By David Morgan
MORGANTOWN, W.V. (Reuters) - Daniel Carder, an unassuming 45-year-old engineer with gray hair and blue jeans, appears an unlikely type to take down one of the world's most powerful companies.
But he and his small research team at West Virginia University may have done exactly that, with a $50,000 study which produced early evidence that Volkswagen AG <VOWG_p.DE> was cheating on U.S. vehicle emissions tests, setting off a scandal that threatens the German automaker's leadership, reputation and finances.
"The testing we did kind of opened the can of worms," Carder says of his five-member engineering team and the research project that found much higher on-road diesel emission levels for VW vehicles than what U.S. regulators were seeing in tests.
The results of that study, which was paid for by the nonprofit International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) in late 2012 and completed in May 2013, were later corroborated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and California Air Resources Board (CARB).
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 that generated results so pronounced that they initially suspected a problem with their own research.
"The first thing you do is beat yourself up and say, 'Did we not do something right?' You always blame yourself," he told Reuters in an interview. "(We) saw huge discrepancies. There was one vehicle with 15 to 35 times the emissions levels and another vehicle with 10 to 20 times the emissions levels."
Despite the discrepancies, a fix shouldn't involve major changes. "It could be something very small," said Carder, who's the interim director of West Virginia University's Center for Alternative Fuels, Engines and Emissions in Morgantown, about 200 miles (320 km) west of Washington in the Appalachian foothills.
"It can simply be a change in the fuel injection strategy. What might be realized is a penalty in fuel economy in order to get these systems more active, to lower the emissions levels."
Carder said he's surprised to see such a hullabaloo now, because his team's findings were made public nearly a year and a half ago.
"We actually presented this data in a public forum and were actually questioned by Volkswagen," said Carder.
The ICCT's research contract to Carder's team was sparked by separate findings by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, which showed a discrepancy between test results and real world performance in European diesel engines.