A previously unknown WVU engineer, Daniel Carder, and his WVU team caught Volkswagen cheating on emissions standards in America and Germany for its diesel cars. VW CEO Martin Winterkorn  resigned.

The head of Porsche -- Matthias Mueller -- was promoted to the top job at Volkswagen.

VW set aside $7.3 billion for pay off claims tied to the cheating. Perhaps 11 million cars had the cheating technology installed.

The scandal reduced the value of oil nation Qatar’s 17% stake in VW by nearly $5 billion, with VW’s stock dropping $28.5 billion after the news got out. Germany's Daimler and BMW, Peugot, Renault and Fiat stock prices all dropped significantly.

Carder's team – a research professor, two graduate students, a faculty member and himself – performed road tests around Los Angeles and up the West Coast to Seattle in 2013. They uncovered the humungous difference in emissions when VW vehicles were tested when stationery and when they were rolling down the highway.

VW was able to fool the EPA and its Germany counterpart because the agency tested the cars only on treadmill-like devices called dynamometers and didn’t use portable test equipment on real roads.

 

The software in the cars’ engine-control computers checked the speed, steering wheel position, air pressure and other factors to determine when dynamometer tests were under way and turned on pollution controls that reduced the output of nitrogen oxide, an ingredient in harmful ozone, the EPA said.

Once on the road, the VW diesels would pump out up to 40 TIMES the allowed level of nitrogen oxide.

And VW got away with it for seven years. But no more.

All because WVU got a $50,000 grant from the International Council on Clean Transportation to test auto emissions.