I have tried to be the practical guy who doesn't care about cars.
I occasionally think it might be nice to live in a city where a car isn't necessary, where walking or public transportation would be sufficient for our needs. I have thought about hybrids and electric vehicles. I once halfway seriously proposed that we get a little scooter--a Vespa or its equivalent--to putt down to the Kroger. For eight years I owned a very practical Subaru.
But the truth is, I'm a car guy. I care about horsepower and torque and tight suspensions. Like everyone who avails himself of the advantages of modern civilization, I can accommodate my own hypocrisy. I can understand the wastefulness implicit in American car culture, yet still want to indulge my driver's heart. I like cars the way some people like guns.
I understand trade-offs must be made. We ought to be as fuel-efficient and non-polluting as possible. Still, I'm not looking forward to the silent clean driverless cars they say are the future. I have a very strong sense of what I want in a car--I want it to be nimble and quick and not call too much attention to itself. I want to shift my own gears and to be able to feel the road through the steering wheel. I want it to be easy to park, not bad on gas, be big enough to haul three sub-20-pound terriers.
Luckily there are a lot of vehicles out there that meet these requisites. But when I was shopping for a new car recently, my first choice was a Volkswagen. To be precise, I decided that I wanted a Volkswagen GTI.
If you don't know the GTI, it's a fabulous car. Check out the reviews in places like Car and Driver and Road & Track. Those guys unanimously love this car, and consensus is a rare thing among motorheads. (An aside: While the quality of writing in most magazines has fallen off precipitously over the last couple of decades, for some reasons these magazines remain extraordinarily well-written.)
The first new car I ever bought was an original 1983 GTI, which was a souped-up version of the econobox Rabbit, which was how the Golf was branded in the U.S. in those days. In many ways, it is my favorite of all the cars I've owned.
I've always felt pretty good about Volkswagen. My first car was a 1964 VW Beetle my grandmother left me in her will a couple of years before I got my driver's license; later I had a 1979 Audi Fox that could go from zero to 60 in eight seconds while getting 36 miles per gallon, and the '91 VW version of the Fox. While over the years I've owned everything from a 1943 Willys Jeep to a 1973 MGB to a 1977 Chevy Nova SS with a 350 V8 to a 1988 Chrysler LeBaron convertible with rich Corinthian leather, VWs have always been on my radar.
And the reasons I didn't wind up with a new GTI have nothing to do with the car itself.
Car shopping produces good experiences and weird ones. Contrary to what you might have heard, it's pretty difficult to buy a car over the Internet. People who sell cars want you to come to the showroom. They still do that thing where they disappear with your keys to consult with their "sales manager." You still have to be willing to walk away after they offer you "their absolute best price" in order to get the best deal. They understand there is an emotional component, that people will overpay if they really want it. If you focus on one particular model, you put yourself at a disadvantage.
What happened was what usually happens when I go car shopping: The dealership couldn't get me the exact car I wanted at the right price. (Why is it so hard to get a stick shift in what's essentially a covert sports car?) So I looked at other cars and liked some of them quite a lot--the Honda Civic SI is a great machine for the money, and if they still made it in a hatchback I might have gone with that. I eventually ended up with a car I fell in love with, but I would have been happy with a GTI.
Until last week.
I'm not the sort of person who tends to be shocked when corporations do shady things to boost profits, but I'm still trying to wrap my head around the venality of VW's recently exposed scheme to cheat on emissions tests. Basically VW engineers wrote some code into their diesel cars' software to track steering and pedal movements. When those movements suggested the car was being tested for nitrogen-oxide emissions in a lab, the car automatically turned on pollution controls that otherwise were switched off. Since the EPA tests light-duty vehicles exclusively in labs under a tightly controlled set of circumstances, it was possible for VW to teach the cars to circumvent the tests.
VW was caught when West Virginia University's Center for Alternative Fuels, Engines and Emissions (CAFEE), working under contract for European clients, took the cars out for a real-world test drive and measured their real-world pollution.
While most people understand carmakers are generally disdainful of regulation and few people really expect to achieve the gas mileage figures posted on the window stickers, this is an elaborate and obvious deception on a different level than, say, taping up a grille to improve aerodynamics or removing a back seat to make a car lighter during mileage testing. More than 11 million VW "clean diesel" vehicles pumped 40 times more nitrogen oxide into the atmosphere than is legally allowed in the U.S.
While it's impossible to say precisely how many people were damaged by this non-compliance, the Guardian reports that about 23,500 deaths a year are directly attributable to diesel emissions and that full compliance with regulations would cut that number in half. People died because VW cheated on these tests.
They're probably not the only car company that has finessed these tests, just the most blatant. The Guardian quoted Alastair Lewis, professor of atmospheric chemistry at the University of York, as saying that "virtually all new vehicles in recent years appear to emit substantially more nitrogen oxide in the real world than they do when tested in labs, irrespective of manufacturer."
I'm glad Mini Cooper won't have a diesel model in the U.S. until at least 2017. By which time the EPA will surely be conducting road tests.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 09/27/2015