West Virginia University’s Center for Alternative Fuels Engines and Emissions, a self-funded arm inside the school’s engineering college, was just looking for work when it answered a request in 2013 for a proposal for a project to compare U.S. diesel car performance with European models.
The request had come from the International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit, European research outfit. […]
Unlike they would have done for standard tests for emissions, they didn’t run the cars on a stationary test bed. They took them out and drove them hundreds of miles—measuring pollutants along the way.
What they found was puzzling: […] the VWs were emitting far more than they were supposed to.
Real-world tests. Useful. More believable than benchmarks. A thousand times more believable than marketing.
