Volkswagen’s deception will cause 59 premature deaths in the US

The World
P.J. Goodwin, in Boston, in front of his 2010 diesel Volkswagen Jetta SportWagen, a car sold to him as "clean diesel."

P.J. Goodwin has always loved Volkswagens, I mean really loved them. He flashes his lights and waves at other VW owners on the road.

“I definitely felt a magnetism towards vintage VW’s. My first car was a VW 1972 camper. I still have it,” says Goodwin. “I was a kid when I bought it, I didn’t even have my driver’s license.”

He bought it used for $300. He’s rebuilt the engine three times and is returning it to its original color: sierra yellow. “It’s very 70’s," he says. 

Goodwin, who lives in Boston, also has a 2010 diesel Volkswagen Jetta SportWagen. That’s one of the tainted automobiles marketed by VW as "clean diesel." He says he bought it first and foremost because it was an environmentally-friendly choice.

Goodwin is aware that his car can emit up to 40 times the legal limit of NOx emissions. Those nitrogen oxides react in the atmosphere to form ozone (smog) and particulate matter, which can cause serious health problems including aggravated asthma, decreased lung function, nonfatal heart attacks or premature death.

It’s clear speaking with Goodwin: he’s deeply bothered by Volkswagen’s big lie. But, like all VW owners, Goodwin couldn’t really know how his car’s emissions were impacting people.

I told Goodwin the results from a joint study by MIT and Harvard: All of the excess pollutants coming from VW diesel cars installed with “defeat devices” will cause 59 premature deaths.

Goodwin’s reaction: “I’m shocked. To put an actual number of fatalities is pretty shocking.”

Let’s be clear, researchers aren’t saying 59 people will drop dead tomorrow. The lead author of the new study, Steven Barrett with MIT, says they’ve calculated statistical averages to gauge the impact of excess emissions from VW’s sold between 2008 and 2015.

“You can’t knock on someone’s door and say, ‘Sorry you’re going to die early.’ All we can do is say, for the US population as a whole, about 60 people will lose between 10 and 20 years of their life,” says Barrett, who is an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT.

Co-author David Keith, a professor of engineering at Harvard University and public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School, says the new study wasn’t conducted just to point fingers at Volkswagen, but to help people understand the severe consequences of air pollution.

“Many of the public don’t understand that in fact air pollution, much more than water pollution or food contamination or anything else, is the thing that really kills people,” says Keith. “Air pollution, overall, cuts more than a year off the life of an average American. It’s a very big number.”

Roughly 50,000 Americans die prematurely each year from power generation emissions, according to Barrett. The number of people impacted by VW emissions, while not insignficiant, is a fraction of a fraction of that.

Full disclosure, I own a 2011 Volkswagen Golf TDI, one of the rogue diesel cars. There’s nearly a half million of us on the roads in the US. If you do the math — assuming we’ve all driven the same amount and have similar engines and vehicles — we’ve each taken slightly less than a half a day off of somebody’s life (factoring that 59 people will die 10 years early). That’s terrible. Still, it doesn’t feel like much, considering how much coal we burn to power our homes.

Keith says that’s the wrong attitude.

“Each individual car makes no difference at all,” says Keith. “But that’s not thinking systematically about morality. If you threw your garbage out on the street, it wouldn’t make Boston a totally polluted place. But if collectively, we all throw our garbage on the street, it would be a disaster. And the point is: individual cars matter once you add them up.”

Here’s the tricky part though: I’m feeling guilty about my car, but a recall could reduce its superior fuel efficiency. That was one of the selling points of Volkswagen TDI’s — I can get north of 45 mpg driving on the highway in my car, exceeding US goverment estimates

“You feel bad about your car,” says Keith. “But in fact your car is still a very efficient car, which means it has good gas mileage, which means that actually on a climate basis it would be relatively low in the climate pollution, which is the carbon pollution. And one of the other lessons here is there are trade-offs, there’s no free lunch. We can’t get everything.”

Still, Keith encouraged me to fix my car when a recall is ready. Barrett with MIT says they also calculated the impacts if no cars are recalled. 

“The existing vehicles that are already out there would cause an additional 140 deaths if they stayed on the road for their lifetime.”

Barrett estimates that if those cars are recalled quickly, by the end of 2016, 90 percent of those premature deaths could be averted. Those cars need to be found and fixed though.

PJ Goodwin — who this week became a plaintiff in a class action suit against VW — says he’ll get his diesel repaired. (I will too.)

“One thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, after going through all of this, is that there really is no clean car,” says Goodwin.

A few weeks ago Goodwin got himself a new ride: a bike. 

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