Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

by Tim Harford

In September 2015, Volkswagen, one of the largest car manufacturers in the world, was caught cheating on U.S. emissions tests. Public opinion was shocked. Shares in the German car giant plunged; the boss, Martin Winterkorn, resigned; and Germans worried that the reputation of every manufacturer in the nation might be tarnished by association with VW.25 How was such cheating possible? Manufacturers must submit to a program of laboratory tests designed to ensure that the engines emit low levels of nitrogen oxides, gasses that can cause a variety of local pollution problems—acid rain, smog, and soot, damaging agricultural crops and causing breathing difficulties in elderly people and children, sometimes with fatal results. The tests are tough and the standards are high. But the tests are also absurdly predictable—a series of predetermined maneuvers on a treadmill. As a result, VW was able to cheat. The company’s cars—tricked out with computers and sensors as all modern engines are—would recognize the distinctive choreography of a laboratory test. They would switch to a special testing mode, one where a nitrogen oxide trap in the exhaust system would filter out the pollutants, but at the cost of a sluggish, fuel-hungry engine. Outside the laboratory, the engine would be zippier and more efficient, but would spout vastly more nitrogen oxides, perhaps twenty or thirty times more. What VW did is strikingly similar to what regulators observed in banking, with banks buying unprofit...