Car owners in the United States can soon play Volkswagen engineer, courtesy of the federal government.
Last month, officials gave auto enthusiasts who want to beef up their car’s performance the right to tinker with vehicle software without incurring the legal wrath of carmakers. The decision was one of many changes to a federal copyright law, including allowing people to “jailbreak” their mobile phones and reprogram older video games.
Digital-rights activists have applauded the changes, which are scheduled to take effect next year. But environmental regulators and carmakers have warned that the decision opens a new front in a cat-and-mouse game with car lovers who soup up their engines — perhaps violating emissions standards.
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Volkswagen has admitted using deceptive software on a corporate scale to evade emissions limits on some of its diesel cars. But long before the VW scandal, individual car owners turned to aftermarket components or software fixes to increase engine performance in ways that could produce more pollution.
“It has been going on forever,” said Mike Norris, who runs a company near Indianapolis that legally customizes cars. “Hot rod guys don’t want to be known as tree huggers.” To avoid detection, experts say, tinkerers reprogram car software settings or use “defeat devices” to try to fool emissions testing equipment.
The practice was so widespread nearly a decade ago that the Environmental Protection Agency outlawed a defeat device known as an oxygen sensor simulator. Such units made it look like a car’s catalytic converter was working properly, even if it was disconnected.
More recently, Edge Products, a maker of auto components in Ogden, Utah, agreed to pay a $500,000 fine in 2013 for selling devices that allowed owners of diesel pickup trucks to disconnect an emissions-control component without activating a dashboard warning light. The environmental impact of the devices, which were sold under the Edge Racing brand name, was significant. Federal regulators said the more than 9,000 pickup trucks equipped with the unit emitted excess pollution equal to the amount generated by 422 new long-haul trucks operating for 29 years.
Practices like these can be taken to extremes. For instance, there is “coal rolling” — the practice of modifying diesel pickup trucks to intentionally belch clouds of black smoke, often from upright exhaust pipes that look like chrome-plated smokestacks. An employee of Parleys Diesel Performance, a company in St. George, Utah, that makes the towering, customized exhaust pipes, said, “It is not the goal of our company to help people blast out black smoke.”
The pipes themselves are perfectly legal. The smoke is created by modifying the car to increase the amount of fuel going to a vehicle’s engine without increasing air intake.
Today’s cars contain sophisticated engine control software that determines how a vehicle’s engine operates, including fuel efficiency and exhaust emissions. In Volkswagen’s case, software could detect when a car was being tested for emissions and activate its pollution controls, then deactivate them when the car was being driven normally.
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