Volkswagen AG, known internationally as the Volkswagen Group, is a German multinational automotive manufacturer headquartered in Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony, Germany. The company designs, manufactures, and distributes passenger and commercial vehicles, motorcycles, engines and turbomachinery, as well as offers related services, including financing, leasing, and fleet management. In 2016, it was the world's largest automaker by sales, and keeping this title in 2017, 2018, and 2019, selling 10.9 million vehicles. It has maintained the largest market share in Europe for over two decades. It ranked seventh in the 2020 Fortune Global 500 list of the world's largest companies.
The Volkswagen Golf is a compact car/small family car (C-segment) produced by the German automotive manufacturer Volkswagen since 1974, marketed worldwide across eight generations, in various body configurations and under various nameplates – including as the Volkswagen Rabbit in the United States and Canada, and as the Volkswagen Caribe in Mexico (Mk1).
The Volkswagen Touareg is a car produced by German automaker Volkswagen Group since 2002 at the Volkswagen Bratislava Plant. Being a five-seater crossover SUV, the vehicle was named after the nomadic Tuareg people, inhabitants of the Saharan interior in North Africa. As of its first generation, the Touareg was developed together with the Porsche Cayenne and the Audi Q7, and as of October 2020, the Touareg was developed together with the Audi Q8, the Bentley Bentayga and the Lamborghini Urus. The vehicles were designed as unibody SUVs with independent suspensions. The first generation (2002–2010) offered five, six, eight, ten and twelve-cylinder engine choices.
Vehicle emissions control is the study of reducing the emissions produced by motor vehicles, especially internal combustion engines.
Emission standards are the legal requirements governing air pollutants released into the atmosphere. Emission standards set quantitative limits on the permissible amount of specific air pollutants that may be released from specific sources over specific timeframes. They are generally designed to achieve air quality standards and to protect human life. Different regions and countries have different standards for vehicle emissions.
Exhaust gas or flue gas is emitted as a result of the combustion of fuels such as natural gas, gasoline (petrol), diesel fuel, fuel oil, biodiesel blends, or coal. According to the type of engine, it is discharged into the atmosphere through an exhaust pipe, flue gas stack, or propelling nozzle. It often disperses downwind in a pattern called an exhaust plume.
A green vehicle, clean vehicle, eco-friendly vehicle or environmentally friendly vehicle is a road motor vehicle that produces less harmful impacts to the environment than comparable conventional internal combustion engine vehicles running on gasoline or diesel, or one that uses certain alternative fuels. Presently, in some countries the term is used for any vehicle complying or surpassing the more stringent European emission standards, or California's zero-emissions vehicle standards, or the low-carbon fuel standards enacted in several countries.
The European emission standards are vehicle emission standards for pollution from the use of new land surface vehicles sold in the European Union and European Economic Area member states and the United Kingdom, and ships in EU waters. The standards are defined in a series of European Union directives staging the progressive introduction of increasingly stringent standards.
BlueTEC is Mercedes-Benz Group's marketing name for engines equipped with advanced NOx reducing technology for vehicle emissions control in diesel-powered vehicles. The technology in BlueTec vehicles includes a selective catalytic reduction (SCR) system that uses diesel exhaust fluid, and a system of NOx adsorbers the automaker calls DeNOx, which uses an oxidizing catalytic converter and diesel particulate filter combined with other NOx reducing systems.
The Green Car of the Year is a Car of the Year award from the Green Car Journal. The winner is selected by an 11-member panel comprising automotive and environmental experts. Invited jurors have included Mario Andretti; Carroll Shelby, Jay Leno, Carl Pope, Christopher Flavin, Jonathan Lash and Jean-Michel Cousteau.
Martin Winterkorn is a German former business executive who was chairman of the board of management of Volkswagen AG, the parent company of the Volkswagen Group, chairman of the supervisory board of Audi, and chairman of the board of management of Porsche Automobil Holding SE.
A portable emissions measurement system (PEMS) is a vehicle emissions testing device that is small and light enough to be carried inside or moved with a motor vehicle that is being driven during testing, rather than on the stationary rollers of a dynamometer that only simulates real-world driving.
TDI is Volkswagen Group's term for its current common rail direct injection turbodiesel engine range that have an intercooler in addition to the turbo compressor.
The Volkswagen emissions scandal, sometimes known as Dieselgate or Emissionsgate, began in September 2015, when the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a notice of violation of the Clean Air Act to German automaker Volkswagen Group. The agency had found that Volkswagen had intentionally programmed turbocharged direct injection (TDI) diesel engines to activate their emissions controls only during laboratory emissions testing, which caused the vehicles' NOx output to meet US standards during regulatory testing. However, the vehicles emitted up to 40 times more NOx in real-world driving. Volkswagen deployed this software in about 11 million cars worldwide, including 500,000 in the United States, in model years 2009 through 2015.
Michael Horn is a businessman and former chief executive officer and president of Volkswagen Group of America.
A defeat device is any motor vehicle hardware, software, or design that interferes with or disables emissions controls under real-world driving conditions, even if the vehicle passes formal emissions testing. The term appears in the US Clean Air Act and European Union regulations, to describe anything that prevents an emissions control system from working, and applies as well to power plants or other air pollution sources, as to automobiles.
John German is an American engineer who is the US co-lead of the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT). In that role, his research helped uncover the Volkswagen emissions scandal of 2015. German was investigating what he thought would be relatively clean diesel emissions in US cars, where standards are more strict than in Europe. The hope was to eventually improve the diesel emissions of European vehicles. After the results were published, which showed VW nitric oxide emissions were exceeding US standards by as much as 35 times, further work uncovered a VW defeat device. In light of the discovery and scandal, German recommends that other car manufacturers be investigated for installing potential defeat devices. German has a degree in physics from the University of Michigan, is married, and makes what The Guardian called a "modest salary" in his role at the ICCT.
From 2014 onwards, software which manipulated air pollution tests was discovered in vehicles from some car makers; the software recognized when the standardized emissions test was being done, and adjusted the engine to emit less during the test. The cars emitted much higher levels of pollution under real-world driving conditions. Some cars' emissions were higher even though there was no manipulated software.
The Volkswagen Bora is a small family car, the fourth generation of the Volkswagen Jetta, and the successor to the Volkswagen Vento. Production of the car began in July 1999. Carrying on the wind nomenclature from previous generations, the car was known as the Volkswagen Bora in much of the world. Bora is a winter wind that blows intermittently over the coast of the Adriatic Sea, as well as in parts of Greece, Russia, Turkey, and the Sliven region of Bulgaria. In North America and South Africa, the Volkswagen Jetta moniker was again kept on due to the continued popularity of the car in those markets.
Volkswagen, the German automotive company, has been involved in several controversies.
