"Britain is hooked on diesel." "Half of our new cars guzzle it." "The German motor giant Volkswagen is a market leader." "Oh, look what she's doing." "Their cars promised owners they were doing their bit for the planet." "I felt as though we had been duped by one of the largest companies in the world." "VW was fooling everyone, a clever scam to beat the emissions test." "It is difficult for me to explain what is happening and why." "Tonight, panorama reveals for the first time how VW conned the" "European pollution testers." "I think we have been testing the wrong things in the wrong way for quite a while." "And we ask if they are the only manufacturer whose diesel fumes are ruining the end we breathe." "You can't gasp for air because the air is what is hurting you." "Europe is the world leader in diesel technology." "Modern diesels are quick, quiet, reliable, and often more economic than petrol cars." "Over the last decade or so, they have become a firm favourite." "Diesels seem like such a success story, until eight weeks ago, when VW was forced to admit that for years it had been cheating the American emissions test." "It had programmed the cars' computer with a defeat device, so the car was clean in the laboratory, but on the road, the pollution levels shot up, as much as 40 times the legal limit." "Cheating was the only way the company could pass this test and have a car that performed well on the road." "How do you like my new car?" "In July," "Volkswagen became the world's biggest car-maker." "It adverts trumpeted how squeaky clean they were." "Diesel in Latin means dirty." "You are going to ruin your scarf!" "See how clean it is?" "That is why" "Volkswagen is the number-1 selling diesel in America." "It was an illusion, the boss of the American business admitted they had been lying for years." "Our company was dishonest." "With the EPA and the" "California Air Resources Board and with all of you." "In my German words, we have totally screwed up." "They announced 11 million cars from the group, which includes Audi, Seat and Skoda, where programmed with the cheating software." "That includes 1.2 million cars in the UK." "I have come to Northamptonshire to meet this family." "You can see why they needed a bigger car." "As well as Baxter the dog, they have two kids." "Mark and" "Claire paid £15,500 for their BlueMotion Volkswagen Passat." "They wanted something reliable, safe and clean." "Volkswagen were quite keen to push the environmental credentials of their vehicle." "The BlueMotion technology was definitely a factor in highlighting this vehicle is one that we would be interested in, definitely." "We looked at other options, hybrids, because when you have a family, you start thinking a bit more about the impact that you have on the environment, you look at the next best option that ticks all the boxes and does what you need it" "to do." "It was part of it." "It was one of many factors that led us to purchase this vehicle." "You have bought your car, you are driving it around, you have assumptions about it, then you see the VW story, what did you think?" "I was shocked." "At first, I felt stupid." "I felt as though the wall had been pulled over my eyes, and been told a lie." "Once I got over that and realise that I was not stupid, I felt really angry about it." "With so many angry customers, I wanted to understand what the defeat device was and where it might be hidden." "There has been a revolution in car technology in the last 20 years." "Now, all modern cars are controlled by computer, so that is where we started." "Scott, you can take this computer out?" "Yes." "Let's go." "We have got the ECU." "How important is that in a modern car?" "Very important." "They control everything in the car." "Headlights, wipers, door locks, indicators, ..." "This is the brain of the car, it is where scientists believe the cheat device is lurking." "That is the PPF filter." "It has a load of sensors on there, it controls what is going out into the atmosphere." "One function of the computer is that it decides what pollution is going to come out of the exhaust pipe." "Yes, what is going in and out." "There we have it." "The biggest brain of the car." "That is it, the on-board computer." "Somewhere in here is the software, the defeat device." "That has caused this huge scandal." "To understand how VW's device works, we entered the secretive world of car testing." "No British laboratory would help, so we went to this facility in the Czech Republic." "It is governed by the same" "EU rules and regulations as the UK." "We put a Passat BlueMotion through its paces to reveal how the car's computer fix its green credentials." "The clues will lie in the cocktail of emissions coming from the exhaust." "It is a 2014 car, we are testing it against the euro five emission limit, 180 mg of nitrogen oxide per kilometre, the polluting gases that are the most damaging to human health." "The