Hello everyone and welcome the title is as bad as it sounds Volkswagen was literally sticking monkeys in boxes
forcing them to inhale diesel emissions and
using this to prove that their diesel vehicles are clean
and as if gassing monkeys wasn't bad enough they cheated the results. So in this video we're gonna explain how
Volkswagen's defeat device worked do a little bit of history on how this all came about and then get into the gassing of monkeys
towards the end
so this all goes back to for example in America
we have laws that say you shouldn't emit lots of nitrogen oxide emissions
because 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 and
Volkswagen
created this device in order to get around the US laws because they wanted the performance and efficiency of diesel engines
but they didn't want to sacrifice
anything in the name of emissions, and so they created this defeat device to get around it
fooling their consumers
fooling the US environmental agencies and so this is essentially what a Volkswagen exhaust
diesel will look like so you've got your engine right here
we'll just follow the intake path and travel along through our system our air comes in your intake
passes through the compressor side of the turbocharger into your intake manifold then into your cylinder
it's burned off where it goes into the exhaust manifold where it can be routed one of two ways a high-pressure exhaust gas recirculation
so this is done, too
you know you put some inert gas
into the combustion chamber you're not burning as much air and fuel and as a result your combustion temperatures are lower so lower
combustion temperatures means that nitrogen and oxygen
N2 and O2 they don't split off and then reform
into nitrogen oxides so lower combustion temperatures are critical in order to prevent the creation of nitrogen oxides
so that's what EGR is for so that's the high-pressure EGR side or that exhaust can try
through the exhaust turbine then through a
oxidation catalytic converter, which is breaking down
hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide and then passes through a diesel particulate filter
which gets rid of
soot and diesel particulates, and then it can choose to go between you've got these valves here of course for the EGR systems
the low-pressure EGR side so it's after the turbo
and that's going to go back into the intake portion of the turbocharger and then re fed into the intake manifold again
this is done to prevent the creation of
nitrogen oxides
then that exhaust can continue traveling through a nitrogen oxide trap
so this chemically what it does is it has this surface area that stores nitrogen oxides
so the nitrogen oxides want to bond and store within this trap and nitrogen oxides are created in lean burning scenarios
where you have these higher temperatures in diesel engines
and you are not using fuel to get rid of these nitrogen oxides
so diesel engines can have air/fuel ratios as high as 70:1 18:1 to 71
but essentially how this
nitrogen oxide trap works is it needs fuel in order to break down the nitrogen oxides that are trapped inside
so it will react with diesel fuel and then it will form N2 nitrogen and
H2O water as its emissions from that so you'll get rid of the nitrogen oxide in there
you'll clear out your trap
and then you can go back to lean burning and you know start to refill up this trap
after using a little bit of extra fuel in order to clean it out
and then finally you have this hydrogen sulfide to sulfur dioxide converter
and then it travels out through the muffler and into you know the air
so that's the system, and you know working properly it can create very clean emissions
so
Volkswagens cheat was to have one
calibration for when the vehicle was being dyno tested and one calibration for when the vehicles driving on the road well
how 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 the
car hey unleash full you know potential because a human is actually driving this versus when it's sitting on a dyno
and it's just spinning the front wheels here actually steering then it knows hey, I'm actually being tested right now
and so I'm going to reduce performance, but improve emissions because that will get the EPA off my back
they'll say "Hey your vehicle's super clean," and we'll get away with it
so 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 minimize
exhaust gas recirculation that means you're getting more nitrogen oxide emissions, but your performance is greater
it will use a leaner air fuel ratio when possible this means more nitrogen oxide emissions
but your efficiency is improved and then it will render this nitrogen oxide trap ineffective
it'll fill it up
and then it won't use extra fuel to clear it out because that's just a waste of fuel your fuel economy goes down
so you can improve your fuel economy by not using that the result however is
that they have 40 times the legal limit of nitrogen oxides coming out of the exhaust and this was discovered by West
Virginia University some students there
who 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 Volkswagen
Volkswagen downplayed, it said it was you know testing airs of course
it wasn't and the fallout was known as dieselgate which is an ongoing thing Volkswagens lost 26 billion dollars or so
