The news just keeps getting worse for Volkswagen.
The company is recalling 500,000 diesel cars in the United States and 11 million vehicles worldwide because they may emit up to 40 times the allowable levels of air pollutants that are called nitrogen oxides (NOx), The New York Times reported.
The company is now embroiled in a scandal after it was revealed that Volkswagen deliberately turned off the filter designed to trap NOx from the exhaust.
It turns out that diesel engines have an inherent trade-off between power, fuel efficiency and clean emissions, experts said.
"You have power, you have energy, you have emissions: You get to choose
two of them," said Don Hillebrand, the director of energy systems
research at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, and the former
president of the Society for Automotive Engineers.