The Volkswagen Defeat Device Scandal: A Look into the Gassing of Monkeys and Emissions Cheating

Hello everyone and welcome to this title is as bad as it sounds, where we're going to explore one of the most notorious scandals in automotive history - Volkswagen's defeat device. This device was used to cheat on emissions tests, and to make matters worse, it involved sticking monkeys in boxes and forcing them to inhale diesel emissions.

In order to understand how this all came about, let's take a step back into American history. In the United States, there are laws that prohibit the emission of excessive nitrogen oxide emissions because these gases are harmful to respiratory health, contribute to smog, and have caused tens of thousands of premature deaths annually around the globe. Nitrogen oxides are considered bad, so we have rules in place to prevent them. However, Volkswagen wanted to create diesel engines that were both efficient and environmentally friendly, without sacrificing anything in terms of performance.

To achieve this goal, Volkswagen created a defeat device - a system designed to fool consumers and regulatory agencies into believing their diesel vehicles were cleaner than they actually were. This defeat device involved manipulating the exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) system to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions. To understand how this works, let's take a look at the EGR system itself.

The intake path begins with air entering the engine through the compressor side of the turbocharger into the intake manifold. From there, it travels to the combustion chamber where it is burned off, releasing exhaust gases into the exhaust manifold. The exhaust gas can then be routed in one of two ways - either through the high-pressure EGR system or the low-pressure EGR system.

The high-pressure EGR system involves injecting inert gas into the combustion chamber, which reduces air and fuel consumption. Lower combustion temperatures are a result, as the nitrogen and oxygen molecules do not split off and reform into nitrogen oxides. This is the primary function of the high-pressure EGR system - to prevent the creation of nitrogen oxides.

The exhaust gas can then travel through an oxidation catalytic converter, which breaks down hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide. The diesel particulate filter gets rid of soot and diesel particulates, and the exhaust can choose to go either through the low-pressure EGR side or the nitrogen oxide trap.

The low-pressure EGR system is located after the turbocharger and feeds back into the intake portion of the turbocharger, where it re-enters the intake manifold. This system is designed to prevent the creation of nitrogen oxides as well, but in a slightly different way.

In lean burning scenarios, nitrogen oxide emissions are created due to higher combustion temperatures and less fuel consumption. To combat this, diesel engines can have air/fuel ratios as high as 70:1. The nitrogen oxide trap works by storing nitrogen oxides within its surface area, where they bond with the surface material. However, this process requires fuel to break down the nitrogen oxides.

When nitrogen oxides are trapped inside the nitrogen oxide trap, it reacts with diesel fuel and forms N2, nitrogen, and H2O - water as emissions from that. This clears out the trap and allows the vehicle to return to lean burning ratios after using a little extra fuel to clean it out.

The final component of this system is the hydrogen sulfide to sulfur dioxide converter, which travels through the muffler and into the exhaust gases before they exit the vehicle. This system works properly by creating very clean emissions, but Volkswagen's defeat device was anything but clean.

So how did Volkswagen manage to get away with cheating on emissions tests? The answer lies in a single calibration for when the vehicle was being dyno tested and another calibration for when the vehicle was driving on the road. However, how does it know which one to use?

Volkswagen took advantage of the fact that steering input could tell them if they were being tested or not. When the car is sitting on a dyno, the front wheels are simply spinning, but as soon as human input is provided, the vehicle knows it's being tested and adjusts its performance accordingly.

