> There is no suggestion that any of the cars tested broke the law on emissions limits or used any cheat devices.
Since all these cars passed the laboratory test, that means there must be something very wrong with the test and the way the standards are enforced. Or all car makers do cheat.
I thought it was more a case of "some car manufacturers cheated" and not "almost all diesel cars emit several times more than they should". How is this possible?
The test is accurate and measures emissions very well. The cars emit NOX at levels lower than the legal limits during the test. There is no mistake during the test and no cheating (apart from VW).
However, when the cars are used by normal drivers, the usage patterns are so significantly different than the test sequences that the emissions profile changes. In the majority of cases the NOX emissions from cars used by normal people exceed the EU limits.
This does not, as I understand it, mean that the cars are illegal. The cars all passed the tests in the test environment. That is the requirement and they met the requirement.
No law is being broken but that is only because the law is not fit for purpose.
The tests simply don't match modern real-world driving patterns. For example, apparently real-world drivers tend to accelerate much more rapidly than in the test sequence. It doesn't just affect diesel cars either; they tend to over-estimate the fuel efficiency of all cars and presumably under-estimate their pollution levels too.
Some manfs were cheating - they increased tire pressure to levels that would be dangerous on roads, for instance.
Some manfs were building to the type approval test, but not for real world driving. A car needs to accelerate from 0 kph to 100 kph over a certain time. Normal road drivers would accelerate faster than this test, and acceleration is when the vehicles emit a lot of stuff. The tests are run on engines at their normal operating temperature. So cold engines are allowed to emit more stuff to protect the engine. Many engines in real world use would be at this cold temperature.
The US has particularly stringent testing, and it might not be possible to meet those tests. They should probably have done other stuff to reduce diesel vehicles - taxes and duties on the vehicles and the fuel, with exemptions for commercial operators.
It's clear now that manfs build to the test, and that type approval testing needs to include better real world driving testing.
Also, the number of car manufacturers outnumber the number of car engine manufacturers - so if one company which actually makes engines (cough) optimizes their engines for testing, several car manufacturers may be caught with their trousers down. (Which, I am sure, will lead to all sorts of interesting lawsuits.)
For instance, the engine in cars as different as the Land Rover Defender (sadly, no longer among us) and the Volvo, say, S80 is basically the same Ford-engineered unit.
> I thought it was common knowledge the lab tests are a joke
it was common knowledge for a long time that the lab tests were not the same as real world driving. But we thought that, even though the lab tests were better, there was some meaningful relationship.
As it turns out, they are wildly divergent in a lot of cases. And the repercussions are ongoing. Long-term, this might turn out to a turning point in the history of internal-combustion engines.
A bit/lot of it may be "optimize for the test", not cheat. They know at what temperature the test is done, so they optimize the chemistry for that case. They know it will be done with new cars, so they do not optimize "emission over the car's lifetime".
They also have drivers who are above average. That will help with manually shifted cars.
And of course, they pick the best car they can produce, and prepare it optimally. Tyre pressure will be optimized, the car will be perfectly polished, if that helps, etc.
Cheating starts when they tape shut doors to decrease air resistance, or when they explicitly detect "test is being run" and act upon it.
IMO, the real problem is twofold: firstly, the existing tests were designed in such a way that their results do not reflect what happens in the real world, and secondly, some manufacturers went criminally far in optimizing for it.
"Dynamometer testing is already supplemented by on-road testing using portable emissions equipment, lab testing of cars borrowed from consumers, audits of other industry emissions labs and examination of vehicles chosen randomly from assembly lines, said Valentine, the EPA spokeswoman."
So the manufacturer apparently does not get to chose the vehicle, which is one reason why the cheating code was present in all VWs with that engine model rather than just in the vehicles used for the testing.
So the manufacturer apparently does not get to chose the vehicle, which is one reason why the cheating code was present in all VWs with that engine model rather than just in the vehicles used for the testing.
Are you implying that it's a bad thing that a manufacturer is forced to implement cheats on all cars rather than just provide a rigged car for test?
I guess it's just the use of the words so and apparently, it reads sarcastically or condescendingly? I'm having trouble finding the words to describe the subtle implication of that combination of words.
Like if you were to say "So we're apparently not allowed to bring guns to school".
You can find alternate uses for many words and then you can go and spend many hours debating your reading of what someone wrote but given that I've (1) already answered your question with my response and (2) those do not seem to be the dominant meaning of the term I think that further debate of this particular matter is pointless.
Pointless -> 'not useful', not 'without a sharp pointy end'.
I wasn't debating you. I was seeking clarification. You asked how I misinterpreted what you said. I explained how I misinterpreted it. That's not really a debate but rather a discussion. I guess people found what I said to be contentious because I've been downvoted to hell but I was just asking for clarification.
Car manufacturers do not make the measurements themselves, but they directly do pay for it, and do shop around for the best testers. That raises doubts as to the independence of those testing firms.
>Since all these cars passed the laboratory test, that means there must be something very wrong with the test and the way the standards are enforced.
It depends how the law is written.
Case a) - the cars must never emit more pollutants than specified in these rules - then yes, you are correct. The car manufacturers would be rightly concerned about the wide range of situations they would need to account for.
Case b) - the cars must not emit more than the specified amount of pollutants under these specific test conditions (implying hopefully "we understand that the real world performance will differ, and are willing to accept this for the sake of simplicity in testing/lawmaking") - in this case the system is working as intended.
I am not sure which case we are dealing with, maybe someone can advise us.
It's all a bit of a sham, a lot of politics in play with it.
If NOx was a real concern, the cars would be required to have realtime sensors, the check engine light would come on when they misbehave. All the manufacturers knew. The testers almost certainly knew
If NOx was really a priority, then the large producers would be subject to increased regulations rather than the tiny fraction that's produced by individual passenger vehicles.
"Unlike other parts of the world, European nations incentivised the use of diesel vehicles over the last 20 years because they emit less carbon dioxide per mile than petrol cars. Governments thought stricter regulation would sharply reduce NOx emissions, but carmakers found ways around the rules and governments failed to clamp down on the practices."
How typical in so many ways (I particularly like the claim that governments "failed" without either suggesting to strip the governments of those powers which they failed to use so consistently throughout all of Europe, or charging government officials with criminal incompetence or fraud.)
Not acting quickly enough?.. VW's "defeat device" wasn't uncovered by the government, and it's been deployed for years. I'm not sure what would make governments do anything about this at any future point in time if the issue wasn't reported by a non-government entity. The article also elaborates the measures governments are taking to let perpetrators get away with this into the future (and another source reported how governments keep postponing random checks of cars on actual roads.) There are at least three reasons for governments to side with the perpetrators - campaign contributions or outright bribes to politicians, concerns about the economy/employment, and a revolving door between car makers and regulatory agencies, all this is true for any big business regulated by the government.
