. Problem was, those systems could run out of urea, rendering it useless, and U.S. officials wanted automakers to install switches that would disable diesel cars that were running out of urea.

And then, voila, VW had a solution that avoided the urea issue altogether for its small passenger cars. After taking diesels off the U.S. market in 2007 and 2008, by the 2009 model year the automaker said it had come up with a solution that used a particulate trap and a catalyst to clean the air. One reporter even quoted some Volkswagen engineers as saying the air coming out of the 2009 diesel Jetta was cleaner than the air going in.

Of course, we now know that was a flat-out, bald-faced lie.

The air coming out of the back of VW’s diesel engines was 40 times more polluted than allowable by law. But at the time, it looked like VW had made a huge environmental advance. By driving a “clean” diesel, you could go further on one tank of gas than you could on a tank of gasoline, and you could do it without spewing toxic fumes.

Journalists take part in a fuel-mileage record attempt with a VW Passat diesel.