Dieselgate resulted in 1 million extra tonnes NOx emissions from dirty VW’s

With 11 million VW 2 liter TDI Diesel cars emitting 10-40x the NOx pollution they’re allowed, what’s the effect on the environment? According to reporters at The Guardian, it adds up to 1 million tonnes extra NOx in the atmosphere.

Those 11 million cars were bought under a promise of being ultra clean even though powered by a Diesel engine. Governments threw their support behind these cars, under the premise of clean emissions. But, according to the EPA, it was a sham. Instead of clean diesel, customers were conned into buying the same old dirty diesel.

According to The Guardian, if these cars had complied with the standard they supposedly passed, they would have emitted just 1,039 tonnes of NOx each year in total, for the half million in the U.S. But at 10-40x that amount the total tots up to between 10,392 and 41,571 tonnes of extra NOx emissions in the U.S.

Because VW has admitted the total comes to 11 million vehicles, the total extra NOx emissions are between 237,161 and 948,691 tonnes of NOx emissions each year.

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About David Herron

David Herron is a writer and software engineer living in Silicon Valley. He primarily writes about electric vehicles, clean energy systems, climate change, peak oil and related issues. When not writing he indulges in software projects and is sometimes employed as a software engineer. David has written for sites like PlugInCars and TorqueNews, and worked for companies like Sun Microsystems and Yahoo.