The belief that fraud is conducted on this scale but the regulator is not to blame is stunning to me (same with banking fraud etc.) I didn't say governments should necessarily be stripped of this power, just that if they all fail so miserably at something, you ought to either suggest that they cannot ever succeed (and if so of course you'll want to strip them of this power) or that people currently employed by governments to oversee this should be investigated, in the hope that eventually the governments can be trained to find competent people to fill these roles, and find some mechanism that prevents corrupting these people. Meeting extreme government incompetence with complete understanding ("they just didn't act quickly enough") and zero penalties, however, is IMO perpetuating the problem.
What the Guardian neglects to add is that (IIRC) the German auto industry had placed a big bet on diesel engines as far back as the early '80s, and that the German government has enormous clout in the EU and seems to love German export industries with the same fervour that the US and UK governments adore their national financial sectors.
AFAIK all modern diesels are based on electronically controlled common rail which was originally designed by FIAT, even if it ended up being licensed to Bosch.
What I mean is, probably all the european auto industry invested in diesel at a time when gasoline was considered a lot worse than diesel in terms of pollution, and taxation greatly favoured diesel vs gasoline in terms of fuel price.
Hmm. Of course now I can't find my original source. :/ According to this article https://ranwhenparked.net/2013/07/22/30-years-ago-bmw-launch... Mercedes' and BMW's interest in car diesel engines goes back to the 1970s, though Peugeot was there too. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_the_di... is oddly written and fairly uncited, but it does state "The diesel car markets are the same ones who pioneered various developments (Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Peugeot/Citroën, Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Volkswagen Group)".
Moving towards the politics, Rüdiger K. W. Wurzel's Environmental policy-making in Britain, Germany and the European Union's Chapter 5, "The catalytic converter versus the lean-burn engine controversy" seems very informative. Particularly the section "The diesel engine", which contains this:
"In America and Japan, diesel cars almost disappeared from the market in the 1970s after the adoption of stringent limit values for carcinogenic particulates, although this was disputed by the car industry. The EU introduced relatively lenient particulate limit values in the late 1980s. The German government demanded the [Best Available Technology] option for both petrol and diesel cars. However, after heavy lobbying from Mercedes and Volkswagen, fiscal incentives were granted not only for the three-way catalytic converter but for diesel cars which met the lenient EU particulate limits."
"Moreover, since diesel engines get the same break, the European regulation also favours those German producers who are leaders in diesel technology, especially Daimler Benz and VW."
However, Wurzel clearly asserts that the move towards US-style catalytic converters on petrol cars in Europe (which is apparently what first made diesels attractive as a regulatory end-run) was initiated by Germany in the teeth of opposition from German car makers (especially Volkswagen): there was a perception in the UK government that Germany was obliging its automakers in this, but it was wrong. Also, http://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/2190-4715... says that tax incentives for dieselisation in the domestic German market are relatively modest (and that there was a small tax penalty for buying a diesel until 2009, though not after actual fuel costs were taken into account) (2.3.6, 2.3.7). Interestingly, it also suggests that a supply glut of fuel oil (which can be converted into diesel) was the original incentive for the European diesel boom (2.3.1) . Then again, further on down the road it seems clear that the EU's lenient approach to diesel emissions had the effect of advantaging European automakers collectively against competition from the Japanese, who had bet on hybrids instead (2.3.6).
Without the governments' attempts at controlling pollution, do you really believe that the car companies would voluntarily be restricting their cars' emissions?
If the government did nothing at all in the matter, I believe car companies wouldn't care less about emissions (though perhaps it would result in higher CO2 emissions but lower NOx emissions and perhaps that would have been a net benefit to society - but I'm not sure about that, so I wouldn't make an argument hinging on this being true.) Personally I would not advocate stripping the government of the power to regulate emissions (though I'm not at all sure how to get them to do their job properly), on the theory that with all the unintended consequences of regulation including higher NOx emissions, it's still better than nothing. But I have a feeling that jailing regulators is a promising approach to improving future regulators' performance, and this approach seems underrepresented in public discourse, perhaps because most people prefer to either abolish regulation altogether or to always blame the regulated industry. The main reason I mentioned stripping regulators of their power is that this is the logical conclusion of the assumption that we should expect competent, honest regulators to fail to detect fraud at such a huge scale.
Not terribly surprising. Their engineers are competent, it's just that the US (where diesels are less popular) set some rather unpleasant requirements for diesel cars, in particular insisting that they couldn't require the diesel exhaust fluid tank to be topped up by the end user and setting lower NO2 limits. In order to meet these conflicting requirements, VW cheated. I think some of the VWs they tested actually have the same engine and emissions control system as some of the US models that cheated, just without the defeat device intended to reduce exhaust fluid usage.
> in particular insisting that they couldn't require the diesel exhaust fluid tank to be topped up by the end user
Not being rude, but I'm having trouble parsing that part of your comment.
Do you mean that the US authorities won't let diesel car owners re-fill the diesel exhaust fluid tank by themselves, i.e. the re-fill must be performed by a dealer?
Also is the DEF tank just a US thing? I'd never heard it before (UK resident here).
The DEF tank is a global thing – ever heard of AdBlue etc?
But yes, the issue is that the US requires dealers to refill them. And also sets a limit for how often refill cycles may happen. And the weight of the tank sets a limit on how large it may be.
The result is simple: Small Diesel cars can’t exist legally in the US.
This is all completely new to me (and probably most folks unless they're running around in brand new diesel vehicles). The last diesel car I owned was a 1998 (Euro-2 standard when NOx emissions were more relaxed - so no DEF required [0]) Ford Mondeo which I disposed of in 2006 when the timing belt snapped ruining the engine. Since then I've owned older petrol engined high mileage "bangers" so I would never have encountered DEF unless I won the lottery and fancied a new Landrover :)
Because American companies don't make diesel cars.
Aside from trucks, that is.
I tend to keep up on cars, and I can't name any American-brand, small diesel off the top of my head from the last 30+ years, aside from last year's Chevy Cruze.
Edit/clarification: I'm speaking strictly of the American market. If American companies make small diesel cars for international markets, it's not at all relevant to discussing small diesel cars in the US.
There were multiple unfortunate diesels in the 1980s. My first thought was "Ford Escort" and a bit of searching confirms that there was one (Mazda made the engines though).
Ford makes them though, but only in Europe, and they are not particularly strong in diesel at that. Both Focus and Mondeo are available as diesels. And even Fiasco...sorry, Fiesta.
GM don't sell Opels in the US, although they could re-badge them as Chevrolets.
> Ford makes them though, but only in Europe, and they are not particularly strong in diesel at that
I disagree, certainly from a UK perspective.
Most modern Ford diesel engines are the product of the collaboration between Ford, Citreon and Peugeot [0][1].
Ford diesel Focus and Mondeo's are hugely popular and are quite reliable, reasonably sporty and fuel efficient things. My dad's last three Fords (Focus, Mondeo then Focus) were all diesels and he loved them. Virtually everyone I know that own's a Focus has one of the diesel versions.
