While the world is currently outraged at Volkswagen for using software cheats to get around emission tests, it should be remembered that the German company certainly isn’t the only one to cheat to get around a rule. And they certainly weren’t the first either. Here are five other cheats that got caught.
Ford EPA Loophole cheat
While VW went too great lengths to hide cheaty software in its cars, Ford (and, let’s be honest here, no doubt lots of others as well) simply used loopholes in the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) testing regime to get better economy ratings for their cars.
It seems that one of the biggest and most glaring loopholes allowed manufacturers to use the same data from different cars that shared the same drivetrain, regardless of massive weight and aerodynamic differences between cars. So, of course, they did that.
And it worked well. Until the EPA caught them doing it with the C-Max Hybrid and told them to not do it anymore.
Subaru Chicken Tax cheat
The “Chicken Tax” was a 25 percent tariff the US government applied to imported potato starch, dextrin, brandy and, um, light trucks in 1963 in response to France and West Germany putting tariffs of the importation of chicken from the USA. Because politicians are mature and sensible people.
Eventually the tariffs on potato starch, dextrin and brandy were dropped, but the light truck tax remained.
So, of course, foreign manufacturers found a way to get around this, with Subaru being the first to do so by putting two cheap, crappy plastic seats in the tray of the Brat pick up (Brumby over here) and classifying it as a car, which saw it taxed at 2.5 percent instead.
Chrysler light truck cheat
The Chrysler PT Cruiser was a truly hateful car. Its badly misjudged retro styling was one thing, but its awful build quality and wheezing gutless engine just finished the whole nasty package off.
Except it wasn’t actually a car. At least, not in the USA.
In a cunning effort to bring down the company’s MPG average to comply with the strict Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations, Chrysler managed to classify the PT Cruiser as a “light truck”.
Probably best though, given the US NHSTA doesn’t have an “awful retro crapbox” category…
Cadillac A/C cheat
What do you do when your engines are so awful that they would actually stall when the unfortunate owner turned on the air conditioning? get some new engines?
Nah, screw that. Cadillac had a much better idea – just have the computer pump WAY more fuel into the engine so it wouldn’t stall. Oh, and it would also produce so much carbon monoxide that the catalytic converters couldn’t cope with and the excess poison would just be spewed into the atmosphere.
Funnily enough Cadillac got busted for this in 1995 and had to pay an US$11 million fine.
Smokey Yunick’s many ways to cheat
As clever (or not) as car manufacturers have been at cheating over the years, they will never actually be as good at it as NASCAR teams. And the greatest of them all was the legendary Smokey Yunick.
Among his clever “interpretation” of the rules were a perfect 7/8th scale car and an 11-foot long, 2-inch thick fuel line, because, while NASCAR specified how big a fuel tank could be, it never specified how big the fuel line could be.
Then there was the basketball he put in an oversized fuel tank. After the tech inspection his team would simply deflate the ball and have extra capacity in the tank!
