The Fix Is In

Three years after its emissions sleight of hand was exposed, volkswagen has a software update to put its diesels back on the road. We test the result to find out if repairs to its cars will be a step toward repairing the brand's reputation.

- Jeff Sabatini

Throwing money at problems is how corporations make them go away. Pay for more lawyers, pay for more public relations, and certainly pay for more marketing in the hopes that the world will believe your new promises. For Volkswagen, those invoices have recently been super sized, befitting the scope of the diesel cheating scandal that has engulfed the company and prompted the recall of approximately 590,000 vehicles in the United States.

Yet, its attorney bills and the costs of hiring extra PR staff must seem like little more than a few padded expense reports to the accountants in Wolfsburg. Since a group of West Virginia University scientists announced in May 2014 that they had found unexpectedly high emissions from VW’s TDI vehicles—which led to the uncovering of the company’s conspiracy to cheat government regulators and defraud consumers—Volkswagen has committed to spend at least $25 billion in the U.S. in legal settlements alone.

As the world’s largest car company bleeds, TDI money now begets its own economy [see “TDI Profiteering”]. VW even has had to create a subsidiary called Electrify America to ensure the spending of $2 billion on brand-neutral electric-vehicle infrastructure. Not coincidentally, Volkswagen says that it has quit the “clean diesel” business for good, at least in the U.S., to focus its green efforts on EVs. Except that as of April, the company owns more than 237,000 used diesels acquired through its court-mandated buyback program. And inventories are growing, with 15,000 more vehicles being turned in each week, according to reports. Without the joint blessing of the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and the United States Environmental Protection Agency, these cars are to remain parked in places like the lots that surround the shuttered Pontiac Silver dome, the former Detroit Lions football stadium 30 miles north of Detroit.