Yes, I don't disagree, you can buy a Focus, but I said Ford is not particularly strong in diesel. They work with PSA to get the engines. Still, a smaller percentage of Ford's European cars are diesel, compared to all major German and French brands, Volvo, Nissan or even Dacia.
To the extent that consumers remember crappy American diesels, I would say the most infamous is the Olds diesel. GM took a (not so great) SI engine and turned it into a CI engine.
Because keeping diesel cars away from the US market leaves them with a bit less competition.
American companies make some diesel cars in other markets (Ford, and GM with its Opel and Vauxhall brands) but they have a significantly smaller market share in diesels than in gasoline engines.
"A third warning indicates when 515 miles are left and also warns that the DEF tank needs re-filling or the vehicle will not be able re-start when the distance countdown reaches 0."
Wow.
"The engine will only start again when the DEF tank is re-filled."
And thus the the "faulty DEF sensor" malfunction is introduced into our car fault lexicon.
I'm pretty sure that owners can refill the tank by themselves, but manufacturers are required to have a big enough tank that it can be done by the dealer as part of the regular servicing schedule. The tank itself not so much a US thing as it is a modern diesel car thing; it's part of the emissions control system on I think most new diesels.
It's not an idiotic regulation. If you fit a tiny reservoir that needs to be topped up every week then most customers wouldn't bother, and the car would be spewing extra toxins. So you have to make it large enough that normal servicing will ensure it is filled.
Using "limp mode" with warnings to ensure the tank stays filled (and the car does not run at full throttle unless it is filled) is a much better solution.
When the sales guy told me the tank only had to be filled at service intervals, it sounded strange. People on the TDI forums thought it was just because VW didn't want to scare away customers with an extra thing to do, but you can buy the stuff at any gas station and pouring it into the tank is not difficult.
When the scandal broke the assumption was that they mistuned the DEF cars out of arrogance, and again to avoid spooking customers with extra maintenance.
Now it sounds much more like they tuned it that way because this regulation would have crippled the car with an enormous DEF tank otherwise. It is possible that such a regulation combined with a 10,000 mile service interval only makes engineering sense on mid-size trucks or larger.
This doesn't have anything to do with them failing to build a working LNT solution and cheating with those previously, of course.
It's very simple: make the car so that if the tank hits empty, the car doesn't run any more.
If you think that's a problem, then please explain why this isn't also a problem for the gas tank. I don't know of any cars which will continue to drive (but spewing extra toxins) when the gas or diesel tank is empty.
Customers don't seem to have much of a problem topping up their diesel tank every week or two....
"Limp mode" is a much better solution, switching that on will basically guarantee the fluid gets refilled in short order.
And actually I'm not so quick to assume this is only a stupid decision either. Hanlon's razor still applies but there is also a distinct possibility that this regulation was "encouraged" as a play to make small diesel cars less competitive.
It's a different solution, but I don't know if it would be better. How do you think it's better?
VW doesn't want their cars going into limp mode. They don't want customers calling up asking why their car is acting funny. They don't want to increase the maintenance load on their customers. They don't want customers coming in for unnecessary service appointments (especially for stuff they wouldn't be able to charge for). Making a tank big enough to last as long as the motor oil seems like an easy, low tech solution. Sometimes simple is better.
See my reply above, I'm inclined to believe that storing enough DEF for correct dosing through a 10,000 mile service interval may not be feasible for a small car.
After hearing about this regulation it seems an obvious reason why they would keep the cheat enabled even after adding a DEF system.
What they are going to do during the recall is different for the various generations of cars.
Some of the VWs are getting bigger DEF tanks. For the cars that this isn't an option, I don't think VW has said exactly what they are going to do. They could just disable the cheating mode on the software. Fuel economy and performance would suck, but the emissions would be at acceptable levels.
I haven't heard anything about the latest agreement, other than that it will involve a buyback offer, unspecified fixes, and/or compensation. You don't have a source do you?
There's been a lot of speculation all along, will they retrofit DEF systems, will the cars just get super unreliable because the systems can't handle prolonged legal operation, etc.
No, I don't have a source I can point you to. I was talking to a Audi mechanic last weekend. He told me that 2015 cars were pretty much unaffected and will likely only get a firmware tweak.
2013-2014 cars need to hold 1/2 gallon more exhaust fluid and apparently that's doable (and also new firmware).
Older cars are a bigger problem and will likely get a combination of fixes but in the end, they are going to be louder, fuel hungry cars after getting "fixed".
The oldest cars will likely get owners a buy-back offer because the depreciated value is lower than the cost to fix.
>He told me that 2015 cars were pretty much unaffected and will likely only get a firmware tweak
And what exactly will this firmware tweak do? If it decreases performance or fuel economy, then that isn't acceptable. The customer bought the car because it advertised X horsepower and Y mpg; if the firmware tweak changes that, then that's false advertising and the company needs to refund their money in full.
VW is offering some compensation too. There are also a bunch of big lawsuits chugging along. If you aren't happy with the settlement VW is offering, join one of the lawsuits. Those are pretty much your only options.
Luckily, I don't own a VW, I'm just pointing out how this is a scam. If I were a VW customer, I'd be really pissed. I'm really glad I passed on VWs and bought a Mazda instead.
What's really stupid is that it sounds like they should be able to get the advertised power and economy with the required low emissions simply by using more DEF. I'm assuming the DEF liquid isn't too expensive here, but if they just made it so you needed to refill it every 1000 miles, that should solve the problem. Heck, why can't they just make it available at gas stations too?
Having this idiotic notion that only dealers should be able to refill the stuff, and that it needs to be done at 10k intervals, is what's making it impossible.
Why not require that cars must be able to carry enough fuel to drive 10,000 miles while they're at it? It makes as much sense.
My dad has a US Volkswagen diesel. He's told me he can refill the urea tank, but he can't reset the computer to tell it the tank was filled, so there's very little point for him to actually refill it. His car will stop working unless he brings it into the dealer, one way or the other.
See, this is a great example of how our regulators have failed miserably. This kind of practice should be outright banned. There should not be anything on a car that requires you to take it to a dealer to reset; any competent mechanic should be able to do any service on the car, and not need a special dealer-only computer system to make the car recognize the service.
After looking into this the only thing I can find is a reference to 4,000 mile capacity[0], way less than a TDI service interval. Maybe they mistuned it just so customers wouldn't have to pour a bottle of stuff into the tank, which would have been an awful idea. Or maybe the catalyst they used isn't sufficient to meet US NOx standards with the optimum fuel-air ratio, I guess we will have to wait and see.
Well it wasn't that long ago that a study found that school buses had many times the acceptable levels of pollutants inside because they sat idling while waiting for kids.