scientist guiding us is Michal Vojtisek, he spent the last 15 years studying diesel engines." "To referee the whole thing, we brought Ted Foreman, a retired UK" "Government vehicle inspector." "His job is to make sure we do everything by the book. 2.4." "Yes." "OK." "What are you looking for?" "We are going to make sure the tyres are inflated to the recommendation of the manufacturer, so the resistance is not giving us any spurious resorts, and we will make sure they use the right coefficients from the legislation." "The rule book runs to 280 pages." "One of the hundreds of conditions states the car has to stand in doors for at least six hours to cool to room temperature." "This is meant to make the test tougher, as cold engines often pollute more." "Do we have the cell temperature?" "Excellent. 24.3, it is right in the middle, it is right." "The procedure is so predictable, the suspicion is that the car's computer can instantly work out if it is being tested and cut the pollution coming from the exhaust." "When was the last time you got in a car and drove in a straight line from a cold start for six miles without turning the steering wheel?" "It is driving by numbers, so controlled, it is robotic." "The displayed it takes the pace." "Stray just two kilometres an hour over or under and the test is potentially void." "You have the drive cycle, the line in green, and the driver is following it." "The purple lines of the upper and lower limit, the violation." "They can make the test in valid." "He is following the drive cycle really well." "Parts of the test have not changed for 40 years." "It always takes 20 minutes and 20 seconds, precisely." "We played it by the book and the eco-friendly BlueMotion Passat past the emissions test." "We have done one test with the computer plugged into your systems, the emissions levels were fine." "Yes, now we run another test." "The professor now have the car driven at high speed, well above the normal test range." "He was trying to convince the on-board computer that the car was no longer in the laboratory." "We are looking if the engine will return itself to a test mode or good emission behaviour." "In effect, you are trying to find little ways of putting it in test mode and outside test mode, just to see if there is any difference?" "Yes." "We repeated the same emissions test drive, with one key difference, we started with a hot engine." "The amount of poisonous gases in the exhaust was measured." "Look at the emissions now." "They are becoming very high." "It is difficult for me to explain what is happening and why." "It failed, spectacularly." "When the on-board computer thinks it is not being tested, it stops cheating, it runs the engine as if it were on the road, pumping out two and a half times more poisonous gases." "We have shown for the first time that the on-board computer can cheat the European emissions test as well as the American one." "Volkswagen told us..." "Our experiment goes some way to answer a problem that had puzzled environmental scientists for years." "Despite tougher regulations to reduce emissions, the amount of poisonous nitrogen dioxide remains stubbornly high." "Latest research shows that pollution in London during the rush hour often peaks at dangerous levels." "Many other UK cities also struggle to meet EU clean air targets." "Our measurements from the London air quality network show that it was not changing, so we went and looked at the data Neil Rhodes and we found that it was diesel vehicles which were emitting a lot more pollutants than they" "should be." "We now have cities which are clogged full of traffic which are producing a lot of emissions, much more than we thought they were, and that has led to this ten, 15 years of people breathing into much" "air pollution." "The air we breathe now is partly down to a decision made here, 14 years ago." "Back then, cutting the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide was the political priority, and petrol engines made more of it, so the Government offered tax breaks to encourage drivers to change over to diesel." "In fact, they were swapping one polluting menace for another." "Ben Barratt is a scientist at Kings College, London, an expert in air pollution." "People show is a ground-breaking experiment that measured the diesel pollution in London and its effects on our bodies." "If you can talk me through what we are going to do?" "You will have to take some clothes off!" "You haven't picked the warmest day!" "I will trust you." "What are we doing?" "These will be connected up to an" "ECG, which monitors your heart rate." "That tells us about how the different areas of your heart are reacting to the air you are breathing." "The idea was simple." "Monitor people first in a quiet park, and then on one of the country's most polluted roads." "Basically, this snuck up on us, because we thought we had sorted this in the 90s." "We did." "The catalytic