Thousands of Audi and Volkswagen cars were left sitting in the Mojave Desert for years

It’s pretty difficult to imagine thousands of Audi and Volkswagen cars gathered in one place.

Such a scene would require an area so vast that it would almost have to be… a desert. Hold that thought.

It turns out that thousands of Audi and Volkswagen cars were actually left sitting in the Mojave Desert.

And it’s all down to a scandal that rocked the car world.

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‘Dieselgate’ rocks car world to its core

There is a very good reason for the thousands of Audi and Volkswagen cars being left in the Mojave Desert.

And it all comes back to a scandal in which the German giants were caught red-handed.

A decade ago, Audi and VW cars were at the epicentre of one of the biggest car scandals in recent history.

The saga, dubbed ‘Dieselgate’, cost Volkswagen billions of dollars in damages and penalties.

From 2008 to 2015, Volkswagen (and later Audi) were discovered to have been cheating US emissions regulations.

Back in September 2015, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a notice of violation of the Clean Air Act to VW.

The agency made the allegation that the brand intentionally cheated US emissions tests.

But how could VW have cheated such stringent, advanced emissions testing for so long?

It turns out that the marque intentionally programmed its Turbocharged Direct Injection (TDI) engines.

Volkswagen programmed these cars to activate their emissions controls only during laboratory testing.

This software allowed the brand’s cars to pass emissions testing during the laboratory phase.

In real-world scenarios, however, cars were emitting up to 40x more emissions than during testing.

VW deployed this software in over 11 million cars worldwide from 2009-2015, with about 500,000 in the US.

Audi eventually got caught engaging in the same underhanded cheating as VW.

The scandal has cost Volkswagen over $33 billion in legal settlements and vehicle re-fits.

Several former engineers have also been arrested and convicted for their parts in the conspiracy.

Why are so many Audi and Volkswagen cars in the desert?

So, how does the ‘Dieselgate’ scandal explain the thousands of Audi and Volkswagen cars in the Mojave Desert?

Well, as part of its fines and settlements, Volkswagen and Audi engaged in a buy-back scheme.

It cost the German brands over $7.4 billion to buy back over 300,000 cars that had cheated emissions testing.

Even though they had been bought back, Volkswagen and Audi had nowhere to put the cars.

So they stored the cars somewhere vast enough to put nearly half a million cars – the Mojave Desert.

Volkswagen already owns nearly 40 remote storage facilities across the US as a whole.

Those include an old paper mill in Minnesota, a former Football stadium, and Detroit – and the patch of land in the Mojave Desert.

The Mojave Desert storage facility is one of the most eye-catching images that you will ever see.

And it is representative of the scale of the scandal that directly led to it.