All I have to do is watch the local bus service, mostly the city one, to see how bad some vehicles pollute. So let us be honest here, the government needs to clamp down hard on all vehicles in its employ at all levels even more than going after consumer cars
I rode the bus every day as a child, and I will always associate the smell of diesel exhaust with the inside of the school bus, because it always smelled like exhaust.
I'm willing to take down votes for this position, I don't understand the fuss here, nor to credulity of the actors whom should have (and probably did) know better. If the tests were meant to reflect real-world conditions, they should be be designed to do that -- they clearly weren't, and were only tiny sample of performance from which (wild?) extrapolations were drawn.
Don't have a cry about it, fix the tests. Get together some disinterested parties to design them to capture the behaviour we all apparently expected the current dud tests to measure.
This actually reminds me of how the failure of the bodies responsible for banking oversight cry WOE when the industries they were charged with overseeing did bad things. Failure of real oversight again. And it the same way, we have these same bodies (NOT end users) expecting to be paid for making these mistakes. Who benefits from the fines? Not car owners, not car makers.
There is a lot more riding on these tests than is currently being admitted. The simple fact is that based on the tests and the impact of NOx on population health, the sale of diesel cars should be stopped immediately.
Even London has doubled the congestion charge fee for diesels.
A further step would be to recognise that petrol cars also emit NOx and that the long term goal should be the removal of these from the road.
This is going to hurt the car industry in ways we don't fully understand yet. In the short term I would be end-of-lining their diesel production and restructuring to electric.
> The simple fact is that based on the tests and the impact of NOx on population health, the sale of diesel cars should be stopped immediately
Extremely disingenous. You know what happens when the sale of diesel cars/taxis/buses stops? The old ones get driven longer.
You know what vehicles create the lion's share in NOx emissions? The ones built and sold before 2000 when Euro3 emission standards started limiting NOx emissions. The majority of London "quaint" TX4 black cabs are of this toxic variety, as are the majority of their buses. (This is probably similar to much of the rest of Europe). Taking 50 new diesel vehicles off the street will do less than upgrading a single one of these legacy vehicles to a state-of-the-art diesel engine. Your proposed policy would be counterproductive.
I think the person you're responding to meant some sort of "immediate action", not necessarily just stopping the sale of new diesel cars. Precisely because we have to be sensible about the actual culprits of emission.
London's bus fleet is also pretty new. All meet Euro 4, and over 20% at least Euro 5. [1]
The taxis are the problem -- London's low emission zone (similar to those in Germany) only applies to large vehicles, taxis are not included. There are thousands of taxis over 10 years old still running in London [2].
> So most buses in Germany are Euro VI now.
Really? That would mean most buses in Germany are less than 3 years old, which seems unlikely.
The fact remains that millions of people park on the street or in alleys/garages they do not own. Until we start stomping on landlords' property rights to force them to install chargers, and also somehow install chargers in street parking spaces, EVs are just not usable for a huge segments of the population. The only way to make EV ownership practical is, ironically, to make your commute longer by living in the suburbs.
Diesel vehicles kill people, period. It's very difficult to reduce emissions sufficiently to change that but it's nigh impossible to ban diesel cars and trucks from the road. Given that, the only reasonable alternative is stringent tests that push diesel technology to the limit in terms of minimizing health impact. Which is what we have. Could the tests be better? Certainly. But that doesn't excuse the cheating. Imagine if airplane manufacturers had been found to be cheating on safety tests. That's how serious and how immoral this cheating is.
The manufactures were required to "pass" the tests. They did. The tests were not fit for purpose. Fix the tests or GIVE UP. You will NEVER get the manufactures to act as moral entities -- they are amoral. They are profit machines and are required by law to be that way. The comparison to aircraft manufacturing only works if you are arguing aircraft manufactures and industry bodies design and implement similarly stupid tests -- they simply don't. Failing aircraft parts cause readily identifiable deaths, NOx requires large scale, organised statistical inference, which, lo, is also in the laps of the regulators. Sound, impartial, rational testing is the only way to improve the current situation -- I would argue the current situation is none of these things and was stillborn as a regime.
The tests weren't the problem. VW made it so the car only passed during the tests. A test should be somewhat reproducible and that conflicts with not being able to cheat the test.
The solution would be to throw some people in jail. Your suggestion that it was even mandatory for companies to behave this way is so weird that I cannot respond to that.
Your first two sentences seems to contradict one another. The assumption was the cars would behave the same in tests versus how they are driven by real drivers, but THAT WASN'T IN THE TEST! Test it! Randomly give them an 4 hour driving profile including resistance and acceleration generated from a model of drivers, fail if it diverges by X% from the reproducible baseline. This is what people are complaining about (largely), but it wasn't what was asked of the manufacturers.
Companies are required to act in the interests of the shareholders. These companies were required to pass the synthetic tests. If the manufactures spent precious resources "wasting" R/D and manufacturing effort going beyond the requirements placed upon them to ship expensive but already conforming vehicles, they would be savaged in the markets, and executive open to litigation for dereliction. I'm not defending it, by the way -- this is how capitalism works.
> Companies are required to act in the interests of the shareholders. These companies were required to pass the synthetic tests. If the manufactures spent precious resources "wasting" R/D and manufacturing effort going beyond the requirements placed upon them to ship expensive but already conforming vehicles, they would be savaged in the markets, and executive open to litigation for dereliction. I'm not defending it, by the way -- this is how capitalism works.
We have an example in Apple that does exactly this, with a CEO that makes statements during quarterly earnings summary calls openly admitting exactly this, and there is no lawsuit. This is also how capitalism works.
I don't disagree with your opinion on the tests. If the tests aren't fit for purpose, they must be replaced or removed. However, the tests as-is do serve one purpose: to provide an absolute comparison between different models across different years.
However, regarding corporations:
You will NEVER get the manufactures to act as moral entities -- they are amoral
This attitude is part of what keeps them immoral.
They are profit machines and are required by law to be that way
So, change the law? I'm sure there's been many articles on HN where the prevailing opinion was "the law is wrong, and must be changed".
They are not required by law to be amorral profit machines. Directors have to take into consideration company image and general well being in making decisions. They don't have to take into consideration profit.
They are not required by law per se, but this is what evolutionary pressures (i.e. competition) demand of them. We won't have companies acting morally until we start expecting it from them - seriously enough that it starts to affect the profit calculation.
This is a well-worn sentiment, but I think it is at best only partially true. A substantial aspect to the way modern businesses run has little to do with sheer, naked profit seeking and much to do with culture. Specifically a culture of class distinctions, power, and "winning". There are countless instances of corporations doing dumb things that hurt their bottom line but are done anyway because it aligns with the culture and values system of those making the decisions.
Whilst people continue to state the falsehood that corporations must legally pursue profit ahead of al other considerations I will continue to correct them.
It is a common falsehood that is used to both justify outrageous corporation behaviour and to belittle those who criticise company actions as being ignorant of the law.