converters and other technology made a big difference, so we were not expecting vehicle pollution to be as much of an issue as it is today." "Mind the Swans!" "I can see my heart rate going on the monitor." "So, we have had a lovely walk in the bucolic park." "Now it is time for the real world." "Oxford Street is diesel central, with traffic limited to buses and cards." "It has recorded some of the highest levels of an " " NO2 in the world." "A walk of just a few hundred yards, and Ben's kit shows that the pollution more than doubles and my heart rate climbs." "How do you think this research has changed people's perceptions?" "It changed something that was an environmental issue into a health issue." "So basically, not every one cares about the environment, but we care about our health?" "We care about ourselves and our family, that is the bottom line." "What were your official long-term findings?" "With the asthmatics, their lungs became inflamed and their lung capacity decreased." "There is a evidence that healthy individuals, when walking along Oxford Street, did not get the health benefits of exercise that they should." "So everybody is affected?" "Well, you have to remember that this is an extreme case and some of the highest levels of nitrogen dioxide levels in" "Europe are recorded on this street." "Pollution attacks all of us, but it is the young, the old and the sick who are the most vulnerable." "Children like 16-year-old Sophie Hyde are regularly admitted for long stays at the country's leading lung hospital." "They YouTuber, she was excited to have something new to report." "This is a lot different than normal." "I have a camera crew from BBC Panorama." "Richard stole my crisps!" "Then we have guests." "Sophie was born with the lung disease cystic fibrosis." "So you live by a beach, but you have to come into the city for treatment." "What is the difference between those two environments?" "Can you feel the difference inside your lungs?" "With the pollution, you feel like you are drowning in smoke." "You feel like you are tried to gasp for air, but you can't because the air around you is what is hurting you." "And it is really annoying." "You can't breathe as easily as you can in the countryside, with hardly any cars." "My friends catch the train and go into town and they can rush about the shops." "If I come, I feel like I am slowing them down." "I feel a bit of a burden to them, because I can't breathe as easily as I can where I normally live." "So it puts you off going into towns?" "Yeah, because I get scared that I will have an episode and I have to take my and everything." "It is sort of embarrassing. " " I will have to take my inhalers." "Having watched Sophie struggle to breathe, I went to see" "Professor Andrew Bush, head of the department that looks after her." "I was shocked to find that heavy traffic pollution even targets children yet to be born." "If your mother is exposed to environmental pollution in pregnancy, this will affect the child's lung function at age four to five years." "We also have known for many years that environmental pollution is associated with poor lung growth in childhood." "Big groups of children living in a heavily polluted area will have less good lung function than a big room of children living in a non-polluted area." "Professor Bush says pollution could be harming one in ten children living in big cities, and the damage lasts a lifetime." "One emissions testing company told us that of the 16 newest cars they have examined, just four were as keen on real roads as they were in the lab." "It begs the question, how many dirty engines are out there?" "We decided to test a different make of car at our independent lab in Prague." "A people carrier this time, a 1.6 diesel" "Zafira, the eco-model." "The badge says Opel, but it's the same as a" "Vauxhall." "Why this car?" "Other tests by a German environmental group suggested that it behaved oddly in the lab, all strenuously denied by the manufacturer." "After leaving the car to cool overnight, we put it to the test." "It is 2015 registered, so faces a tough Euro 6 emissions standard, with a limit of just 80 mg of NOx gases per kilometre." "Again," "Ted is on hand to make sure we follow the letter of the law." "The legislation says you should be able to take any car in reasonable condition, taken to the lab, put it through the taxed and it should pass." "This Zafira has just failed." "At twice the Euro 6 knocks limit, it wasn't even close." "Once again, we tried something that isn't in the test, a cruise at motorway speeds." "Look at the Spike." "Ted, you are the testing expert." "What do you make of the results we have seen?" "It is surprising to me, because I have only ever done the type of approval test where things comply." "It is new to me to see it taken outside its comfort zone, for want of a better expression." "When we went even faster, as if overtaking on a motorway, the