as a result of this in fines and so what happens when the defeat device is on when it's on a dynamometer
well the lean NOx trap is of course activated so that means worse fuel economy
but you're gonna get rid of those nitrogen oxide emissions the high-pressure
EGR you wouldn't use that as much why not use that well that means you're sending performance
through you know back to the intake
rather than spooling up this turbo, so your turbo performance is going to be reduced you'll have more lag
you won't have you know the same boost created in those portions where you're sending more exhaust gas back
through the intake rather than out the exhaust so you're losing turbo performance in the name of reducing nitrogen oxides
low pressure EGR a very similar thing you're going to be producing
less nitrogen oxides by using
EGR however you're going to be losing performance
because you're not burning more air and fuel you're putting in inert gas
into that combustion chamber and then finally you can lower the air fuel ratio
and this means less nitrogen oxides used, but it means worse fuel economy because once again. You're just going to be
reacting with the NOx trap and then just in general using those lower air fuel ratios
you get worse fuel economy, but you can improve the nitrogen oxide characteristics of the emissions
ok so this is how it's all done
from an emissions standpoint now
let's get into the monkey testing ok so moving on to the disturbing information that was facilitated by Volkswagen
so BMW Volkswagen and Daimler aka Mercedes grouped together to form and fund an
organization a research group called EUGT and the purpose of this research group was to show that diesels are great
they're wonderful their missions aren't that terrible that kind of thing so to do research
surrounding diesel vehicles and prove to the public that they're wonderful
now
Volkswagen took the lead role in
this monkey study BMW and Daimler have kind of pulled themselves back and said we didn't know that they were cheating this test
we weren't involved they were the ones facilitating it and based on the information that's out currently that looks to be true
it looks like Volkswagen was really the one heading all of this it was their vehicle, and they were overseeing the test itself
so the EUGT then funded Lovelace respiratory Research
institute which is an institute in New Mexico in the United States where they used crab-eating macaques which are non-human primates
which they can use for testing so the legal justification for what was done is that we were learning something
that could you know improve the health of humans
in order to do this we needed to use something very similar to a human so the research was done on non-human primates
in order to learn about the health effects of emissions. Now this is kind of dumb in the first place because we have the technology
to measure exactly what's coming out of exhaust that's how Volkswagen was discovered to be doing something wrong here in the first place
we have the technology to do it without monkeys it seems a bit silly to do and unethical
but regardless it was legal to do they have since gotten rid of this organization
Volkswagen has said they won't be doing any more animal testing, but here's how it works so
Volkswagen set up dynos and they set up the dynos themselves because they wanted to make sure that they could run their dyno
calibration their cheat device during the testing so they had a 2013
Volkswagen TDI beetle on a dyno
and then they had a 2004 ford
F-250 diesel on a dyno and that the idea was to show that new diesels are cleaner than old diesels
and I find it a bit you know odd that they chose a big diesel engine rather than a small diesel
like the the beetle, but either way they wanted to show that new diesels are much cleaner than old diesels
and so they had these crab-eating macaques and little boxes
where they were trained to watch TV these macaques were trained to watch cartoons
so they wouldn't get you know super bummed out that they're just sitting in a box for four hours breathing in diesel exhaust
so they're watching the cartoons
and they send in these boxes for three to four hours of exposure
where there's a pipe routed in that routes the exhaust into that chamber now the
chamber of is of course diluted with fresh air so that you know the monkeys don't die
they're not just going to suffocate from the exhaust
but they are exposed to it and so then the the beetle is running and the
F-250 is running you run them for four hours
you take blood samples you do lung swabs throat swabs to find out the particulate matter inside of the monkeys
and you test it on one and then you test it on the other they had ten monkeys total that they were testing to
do this so
Volkswagen requested two Lovelace respiratory Research Institute that they would have real-time monitoring of
the emissions coming out of the Volkswagen exhaust and the reason they wanted this whatever justification they gave
but the actual reason why they wanted this is to make sure
that it was running in its dyno mode running the defeat device so that the Volkswagen was running super clean so that the results were
in their favor so they were cheating the entire test