> They are profit machines and are required by law to be that way.
People say this all the time, but it's not true. In the US managers at public companies do have an obligation to act in the best interest of the shareholders, but no court has ever said that means maximizing profit. On the contrary, managers had very broad rights to run a company as they see fit. In fact public companies forgo short-term profit all the time in favor of long-term goals such as improving their reputation with customers, politicians or regulators. Shareholders don't get any say in business decisions such as how to handle emissions regulations.
There are some exceptions. You can't explicitly screw over the shareholders, such as by selling the company for cheap in a deal that guarantees big bonuses for management. That doesn't apply here. Craigslist got in trouble and the details of the case are kind of interesting, but it was an extreme and unusual case that also doesn't apply to VW.
I'd assume the rules are similar in Germany. It wouldn't make sense to have a rule that corporations must maximize short-term profit all the time. No one could run a big business that way.
is coercing a corporation to be an amoral entity? No, VW thought they could get away with cheating, and they were found out, with disastrous consequences to their bottom line. The obvious market serving behavior would have been to avoid cheating. When VW cheated they were serving neither the public nor their shareholders, they were just being dumb.
First of all, they didn't caught VW cheating, they caught Audi cheating, amongst others. VW was using those Audi engines.
The press just jumped on VW, because they were the biggest and can take the biggest hit.
Second, the cheaters, and all of them were cheating as already presented at the CCC congress some months ago, used all the same Bosch ECU, which had the cheating option built-in with a misleading variable name, which did the detection of the test cycle. And any engine manifacturer can enable or disable this mode.
Passing the test means the legally they are all fine. Because the european and non-US emission law just honors passing this test cycle. In the US it's different.
Third, historically everybody was cheating with those NOx tests. The US companies starting with that, the Asians got caught, now everybody got caught, with the new VW and Audi A5 engines actually having the least emissions of all, together with Skoda Superb and BMW 3.
Limiting the damage done to VW was a good marketing trick, and you are still falling for it.
> First of all, they didn't caught VW cheating, they caught Audi cheating, amongst others. VW was using those Audi engines. The press just jumped on VW, because they were the biggest and can take the biggest hit.
While it makes good headlines, I think most of this could be summed up as "vehicle emissions are more complex than the simple model you might expect".
Go and read the Wikipedia page on the New European Driving Cycle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_European_Driving_Cycle. Notice that in the test procedure every instance of acceleration is described as "the car slowly accelerates". Now think about the range of driving styles that are found in the real world. Some people might be quite laid back about accelerating, but I think there's an awful lot of "floor the accelerator to get back up to the speed limit" as well. It's hardly surprising that in those periods the emissions from the engine will be higher than they were under the test cycle.
So who do we blame? The vehicle manufacturers? Well, given current popular sentiment, down that path may lie vehicles which are designed to never exceed the emission limit. At the extreme end we might finish up with cars that automatically throttle back when they hit an emission limit, similar to processors throttling back when they hit thermal emission limits. But what do we do when we start having fatal accidents when people tried to overtake and the engine suddenly reduced power in an unpredictable way because it had gone over the emission limit?
So, blame the emissions tests? Well, what should the emissions test be targeting? Never going over a particular threshold, say? In which case, how do you define a standard protocol (to ensure fairness across vehicles) that all vehicles will be able to follow? At one end you've got cars like the Peugeot Bipper Tepee with a 0-60 time north of 16 seconds (with both petrol and diesel engines - http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/carbycar/peugeot/bipper-tepee-20...). At the other you've got cars like the BMW X5 4.4 V8 which can accelerate roughly twice the mass in a quarter of the time (http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/specs/detail/?v=MBMWI-X50311 - the diesel engined version isn't far behind either). I'd imagine that a protocol that produces the highest emissions from the BMW would not even be achievable by the Peugeot.
The only other party left to blame seems to be the drivers, and particularly their inability or unwillingness to drive in a style that minimises emissions (and at the same time most likely increases fuel economy). But the media seem reluctant to point the finger in that direction.
I think we need to blame all of the above, but we need to get past the simplistic model of emissions being a constant that you can set a limit on for all vehicles regardless of how they are driven.
Well motortrend has this real world mileage test where they hook up an complex looking device to the back of the car. Something like that surely can be employed by manufacturers, magazines, colleges, etc, and the EPA.
From reading the article it should not be difficult to extend the testing abilities to cover all pollutants you want to measure
>I think there's an awful lot of "floor the accelerator to get back up to the speed limit" as well //
When I took my UK driving test (quite a few years ago) my instructor informed me that I needed to accelerate hard on a [uphill] dual carriageway section in order to not be perceived as "failing to make progress" (ie. keeping up with traffic). I wonder if modern tests take account of safer aspects of fuel economy, such as slower acceleration, or if it's still penalised?
Accelerating hard isn't a cause for failing, but after the test the examiner gives advice on driving style, particularly around "eco-friendly driving". (I was told I was too slow moving to higher gears.)
> I wonder if modern tests take account of safer aspects of fuel economy, such as slower acceleration, or if it's still penalised?
-When I took my driver's licence last year (I am in my mid-thirties, only didn't have any need to be able to drive a car until recently), part of the curriculum was economic (=less damaging to the environment) driving.
However, my instructor told me that if the examinator brought up the subject, I just had to murmur the right noises - while accelerating hard so as not to upset traffic flow.
Bingo, the examinator suggested I explain to him a couple of principles of green driving, and after doing so, I observed that I had yet to see another car in traffic that morning which paid attention to said principles.
He shrugged and suggested that if I did drive like we had just discussed, I would probably fail the test for being a traffic hazard and general nuisance - but he had to ask, I had to answer - and now, could we get on with the test, if I didn't mind?
I think we follow an EEC guideline for driver's training, so presumably it is the same all over the EU.
My feeling is that catalytic converters go the wrong way.
The biggest problem today is global warming. We want to stop burning diesel. By hiding the NOx, there is less of a problem with burning diesel so we burn more. That's sort of a hard ass approach, but.
Also using a catalytic converter also saps some energy and so requires more diesel to be burned and so more CO2 released.
Modern catalytic converters are so obscenely efficient, they barely have any effect, even cumulatively, on the amount of fuel lost. You have more loss in the drivetrain.
Nothing strange about that - if there is a limit that is hard to meet (which there should be) then manufacturers will make a car that exactly meets the standard.
And just like advertised fuel consumption figures, it will meet the standard under very controlled circumstances. In case of fuel consumption the manufacturers can reach the figure by taping shut door seams, using overinflated tyres, throwing out interior to reduce weight etc. Those aren't "real world conditions" but apparently they are real-world enough to use in advertising. Presumably the same conditions can and are used when testing emissions.
The only conclusion we can draw is that emissions tests aren't used to make manufacturers build cars that emit at most X in real world conditions. That would be both unfair and expensive - it's better to say "use whatever extreme conditions you want and the emissions should be at most Y".