When driving on the road, Volkswagen would reduce engine performance to improve emissions and avoid detection by the EPA. This was all done under the guise of creating cleaner diesel engines, but in reality, they were cheating their way out of compliance with U.S. laws. The consequences of this deception are still being felt today.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enHello everyone and welcome the title is as bad as it sounds Volkswagen was literally sticking monkeys in boxesforcing them to inhale diesel emissions andusing this to prove that their diesel vehicles are cleanand as if gassing monkeys wasn't bad enough they cheated the results. So in this video we're gonna explain howVolkswagen's defeat device worked do a little bit of history on how this all came about and then get into the gassing of monkeystowards the endso this all goes back to for example in Americawe have laws that say you shouldn't emit lots of nitrogen oxide emissionsbecause these are bad because respiratory illnesses, they create smog,they caused tens of thousands of premature deaths annually around the globe.Basically the simple thing to know is that nitrogen oxides are bad, so we have rules that prevent them andVolkswagencreated this device in order to get around the US laws because they wanted the performance and efficiency of diesel enginesbut they didn't want to sacrificeanything in the name of emissions, and so they created this defeat device to get around itfooling their consumersfooling the US environmental agencies and so this is essentially what a Volkswagen exhaustdiesel will look like so you've got your engine right herewe'll just follow the intake path and travel along through our system our air comes in your intakepasses through the compressor side of the turbocharger into your intake manifold then into your cylinderit's burned off where it goes into the exhaust manifold where it can be routed one of two ways a high-pressure exhaust gas recirculationso this is done, tooyou know you put some inert gasinto the combustion chamber you're not burning as much air and fuel and as a result your combustion temperatures are lower so lowercombustion temperatures means that nitrogen and oxygenN2 and O2 they don't split off and then reforminto nitrogen oxides so lower combustion temperatures are critical in order to prevent the creation of nitrogen oxidesso that's what EGR is for so that's the high-pressure EGR side or that exhaust can trythrough the exhaust turbine then through aoxidation catalytic converter, which is breaking downhydrocarbons and carbon monoxide and then passes through a diesel particulate filterwhich gets rid ofsoot and diesel particulates, and then it can choose to go between you've got these valves here of course for the EGR systemsthe low-pressure EGR side so it's after the turboand that's going to go back into the intake portion of the turbocharger and then re fed into the intake manifold againthis is done to prevent the creation ofnitrogen oxidesthen that exhaust can continue traveling through a nitrogen oxide trapso this chemically what it does is it has this surface area that stores nitrogen oxidesso the nitrogen oxides want to bond and store within this trap and nitrogen oxides are created in lean burning scenarioswhere you have these higher temperatures in diesel enginesand you are not using fuel to get rid of these nitrogen oxidesso diesel engines can have air/fuel ratios as high as 70:1 18:1 to 71but essentially how thisnitrogen oxide trap works is it needs fuel in order to break down the nitrogen oxides that are trapped insideso it will react with diesel fuel and then it will form N2 nitrogen andH2O water as its emissions from that so you'll get rid of the nitrogen oxide in thereyou'll clear out your trapand then you can go back to lean burning and you know start to refill up this trapafter using a little bit of extra fuel in order to clean it outand then finally you have this hydrogen sulfide to sulfur dioxide converterand then it travels out through the muffler and into you know the airso that's the system, and you know working properly it can create very clean emissionssoVolkswagens cheat was to have onecalibration for when the vehicle was being dyno tested and one calibration for when the vehicles driving on the road wellhow does it know that it's driving on the road well because you're going to provide a steering input so that steering input tells thecar hey unleash full you know potential because a human is actually driving this versus when it's sitting on a dynoand it's just spinning the front wheels here actually steering then it knows hey, I'm actually being tested right nowand so I'm going to reduce performance, but improve emissions because that will get the EPA off my backthey'll say \"Hey your vehicle's super clean,\" and we'll get away with itso that's what their defeat device does so how does it alter the parameters in here? Well when you're driving on the road,it's just going for maximum performance and maximum fuel economy, which are of course traits that consumers want in a vehicle, so it will minimizeexhaust gas recirculation that means you're getting more nitrogen oxide emissions, but your performance is greaterit will use a leaner air fuel ratio when possible this means more nitrogen oxide emissionsbut your efficiency is improved and then it will render this nitrogen oxide trap ineffectiveit'll fill it upand then it won't use extra fuel to clear it out because that's just a waste of