emissions went off the scale, literally." "At approximately 135 kilometres per hour, we have seen the NOx emissions increase." "They are above the measuring range of the instrument." "But that just be because the car is going faster and therefore emits more?" "When the car is running faster, the engine is working harder and you get higher fuel consumption, so you get higher emissions." "But there is no reason for the emissions to be up to ten times higher." "Then we ran a second standard emissions test, again, with just one difference." "The engine was hot." "In theory, that should make it less polluting." "The result was even worse than a cold engine." "It was 3.5 times the Euro 6 limit." "What we have seen here is a twofold to threefold difference arm and for that, I do not have a good explanation." "It goes beyond what could easily be explained by engineering reasons." "So, an eco-car, good as new, failing the lab test." "How many others out there would do the same?" "For Ted, who spent a career in forcing a test that he thought was protecting our health, the implications are hard to swallow." "How do you feel?" "A bit disillusioned, really." "My conclusion going away from here is that we have been testing the wrong things in the wrong way for quite a while." "Vauxhall cult panorama that the" "Zafira has no defeat device and said:" "As to the high-speed cruising simulation, the company said:" "Diesel engines are the new environmental villains, and the impact of the smallest particles they produce is not yet fully understood." "These tiny, ultrafine particles are produced in their billions with every acceleration of a diesel vehicle." "These particles have never been on the planet before." "They are a new type of challenge to our bodies." "Modelling by Birmingham University shows that a cocktail of nitrogen dioxide and tiny particles is trapped between the buildings." "The pollution is worst where people are walking." "Scientists have only just started to focus on the health effects of these ultrafine specks." "What do we know about these very small particles?" "In terms of health effects, they are easily inhaled." "They will deposit in the deepest lung, and there is evidence that they can penetrate through biological membranes and even into cells within the body." "Then they can affect the bloodstream, and that is where we believe they can cause clotting in the blood, leading to heart attacks and other effects on health." "So as I am walking along, there are billions of particles going into my lungs?" "30 billion in an hour. 30 billion particles in an hour going into my lungs as I walk along a busy road." "VW promises to fix all its cars by the end of 2016." "But they are struggling to rebuild trust, and now customers like Mark and Claire want compensation." "Volkswagens are now before holding their value well, and that was a factor in making us choose this car." "If this car suddenly loses 20% of its value overnight because people cannot trust how it performs..." "It puts people off." "Then I want that money back!" "I'm sorry, I do." "Volkswagen used its green credentials to sell 10 million cars a year under eight different brand names, but now global sales are falling." "The company has offered an amnesty to any whistle-blower with information on the development of the defeat device." "And the compensation lawyers are circling." "We have four types of actions which could be brought - consumer fraud actions, people who have bought diesel cars with the defeat device, disgruntled" "Volkswagen shareholders who have purchased shares, actions brought by people who have been affected by excessive nitrogen oxide emissions, and potentially even actions brought by car manufacturers who have lost sales as a result of an aggressive marketing campaign by Volkswagen in" "relation to their diesel cars." "Is impossible to pin down exactly what this might cost the company in the end?" "We have 11 million Volkswagen diesel cars worldwide with the defeat device." "The cost of repairing those, putting in the fix and making sure they reach the promises which were made even if that is $1000 per car, that is immediately $11 billion." "On top of that, you have an action, for instance, brought by or intended to be brought forward by Volkswagen shareholders." "They are claiming 40 billion euros by way of damages." "VW's reputation has been wrecked." "It remains to be seen what they can save from the pieces." "The laws and tests designed to keep diesel cars clean are clearly failing, and the result is a health time bomb." "We need to have legislation." "The car manufacturers will not do it unless they are made to do it." "We need legislation to protect our children's lungs." "That is my view." "I am at the beach at the moment and it is really nice and the waves are hitting." "The air is so fresh, and I can finally breathe again compared to London." "It's really nice." "So yeah, bye!"