My Criminal the Car

Before we moved upstate, I hadn't owned a car since 1966 when my first husband and I purchased a Corvair, which, I still believe, is one of the Great Automobiles of All Time. (I will never forgive Ralph Nader for a. running for President in 2000 and b. downing the Corvair because its 1965 version bounced off bridges.)  I lost the Corvair in my divorce and moved to Manhattan, where – not through any sacrifice on my part – I had no car and spent over 40 years not contributing much to the nation's automobile pollution. 

So, when Michael and I started looking for cars, we wanted something green. I argued for a Prius, but after heavy-duty research Michael discovered that Volkwagen had come up with diesel technology that not only solved the emissions problem but bestowed on these lucky cars great mileage and a fast-action engine.  So in 2013 shortly before we moved full time to Hudson we bought a white Jetta TDI, which in 2009 had been awarded Green Car of the Year.

 

I really like driving it.  It gets 50 miles to the gallon on the highway and it's zippy.  No Corvair, but very nice.   Then a week or so ago the scheisse hit the fan. We discovered that our adorable fun-loving non-polluting Jetta was actually Rosemary's NOxious Baby.  

Nitrogen oxides (NOx) are on the menu of diesel emissions and include two gases, nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide, which are particularly nasty environmental bullies.  When released into the air, they produce smog on hot days, exacerbate breathing difficulties in people who already have them, and, over a 100-year period, have 265 to 310 times the global-warming potential as carbon dioxide.  Besides diesel particulates, NOx is considered one of the most critical pollutants found in the exhaust.

When developing their "green" turbocharged diesel engines, German engineers were able to filter out the particulates but were stumped by the tricky NOx. So effective in producing rockets in the distant past, they were unable to keep it from escaping without reducing gas mileage and performance.  So they just decided to lie.  ("We will not invade Poland.")  They simply built software that switches on to produce splendidly low NOx levels during testing, but once the car hits the actual road the software switches off, and as our Jetta revs up to its lively speed with its terrific gas mileage the NOx-ious particles also rev up -- to 10 to 40 times the EPA allowance.

A digression: In the late seventies I regularly passed this scruffy guy on a street corner near my office in Midtown standing in front of a lopsided cardboard box pasted with wrinkled black and white Xeroxes of happy dolphins. A scummy glass jar sat on top of the box with "Save the porpoises!" taped across it and a lid gauged with a hopeful slot.   He would yell and scream at passersby, and if you were moronic enough to stop (I was), he would shift the attention of his tiny fierce eyes to you (me) and continue his harangue directly, "They ain't fish.  Did you know that?  They're mammals.  And they're smart.  They can talk.  Like you and me.  And the government is torturing them.  Torturing them.  Shooting them.  Killing them.  Stop the killing." He shoved a clipboard in front of me with a ratty petition clamped onto it.  A few other hapless suckers had signed it.  I reluctantly added my name, included a false address, and pushed a dollar into the slot. I knew he was conning me but what if he wasn’t?  A couple years later I saw him downtown, with the same cardboard box, but this time sporting grainy photos of kittens, whom he was urging passers-by to save by signing his still-grubby petition and putting money into the same paw-streaked glass jar.  I sneaked by.

This story is simply intended as an example of my inability to say no to people even when I know they're hustling me.  I'm so bad at it, in fact, that I made a decision many years ago – about the same time I was saving sea mammals -- to give to anyone on the street who asked.  It's easier than pausing to puzzle over a badly written sign pleading for train money, propped up in the lap of a dirty young woman who looks like she just graduated from Yale. I carry around dollar bills and loose change in my pockets so I can just hand cash over to any random asker without fumbling through my purse and making myself a mugger target.  I'm a little embarrassed but it saves on guilt-time.

So, until this week, I have been resigned to being a sucker.  I'm ok being a chump for gray schlumpy people poking at my liberal bias in return for quarters so they can live a minimal life.  The porpoises may not be benefiting but their lives have not changed.  But now I'm pissed. I'm pissed at playing the fool for Germans, which feels old fashioned and somehow satisfying. To be fair, they aren't the only automakers who have scammed the public. Ford and Chrysler were caught cheatingon emissions in the 1970s, and Volkswagen's current crime isn't directly deadly. 

It doesn't result in engines catching fire or ruptured airbags, but it does hurt kids with asthma, and if they hurl enough of this stuff into the atmosphere, it could kill dolphins.  

So I'm ashamed for being a patsy this time. It has consequences.  Volkswagen played heavily on the liberal hope -- a bit shabby but a well-intentioned hope -- that we can drive a speedy car without imposing extreme environmental harm.  And, after lifting thousands of dollars from us, they happily wave us off as we drive our perky diesels into the sunset, smugly tracking our savings on fuel while we spew poisons into the air.  Nitrogen oxide uber alles.