fuel your fuel economy goes downso you can improve your fuel economy by not using that the result however isthat they have 40 times the legal limit of nitrogen oxides coming out of the exhaust and this was discovered by WestVirginia University some students therewho are doing some on-road emissions testing and found out look all of these numbers seem way too high what's going on?so then they got more people involved they tried to communicate with VolkswagenVolkswagen downplayed, it said it was you know testing airs of courseit wasn't and the fallout was known as dieselgate which is an ongoing thing Volkswagens lost 26 billion dollars or soas a result of this in fines and so what happens when the defeat device is on when it's on a dynamometerwell the lean NOx trap is of course activated so that means worse fuel economybut you're gonna get rid of those nitrogen oxide emissions the high-pressureEGR you wouldn't use that as much why not use that well that means you're sending performancethrough you know back to the intakerather than spooling up this turbo, so your turbo performance is going to be reduced you'll have more lagyou won't have you know the same boost created in those portions where you're sending more exhaust gas backthrough the intake rather than out the exhaust so you're losing turbo performance in the name of reducing nitrogen oxideslow pressure EGR a very similar thing you're going to be producingless nitrogen oxides by usingEGR however you're going to be losing performancebecause you're not burning more air and fuel you're putting in inert gasinto that combustion chamber and then finally you can lower the air fuel ratioand this means less nitrogen oxides used, but it means worse fuel economy because once again. You're just going to bereacting with the NOx trap and then just in general using those lower air fuel ratiosyou get worse fuel economy, but you can improve the nitrogen oxide characteristics of the emissionsok so this is how it's all donefrom an emissions standpoint nowlet's get into the monkey testing ok so moving on to the disturbing information that was facilitated by Volkswagenso BMW Volkswagen and Daimler aka Mercedes grouped together to form and fund anorganization a research group called EUGT and the purpose of this research group was to show that diesels are greatthey're wonderful their missions aren't that terrible that kind of thing so to do researchsurrounding diesel vehicles and prove to the public that they're wonderfulnowVolkswagen took the lead role inthis monkey study BMW and Daimler have kind of pulled themselves back and said we didn't know that they were cheating this testwe weren't involved they were the ones facilitating it and based on the information that's out currently that looks to be trueit looks like Volkswagen was really the one heading all of this it was their vehicle, and they were overseeing the test itselfso the EUGT then funded Lovelace respiratory Researchinstitute which is an institute in New Mexico in the United States where they used crab-eating macaques which are non-human primateswhich they can use for testing so the legal justification for what was done is that we were learning somethingthat could you know improve the health of humansin order to do this we needed to use something very similar to a human so the research was done on non-human primatesin order to learn about the health effects of emissions. Now this is kind of dumb in the first place because we have the technologyto measure exactly what's coming out of exhaust that's how Volkswagen was discovered to be doing something wrong here in the first placewe have the technology to do it without monkeys it seems a bit silly to do and unethicalbut regardless it was legal to do they have since gotten rid of this organizationVolkswagen has said they won't be doing any more animal testing, but here's how it works soVolkswagen set up dynos and they set up the dynos themselves because they wanted to make sure that they could run their dynocalibration their cheat device during the testing so they had a 2013Volkswagen TDI beetle on a dynoand then they had a 2004 fordF-250 diesel on a dyno and that the idea was to show that new diesels are cleaner than old dieselsand I find it a bit you know odd that they chose a big diesel engine rather than a small diesellike the the beetle, but either way they wanted to show that new diesels are much cleaner than old dieselsand so they had these crab-eating macaques and little boxeswhere they were trained to watch TV these macaques were trained to watch cartoonsso they wouldn't get you know super bummed out that they're just sitting in a box for four hours breathing in diesel exhaustso they're watching the cartoonsand they send in these boxes for three to four hours of exposurewhere there's a pipe routed in that routes the exhaust into that chamber now thechamber of is of course diluted with fresh air so that you know the monkeys don't diethey're not just going to suffocate from the exhaustbut they are exposed to it and so then the the beetle is running and theF-250 is running you run them for four hoursyou take blood samples you do lung swabs throat swabs to find out the particulate matter inside of the monkeysand you test it on one and then you test it on the other they had ten monkeys total that they were testing todo this soVolkswagen requested two Lovelace respiratory Research Institute that they would have real-time monitoring ofthe emissions coming out of the Volkswagen exhaust and