In that case authorities can make Y < X and the whole thing is simpler and easier for everyone. If cars emit too much in real-world conditions? Then tighten the limits.
This of course only works so long as no one cheats and designs workarounds specifically for the test conditions (which is what VW did).
Why couldn't a third party just take a production car and do the testing? This is how it works for most compliance testing. This whole situation seems needlessly complex. Or, probably more aptly, it reeks of crony capitalism and politics.
Testing and compliance is an engineering problem. It should treated as such.
Although keep in mind that requiring 3rd party, independent auditors creates a market for crappy/soft auditors. I learned that from ISO 9000 work. Companies don't want to hire someone who will fail their product/process, so they hire someone who will conveniently look the other way. Probably the only way is to have government testing... which brings us full circle to the potential of crony capitalism and politics.
Industrial certifications like ISO 9000, six sigma, etc... are kind of a joke. What happens to those companies if they fail to maintain an acceptable standard? Quality goes down? Who cares? There's no liability.
A better comparison would be something like UL or FCC. Make the standards and testing body liable for their claims. Require PEs to be part of the organization and personally responsible for signing off.
This is a solved problem. We build bridges and electronics that don't kill people using similar methods.
The difference is that those two examples have insurance/liability implications and therefore there is an incentive by some party (insurance industry) to do the certification. There is no equivalent insurance or tort market for emissions.
Every gasoline car is going to put out more pollution in "real world" driving scenarios as well. This isn't a problem with diesels, per se, it's a problem with all emissions standards.
Its supposed to be 'built-in' to the emissions standard. The lab levels are so low, because that makes the road emissions in an acceptable range. Everybody involved knows this; its not a secret; there's no news here.
Yes, I was trying to figure out an eloquent way to add something to that effect to my comment, but I think you've done a better job than what I had drafted anyway.
What would be interesting, is if diesels were predominantly more likely to exceed those lab levels than gasoline cars to a significant amount, or if they were exceeding those standards to an unexpected level.
That's still possible, and it would mean we need to update the emissions standards and/or the test process, but this article doesn't make that case.
The problem is not, that in "real world" driving they exhaust some more (like 20%) but rather 10x (1000%) more than during those tests. That means, the pollution numbers are not just a bit "optimistic" like with fuel consumption, but completely unrelated to the real life numbers.
I don't get the math about diesel. American refineries produce 12 gallons of diesel and 19 gallons of gasoline on average[1] from a barrel of oil(42 gallons). I seem to remember that figure being lower and it looks like googles answer was 10 gallons at one point using the same site reference. I think that there was a push to get most cars off of gasoline and on to diesel before the VW scandal, and that diesel was going to save the world. I didn't see how we were going to make that work when there is 50-80% less of the stuff per barrel of oil. I think in the real world the MPG gains are 25-35%[2]
I don't know that EVs are the savior they're pitched as, unless we can make battery tech and power generation cleaner. It looks like there is progress in that arena, so hopefully that continues. I think that we have demonstrably cleaned up gasoline cars while also increasing power output and MPG, and progress in that arena should continue as well. I think that diesel for passenger cars is a dead end, and it should be left to big rigs and heavy duty vehicles.
132 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadSince all these cars passed the laboratory test, that means there must be something very wrong with the test and the way the standards are enforced. Or all car makers do cheat.
However, when the cars are used by normal drivers, the usage patterns are so significantly different than the test sequences that the emissions profile changes. In the majority of cases the NOX emissions from cars used by normal people exceed the EU limits.
This does not, as I understand it, mean that the cars are illegal. The cars all passed the tests in the test environment. That is the requirement and they met the requirement.
No law is being broken but that is only because the law is not fit for purpose.
Some manfs were building to the type approval test, but not for real world driving. A car needs to accelerate from 0 kph to 100 kph over a certain time. Normal road drivers would accelerate faster than this test, and acceleration is when the vehicles emit a lot of stuff. The tests are run on engines at their normal operating temperature. So cold engines are allowed to emit more stuff to protect the engine. Many engines in real world use would be at this cold temperature.
The US has particularly stringent testing, and it might not be possible to meet those tests. They should probably have done other stuff to reduce diesel vehicles - taxes and duties on the vehicles and the fuel, with exemptions for commercial operators.
It's clear now that manfs build to the test, and that type approval testing needs to include better real world driving testing.
For instance, the engine in cars as different as the Land Rover Defender (sadly, no longer among us) and the Volvo, say, S80 is basically the same Ford-engineered unit.
it was common knowledge for a long time that the lab tests were not the same as real world driving. But we thought that, even though the lab tests were better, there was some meaningful relationship.
As it turns out, they are wildly divergent in a lot of cases. And the repercussions are ongoing. Long-term, this might turn out to a turning point in the history of internal-combustion engines.
They also have drivers who are above average. That will help with manually shifted cars.
And of course, they pick the best car they can produce, and prepare it optimally. Tyre pressure will be optimized, the car will be perfectly polished, if that helps, etc.
Cheating starts when they tape shut doors to decrease air resistance, or when they explicitly detect "test is being run" and act upon it.
IMO, the real problem is twofold: firstly, the existing tests were designed in such a way that their results do not reflect what happens in the real world, and secondly, some manufacturers went criminally far in optimizing for it.
from: http://www.autonews.com/article/20150929/OEM11/150929807/epa...
So the manufacturer apparently does not get to chose the vehicle, which is one reason why the cheating code was present in all VWs with that engine model rather than just in the vehicles used for the testing.
Are you implying that it's a bad thing that a manufacturer is forced to implement cheats on all cars rather than just provide a rigged car for test?
Like if you were to say "So we're apparently not allowed to bring guns to school".
You can find alternate uses for many words and then you can go and spend many hours debating your reading of what someone wrote but given that I've (1) already answered your question with my response and (2) those do not seem to be the dominant meaning of the term I think that further debate of this particular matter is pointless.
Pointless -> 'not useful', not 'without a sharp pointy end'.
For examples, see http://www.beuc.eu/great-fuel-consumption-scam#thescam and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKUtiL-R4sU (subtitled in English)
Car manufacturers do not make the measurements themselves, but they directly do pay for it, and do shop around for the best testers. That raises doubts as to the independence of those testing firms.
It depends how the law is written.
Case a) - the cars must never emit more pollutants than specified in these rules - then yes, you are correct. The car manufacturers would be rightly concerned about the wide range of situations they would need to account for.
Case b) - the cars must not emit more than the specified amount of pollutants under these specific test conditions (implying hopefully "we understand that the real world performance will differ, and are willing to accept this for the sake of simplicity in testing/lawmaking") - in this case the system is working as intended.
I am not sure which case we are dealing with, maybe someone can advise us.