because they knew that their car was going to do better because they were lying about the results by using this defeat device now
original and you can draw your own parallels with Volkswagens history
but originally they were intending on testing people so they were gonna have humans on
exercise bikes in a room with diesel exhaust
funneled in and then they would test the people with the Volkswagen versus the F-250 diesel now
Volkswagen's head of engineering and environmental office for Volkswagen of America
Stewart Johnson was asked
doesn't this seem ridiculous that you were going to test emissions on people and his response was something along the lines of in
retrospect the optics are not good, and that's probably the most obvious statement that man's ever said it's absurd
that they were considering
testing humans putting humans and gas chambers essentially and forcing them to breathe you know heavy NOx emissions from a Ford
F-250 diesel so pretty insane, but anyways they didn't do that
Volkswagens general counsel advised against it said it probably wasn't a great idea
and so you know hopefully at this point you already care about you know what's what's kind of happening here
but if it's not obvious I'm going to spell it out for you, so
first of all they are doing emissions testing on monkeys when it's completely unnecessary we have the technology to know
exactly
what is coming out of that exhaust you can compare side by side and say this one has way more harmful stuff
coming out of it than this one does in this case because this was using a defeat device
we have the technology to do it. We don't need you know a random obscure
crab-eating macaque to show us what the health effects are
we can we can you know determine what the emissions are and show that the newer technology is better than the previous technology
which you know for the most part it actually is now
the test was a lie
and this is perhaps the most frustrating part is that
they were doing all of this knowing that they were cheating the test so they were running their defeat device
that's why they had you know the dyno calibration the the real-time monitoring
and and so they knew going in that the results would show them exactly what they wanted to it was all a lie and so
what this means as this truck testing was totally pointless these monkeys here were just used as a
very poor marketing
stunt to show that Volkswagen was better when in fact before the test was even shown they were going to cheat to ensure that the
results were in their favor
so nothing published nothing came out of this research. There was nothing published. It was all for nothing
and unfortunate for the monkeys involved, and and I think the other thing here is that this is just a lie to
Volkswagen's consumers they had huge campaigns about clean diesel's you know super efficient
but also fun to drive vehicles great fuel economy a better choice
not only for your enjoyment, but for the environment to make versus you know a hybrid or
gasoline car or whatever it may be so it was a lot of consumers because it wasn't actually very
eco-friendly and it was a lie to all of the Volkswagen employees who are just trying to do their best work
working at Volkswagen make the best car that they can that had no idea that this was going on in it
and it really sucks for them as well because you know they get the reputation that goes along with it even if they weren't involved
so so that's definitely disappointing so I want to close this with a very simple message
and it's and it's obvious, but that you know as humans. We should be good. We should do good
we should do the right thing and what's super frustrating about this scenario
is that so many people at Volkswagen knew that this was happening and
none of them stepped forward until was pointed out by a third party that they were lying so West Virginia University said you know you
guys are
something's wrong with your emissions here and Volkswagen downplayed and said no
it's probably your test equipment and then California Air resource board got involved
and they said look Volkswagen you guys are definitely doing something wrong here, and they said no
it's it's your testing equipment. You guys are just not testing it correctly
we're not doing anything wrong, so they continued to lie when internally they knew what they were doing is wrong
and that's extremely frustrating
and I think we just need to be better people we need to do good and so as a small gesture
I am going to be donating a thousand dollars to West Virginia University
towards financial aid for students to get you know books food rent whatever it needs the students that need financial assistance
so I'm donating that thousand dollars. I would of course encourage any of you if there's something you're passionate about
donate it to it today
you'll feel good about doing it, and I'll include a link to West Virginia University if you'd like to donate to West
Virginia and I will also include links in the video description for more information about this
there's a really good Netflix documentary on it, but the general message is we should be good as humans
we need to do the right thing. Thank you all for watching if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below.