http://www.theweek.co.uk/jeremy-clarkson/62887/jeremy-clarkson-comes-to-the-defence-of-volkswagen
Jeremy Clarkson springs to the defence of Volkswagen
VW has merely engaged in some 'well-intentioned and harmless cheating' says Clarkson as emissions scandal rumbles on
Jeremy Clarkson has taken time out from working on his new Amazon motoring show to come to the defence of Volkswagen, the German car company currently embroiled in a
scandal over its diesel-engine emissions tests.
According to Clarkson, the company's senior management should "stop wringing their hands and sweating in press conferences and go on the attack."
The whole issue has come about, Clarkson said in his column for
The Sunday Times yesterday, due to "eco-mentalists" telling people first that diesel engines were less polluting than other engines before changing their minds and drawing attention to the damaging properties of the blend of nitrogen and oxygen – or NOX – the engines produced.
Various "soft-in-the-head governments" listened to those critiques and introduced new regulations on how much NOX a car could produce, Clarkson notes.
The new rules left VW with no choice but to redesign its engines, but the company went further and "fitted its engines with a clever bit of software that exaggerated their economy and cleanliness when they were being tested."
According to Clarkson, the trick is no different to everyday deceptions like lying on a CV or parking on double yellow lines.
As he sees it though, the risks to car makers and indeed Europe as a whole are huge if VW is "driven into the wilderness" by lawsuits, fines and damage to the company's reputation and sales. Because if VW goes out of business "the fallout would be immense because it owns Audi, Bugatti, Bentley, Lamborghini, Porsche, Seat and Skoda as well. So they'd also go to the wall.
"And without the profits from these engineering powerhouses Germany would no longer be in a position to bail out the Greeks or house half of Syria. Which would cause global economic collapse, a humanitarian catastrophe and many plagues."
Clarkson says that in his view what the company has done simply isn't that bad, so the punishment does not fit the crime.
"Put simply, then, Volkswagen looked at a set of arbitrary figures that had been dreamt up by a bunch of ill-informed, woolly-headed government officials and chose to ignore them. We are not talking about thalidomide here. Or Bhopal. It’s just a bit of good-natured rule-bending, and we all do that."
The 55-year-old presenter says that the whole issue is "rubbish" because "about 60 per cent of man-made NOX emissions do not come from road transport, and of the 40 per cent that do, the vast majority are from lorries and buses. So in the big scheme of things, your neighbour's Golf diesel makes no discernible difference."
Clarkson's claims on issues relating to pollution and the environment have been repudiated frequently by scientists and campaigners.
Bill McGuire, professor of geophysical and climate hazards at UCL described the presenter's Sunday Times columns as "barely coherent products of Clarkson's own fevered imagination".
Clarkson's view that VW has merely engaged in "well-intentioned and harmless cheating" sits in contrast with the official position of the governments of the US, Germany, UK, Switzerland, Italy, France, South Korea, Canada, Norway and India where investigations and legal proceedings are now underway.