the reason they wanted this whatever justification they gavebut the actual reason why they wanted this is to make surethat it was running in its dyno mode running the defeat device so that the Volkswagen was running super clean so that the results werein their favor so they were cheating the entire testbecause they knew that their car was going to do better because they were lying about the results by using this defeat device noworiginal and you can draw your own parallels with Volkswagens historybut originally they were intending on testing people so they were gonna have humans onexercise bikes in a room with diesel exhaustfunneled in and then they would test the people with the Volkswagen versus the F-250 diesel nowVolkswagen's head of engineering and environmental office for Volkswagen of AmericaStewart Johnson was askeddoesn't this seem ridiculous that you were going to test emissions on people and his response was something along the lines of inretrospect the optics are not good, and that's probably the most obvious statement that man's ever said it's absurdthat they were consideringtesting humans putting humans and gas chambers essentially and forcing them to breathe you know heavy NOx emissions from a FordF-250 diesel so pretty insane, but anyways they didn't do thatVolkswagens general counsel advised against it said it probably wasn't a great ideaand so you know hopefully at this point you already care about you know what's what's kind of happening herebut if it's not obvious I'm going to spell it out for you, sofirst of all they are doing emissions testing on monkeys when it's completely unnecessary we have the technology to knowexactlywhat is coming out of that exhaust you can compare side by side and say this one has way more harmful stuffcoming out of it than this one does in this case because this was using a defeat devicewe have the technology to do it. We don't need you know a random obscurecrab-eating macaque to show us what the health effects arewe can we can you know determine what the emissions are and show that the newer technology is better than the previous technologywhich you know for the most part it actually is nowthe test was a lieand this is perhaps the most frustrating part is thatthey were doing all of this knowing that they were cheating the test so they were running their defeat devicethat's why they had you know the dyno calibration the the real-time monitoringand and so they knew going in that the results would show them exactly what they wanted to it was all a lie and sowhat this means as this truck testing was totally pointless these monkeys here were just used as avery poor marketingstunt to show that Volkswagen was better when in fact before the test was even shown they were going to cheat to ensure that theresults were in their favorso nothing published nothing came out of this research. There was nothing published. It was all for nothingand unfortunate for the monkeys involved, and and I think the other thing here is that this is just a lie toVolkswagen's consumers they had huge campaigns about clean diesel's you know super efficientbut also fun to drive vehicles great fuel economy a better choicenot only for your enjoyment, but for the environment to make versus you know a hybrid orgasoline car or whatever it may be so it was a lot of consumers because it wasn't actually veryeco-friendly and it was a lie to all of the Volkswagen employees who are just trying to do their best workworking at Volkswagen make the best car that they can that had no idea that this was going on in itand it really sucks for them as well because you know they get the reputation that goes along with it even if they weren't involvedso so that's definitely disappointing so I want to close this with a very simple messageand it's and it's obvious, but that you know as humans. We should be good. We should do goodwe should do the right thing and what's super frustrating about this scenariois that so many people at Volkswagen knew that this was happening andnone of them stepped forward until was pointed out by a third party that they were lying so West Virginia University said you know youguys aresomething's wrong with your emissions here and Volkswagen downplayed and said noit's probably your test equipment and then California Air resource board got involvedand they said look Volkswagen you guys are definitely doing something wrong here, and they said noit's it's your testing equipment. You guys are just not testing it correctlywe're not doing anything wrong, so they continued to lie when internally they knew what they were doing is wrongand that's extremely frustratingand I think we just need to be better people we need to do good and so as a small gestureI am going to be donating a thousand dollars to West Virginia Universitytowards financial aid for students to get you know books food rent whatever it needs the students that need financial assistanceso I'm donating that thousand dollars. I would of course encourage any of you if there's something you're passionate aboutdonate it to it todayyou'll feel good about doing it, and I'll include a link to West Virginia University if you'd like to donate to WestVirginia and I will also include links in the video description for more information about thisthere's a really good Netflix documentary on it, but the general message is we should be good as humanswe need to do the right thing. Thank you all for watching if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below.\n"