Cars
Published on Aug 24, 2025 at 9:11 PM (UTC+4)
by Alessandro Renesis
Last updated on Aug 21, 2025 at 5:11 PM (UTC+4)
Edited by Emma Matthews
There’s a car graveyard in the middle of the Mojave Desert that’s packed with Audis and VWs.
It’s so vast it’s almost unbelievable.
And if you love cars, it’s also quite sad to see these cars rotting away.
But there’s a reason behind this automotive ‘tragedy’.
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There is a very good reason for the thousands of Audis and VWs being left in the Mojave Desert, and it all comes back to one of the biggest scandals in automotive history.
A little over a decade ago, the VW Group was caught red-handed when the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) essentially forced the automaker to admit that yes, it’d been lying about emissions for years.
Most automakers state emission figures based on lab tests, not real-world scenarios, and VW had developed a software that made these lab figures better – about 40 times better, to be exact – than they were in real life.
VW then deployed this software in over 11 million cars worldwide from 2009-2015, with about 500,000 in the US.
The saga, dubbed ‘Dieselgate’, cost Volkswagen billions of dollars in damages and penalties.
More importantly, it meant VW Group had to buy back hundreds of thousands of cars, mostly Audis and Volkswagens.
Dieselgate indirectly accelerated the EV transition.
Emission rules, already quite stringent, became even tougher after VW got caught, which explains the EV boom we’ve seen over the last 10 years.
Several entities, including the EU, for example, introduced mandatory real-world tests along with lab tests.
The only problem is that history tends to repeat itself quite frequently.
Several studies confirm that most EVs fall short of their range expectations.
Consumer Reports, an independent and nonprofit organization, tested 22 EVs and found that ‘nearly half fell short of their EPA-estimated ranges when driven at highway speeds’.
# Tags – Audi, Cars, Volkswagen
Experienced content creator with a strong focus on cars and watches. Alessandro penned the first-ever post on the Supercar Blondie website and covers cars, watches, yachts, real estate and crypto. Former DriveTribe writer, fixed gear bike owner, obsessed with ducks for some reason.
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