If NOx was a real concern, the cars would be required to have realtime sensors, the check engine light would come on when they misbehave. All the manufacturers knew. The testers almost certainly knew
How typical in so many ways (I particularly like the claim that governments "failed" without either suggesting to strip the governments of those powers which they failed to use so consistently throughout all of Europe, or charging government officials with criminal incompetence or fraud.)
If you're going to strip governments of power for this, there would be no more governments left in the world.
The belief that fraud is conducted on this scale but the regulator is not to blame is stunning to me (same with banking fraud etc.) I didn't say governments should necessarily be stripped of this power, just that if they all fail so miserably at something, you ought to either suggest that they cannot ever succeed (and if so of course you'll want to strip them of this power) or that people currently employed by governments to oversee this should be investigated, in the hope that eventually the governments can be trained to find competent people to fill these roles, and find some mechanism that prevents corrupting these people. Meeting extreme government incompetence with complete understanding ("they just didn't act quickly enough") and zero penalties, however, is IMO perpetuating the problem.
This is just another example of Politicians and civil servants making poor judgement on technical matters and a lack of common sense.
The fiasco that is the eu cookie law is another example
AFAIK all modern diesels are based on electronically controlled common rail which was originally designed by FIAT, even if it ended up being licensed to Bosch.
What I mean is, probably all the european auto industry invested in diesel at a time when gasoline was considered a lot worse than diesel in terms of pollution, and taxation greatly favoured diesel vs gasoline in terms of fuel price.
Moving towards the politics, Rüdiger K. W. Wurzel's Environmental policy-making in Britain, Germany and the European Union's Chapter 5, "The catalytic converter versus the lean-burn engine controversy" seems very informative. Particularly the section "The diesel engine", which contains this:
"In America and Japan, diesel cars almost disappeared from the market in the 1970s after the adoption of stringent limit values for carcinogenic particulates, although this was disputed by the car industry. The EU introduced relatively lenient particulate limit values in the late 1980s. The German government demanded the [Best Available Technology] option for both petrol and diesel cars. However, after heavy lobbying from Mercedes and Volkswagen, fiscal incentives were granted not only for the three-way catalytic converter but for diesel cars which met the lenient EU particulate limits."
(Seen through Google Books at https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0719073340 )
Industry and Politics in West Germany: Toward the Third Republic by Peter J. Katzenstein (seen at https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0801495954 ) adds
"Moreover, since diesel engines get the same break, the European regulation also favours those German producers who are leaders in diesel technology, especially Daimler Benz and VW."
However, Wurzel clearly asserts that the move towards US-style catalytic converters on petrol cars in Europe (which is apparently what first made diesels attractive as a regulatory end-run) was initiated by Germany in the teeth of opposition from German car makers (especially Volkswagen): there was a perception in the UK government that Germany was obliging its automakers in this, but it was wrong. Also, http://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/2190-4715... says that tax incentives for dieselisation in the domestic German market are relatively modest (and that there was a small tax penalty for buying a diesel until 2009, though not after actual fuel costs were taken into account) (2.3.6, 2.3.7). Interestingly, it also suggests that a supply glut of fuel oil (which can be converted into diesel) was the original incentive for the European diesel boom (2.3.1) . Then again, further on down the road it seems clear that the EU's lenient approach to diesel emissions had the effect of advantaging European automakers collectively against competition from the Japanese, who had bet on hybrids instead (2.3.6).
In summary, TIL.
Not being rude, but I'm having trouble parsing that part of your comment.
Do you mean that the US authorities won't let diesel car owners re-fill the diesel exhaust fluid tank by themselves, i.e. the re-fill must be performed by a dealer?
Also is the DEF tank just a US thing? I'd never heard it before (UK resident here).
But yes, the issue is that the US requires dealers to refill them. And also sets a limit for how often refill cycles may happen. And the weight of the tank sets a limit on how large it may be.
The result is simple: Small Diesel cars can’t exist legally in the US.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards#Em...
And that is, of course, intentional. To keep some of the foreign competition away.
Aside from trucks, that is.
I tend to keep up on cars, and I can't name any American-brand, small diesel off the top of my head from the last 30+ years, aside from last year's Chevy Cruze.
Edit/clarification: I'm speaking strictly of the American market. If American companies make small diesel cars for international markets, it's not at all relevant to discussing small diesel cars in the US.
GM don't sell Opels in the US, although they could re-badge them as Chevrolets.
I disagree, certainly from a UK perspective.
Most modern Ford diesel engines are the product of the collaboration between Ford, Citreon and Peugeot [0][1].
Ford diesel Focus and Mondeo's are hugely popular and are quite reliable, reasonably sporty and fuel efficient things. My dad's last three Fords (Focus, Mondeo then Focus) were all diesels and he loved them. Virtually everyone I know that own's a Focus has one of the diesel versions.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_DLD_engine
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_AJD-V6/PSA_DT17
To the extent that consumers remember crappy American diesels, I would say the most infamous is the Olds diesel. GM took a (not so great) SI engine and turned it into a CI engine.
American companies make some diesel cars in other markets (Ford, and GM with its Opel and Vauxhall brands) but they have a significantly smaller market share in diesels than in gasoline engines.
Easiest way to look at it is this: http://www.statista.com/statistics/425324/eu-car-sales-share...
You'll find Opel, Vauxhall and Ford towards the lower end of the table.
If they can, they're keeping it a secret.
My family bought a 1982 GM diesel. It was an absolutely atrocious car. Everyone that bought these diesels got burned. Lessons were learned.
"Everyone knows" that American buyers won't buy a diesel, just like "everyone knows" that American buyers won't buy a wagon.
http://www.landrover.co.uk/ownership/euro-6-emissions-standa...
Wow.
"The engine will only start again when the DEF tank is re-filled."
And thus the the "faulty DEF sensor" malfunction is introduced into our car fault lexicon.
When the sales guy told me the tank only had to be filled at service intervals, it sounded strange. People on the TDI forums thought it was just because VW didn't want to scare away customers with an extra thing to do, but you can buy the stuff at any gas station and pouring it into the tank is not difficult.
When the scandal broke the assumption was that they mistuned the DEF cars out of arrogance, and again to avoid spooking customers with extra maintenance.
Now it sounds much more like they tuned it that way because this regulation would have crippled the car with an enormous DEF tank otherwise. It is possible that such a regulation combined with a 10,000 mile service interval only makes engineering sense on mid-size trucks or larger.
This doesn't have anything to do with them failing to build a working LNT solution and cheating with those previously, of course.
If you think that's a problem, then please explain why this isn't also a problem for the gas tank. I don't know of any cars which will continue to drive (but spewing extra toxins) when the gas or diesel tank is empty.
Customers don't seem to have much of a problem topping up their diesel tank every week or two....
And actually I'm not so quick to assume this is only a stupid decision either. Hanlon's razor still applies but there is also a distinct possibility that this regulation was "encouraged" as a play to make small diesel cars less competitive.
