Indian Engineer Who Caught Volkswagen Cheating On Emissions Fired From His Job In The US

Hemanth Kappanna (41), an Indian-born engineer working with General Motors was recently let go of his role of communicating with the Environmental Protection Agency about the American auto major¡¯s emissions technology. He was just one of around 4,000 GM workers whom the company laid off in what it called a ¡°strategic transformation.¡±

He was no ordinary asset to the company though. A peek into the background of Kappanna shows that the guy has been a real-life hero, having managed to change the history of the automotive world. How? He was the one responsible for exposing Volkswagen¡¯s global emissions scandal.

The act dates back to 2013, when Kappanna was a part of a small team of engineering students at West Virginia University in Morgantown, an academic establishment known for its research on vehicle emissions. In his efforts to complete a grant application from the International Council on Clean Transportation handed to him by the director of his program, Kappanna chanced upon a method that would later reveal the lie that Volkswagen had been telling the world about the emissions from its vehicles.

The university had planned to devise a way to measure the real time emissions of vehicles moving on road. At the time, all the emission tests were performed in specially equipped garages as it proved to be much easier than analysing the emissions from a moving vehicle. Kappanna and his two fellow graduates students, Marc Besch (Switzerland) and Arvind Thiruvengadam (India), were chosen for the fieldwork.

Hemanth Kappanna (Image: Nick Hagen/ The New York Times)

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To achieve this task, the team attached a portable emissions-testing equipment to a sheet of plywood and put it into the back of a Volkswagen diesel station wagon. The attached equipment was able to record data that vastly differed from what the companies had made public, proving that the vehicles at the time were much more polluting than was known.

The method proved to be a key to uncover Volkswagen¡¯s ongoing cheating practices. Volkswagen engineers had created a defeat device software for the standardised practices conducted within the testing labs. When Kappanna and his team took the emission tests to the roads, the device failed. The team then presented its findings at an emissions experts¡¯ conference in San Diego.

While the team did not directly accuse Volkswagen of the falser, their findings did raise some questions in the eyes of officials with the California Air Resources Board and the Environmental Protection Agency who were a part of the audience at the conference. An investigation by the regulators that followed later made Volkswagen admit to its practices, claiming that the cheat devices were installed in 11 million diesel cars worldwide.

The aftermath of this saw the auto maker shelling out a total of $33 billion in penalties for resolving the criminal charges. Two Volkswagen executives are currently serving prison terms in the US for their attempts to cover the emissions fraud. In India, Volkswagen was recently fined by the National Green Tribunal a total penalty of Rs 500 crore. Volkswagen, however, has challenged the fine to the Supreme Court which has now put a hold on it for the time being.