Volkswagen Played Me For A Chump — And Likely You, Too

Former Volkswagen U.S. chief Stefan Jacoby holds up the “Green Car of the Year” award for the 2009 VW Jetta diesel, now under EPA recall

Ten months ago, the Volkswagen corporation flew two dozen car journalists, including me, to New Mexico to participate in something called the “Audi TDI Challenge.” The expressed goal was to drive an Audi A3 from Albuquerque to San Diego, 834 miles, on one tank of diesel fuel. I teamed with Jason Torchinsky of Jalopnik, a mad scientist if ever one existed, determined to win. We were one of only two teams to make it all the way, but we won because we took a wrong turn outside of Flagstaff. They handed us a glass of champagne upon arrival and we received a number of lovely parting gifts, including a quality pair of beach sandals. Hooray, we were the champions. 

Even though the race was little more than a ludicrous PR stunt that Audi had pulled off before, the victory still meant a lot to me. First of all, I won a car race, something I’d never done before. Also, I’d done it in the name of fuel economy, which to me is the most important aspect of the automotive industry. 

But when it comes to VW, cleanliness was next to duplicitousness. Instead of winning a race, I’d actually carried water for one of the silliest and most hypocritical plots in the history of the car business. When the veil came off on Friday, revealing that VW had jerry-rigged the software in its nearly 500,000 diesel cars to cheat on U.S. emissions testing, years of TDI-driving fun evaporated like so much poison into the air.

Though the MPG didn’t lie, the rest of the fuel system did, and for years, no one caught it. VW sold its “clean diesel” line as an alternative float in the green-car parade. Everyone loved their diesels, from the hackiest bought-off blogger who never has a negative word to say about any car, to the totally objective Consumer Reports, the industry’s ethical pillar, which rarely met a modern TDI it doesn’t adore. The Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning Dan Neil, who knows as much about cars as anyone alive and is certainly willing to call b.s. on the car companies when it’s warranted, published a review in May called “VW Golf TDI SportWagen: A Special Kind Of Love.” VW even fooled its professional RallyCross driver Tanner Foust into pimping its “Clean Diesels” in ads, only to take them down when the news broke. (They couldn’t snag all of them.)

But Seymour Hersh himself wouldn’t think of asking, “Did you knowingly install something called a ‘defeat device’ designed to deliberately cheat emissions testing, so that your cars could then spew up to 40 times the amount of legally allowed dangerous particulate into the air?” Who would do such a thing? Well, now we know.

They got me, too, on a number of occasions. I went to Mexico to look at the new TDI Golf—everyone’s car of the year—as it rolled off the factory line, beheld the glories of the Autostadt in Wolfsburg, and triumphantly drove a Golf diesel into the center of Berlin. Most importantly, I slow-raced the TDI crown jewel, the Audi A3, across America while plastering its glories all over social media. And was all to celebrate the equivalent of a doctoral degree from a fake mail-order university.

I’ve seen quite a bit of commentary that asks, “if VW fixes this problem, will owners accept reduced performance?” That’s the wrong question. Most TDI drivers, including several I’ve heard from today, chose their cars because of the promise of a balance between environmental friendliness and fun-to-drive, with a major in fuel economy. On Friday, they found out what they were really driving. The special kind of love is over, and VW is going to pay for the divorce.

As a former Audi TDI Challenge champion, I say: You can have the flip-flops back. They’re a little dirty now. Just like your cars.