VW doesn't want their cars going into limp mode. They don't want customers calling up asking why their car is acting funny. They don't want to increase the maintenance load on their customers. They don't want customers coming in for unnecessary service appointments (especially for stuff they wouldn't be able to charge for). Making a tank big enough to last as long as the motor oil seems like an easy, low tech solution. Sometimes simple is better.
After hearing about this regulation it seems an obvious reason why they would keep the cheat enabled even after adding a DEF system.
It is feasible and they already do it.
Or do you mean the Chevy Cruze? They must have some strategy that works (so far).
Some of the VWs are getting bigger DEF tanks. For the cars that this isn't an option, I don't think VW has said exactly what they are going to do. They could just disable the cheating mode on the software. Fuel economy and performance would suck, but the emissions would be at acceptable levels.
There's been a lot of speculation all along, will they retrofit DEF systems, will the cars just get super unreliable because the systems can't handle prolonged legal operation, etc.
2013-2014 cars need to hold 1/2 gallon more exhaust fluid and apparently that's doable (and also new firmware).
Older cars are a bigger problem and will likely get a combination of fixes but in the end, they are going to be louder, fuel hungry cars after getting "fixed".
The oldest cars will likely get owners a buy-back offer because the depreciated value is lower than the cost to fix.
And what exactly will this firmware tweak do? If it decreases performance or fuel economy, then that isn't acceptable. The customer bought the car because it advertised X horsepower and Y mpg; if the firmware tweak changes that, then that's false advertising and the company needs to refund their money in full.
What's really stupid is that it sounds like they should be able to get the advertised power and economy with the required low emissions simply by using more DEF. I'm assuming the DEF liquid isn't too expensive here, but if they just made it so you needed to refill it every 1000 miles, that should solve the problem. Heck, why can't they just make it available at gas stations too?
Having this idiotic notion that only dealers should be able to refill the stuff, and that it needs to be done at 10k intervals, is what's making it impossible.
Why not require that cars must be able to carry enough fuel to drive 10,000 miles while they're at it? It makes as much sense.
[0]https://www3.epa.gov/otaq/documents/nonroad/420f14017.pdf
All I have to do is watch the local bus service, mostly the city one, to see how bad some vehicles pollute. So let us be honest here, the government needs to clamp down hard on all vehicles in its employ at all levels even more than going after consumer cars
Don't have a cry about it, fix the tests. Get together some disinterested parties to design them to capture the behaviour we all apparently expected the current dud tests to measure.
This actually reminds me of how the failure of the bodies responsible for banking oversight cry WOE when the industries they were charged with overseeing did bad things. Failure of real oversight again. And it the same way, we have these same bodies (NOT end users) expecting to be paid for making these mistakes. Who benefits from the fines? Not car owners, not car makers.
Even London has doubled the congestion charge fee for diesels.
A further step would be to recognise that petrol cars also emit NOx and that the long term goal should be the removal of these from the road.
Politically this is a hard thing to do, however some countries are forcing the issue http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/consumer-news/95237/du...
This is going to hurt the car industry in ways we don't fully understand yet. In the short term I would be end-of-lining their diesel production and restructuring to electric.
Extremely disingenous. You know what happens when the sale of diesel cars/taxis/buses stops? The old ones get driven longer.
You know what vehicles create the lion's share in NOx emissions? The ones built and sold before 2000 when Euro3 emission standards started limiting NOx emissions. The majority of London "quaint" TX4 black cabs are of this toxic variety, as are the majority of their buses. (This is probably similar to much of the rest of Europe). Taking 50 new diesel vehicles off the street will do less than upgrading a single one of these legacy vehicles to a state-of-the-art diesel engine. Your proposed policy would be counterproductive.
In Germany, we actually limited almost all cities to cars passing Euro 4, and many even to cars passing Euro 6.
Cars get a sticker with a color based on which standard they pass, and the zones are limited to cars with a sticker of the proper color.
So most busses in Germany are Euro VI now.
The taxis are the problem -- London's low emission zone (similar to those in Germany) only applies to large vehicles, taxis are not included. There are thousands of taxis over 10 years old still running in London [2].
> So most buses in Germany are Euro VI now.
Really? That would mean most buses in Germany are less than 3 years old, which seems unlikely.
[1] https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/press-releases/2014/july/w...
[2] https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/spread_of_ages_of_lon...
The solution would be to throw some people in jail. Your suggestion that it was even mandatory for companies to behave this way is so weird that I cannot respond to that.
Companies are required to act in the interests of the shareholders. These companies were required to pass the synthetic tests. If the manufactures spent precious resources "wasting" R/D and manufacturing effort going beyond the requirements placed upon them to ship expensive but already conforming vehicles, they would be savaged in the markets, and executive open to litigation for dereliction. I'm not defending it, by the way -- this is how capitalism works.
Leaving the company open to massive regulatory action doesn't feel like it's in the best interest of the shareholders.
We have an example in Apple that does exactly this, with a CEO that makes statements during quarterly earnings summary calls openly admitting exactly this, and there is no lawsuit. This is also how capitalism works.
However, regarding corporations:
You will NEVER get the manufactures to act as moral entities -- they are amoral
This attitude is part of what keeps them immoral.
They are profit machines and are required by law to be that way
So, change the law? I'm sure there's been many articles on HN where the prevailing opinion was "the law is wrong, and must be changed".
...or was that intentional?
It is a common falsehood that is used to both justify outrageous corporation behaviour and to belittle those who criticise company actions as being ignorant of the law.
People say this all the time, but it's not true. In the US managers at public companies do have an obligation to act in the best interest of the shareholders, but no court has ever said that means maximizing profit. On the contrary, managers had very broad rights to run a company as they see fit. In fact public companies forgo short-term profit all the time in favor of long-term goals such as improving their reputation with customers, politicians or regulators. Shareholders don't get any say in business decisions such as how to handle emissions regulations.
There are some exceptions. You can't explicitly screw over the shareholders, such as by selling the company for cheap in a deal that guarantees big bonuses for management. That doesn't apply here. Craigslist got in trouble and the details of the case are kind of interesting, but it was an extreme and unusual case that also doesn't apply to VW.
I'd assume the rules are similar in Germany. It wouldn't make sense to have a rule that corporations must maximize short-term profit all the time. No one could run a big business that way.
is coercing a corporation to be an amoral entity? No, VW thought they could get away with cheating, and they were found out, with disastrous consequences to their bottom line. The obvious market serving behavior would have been to avoid cheating. When VW cheated they were serving neither the public nor their shareholders, they were just being dumb.
Second, the cheaters, and all of them were cheating as already presented at the CCC congress some months ago, used all the same Bosch ECU, which had the cheating option built-in with a misleading variable name, which did the detection of the test cycle. And any engine manifacturer can enable or disable this mode. Passing the test means the legally they are all fine. Because the european and non-US emission law just honors passing this test cycle. In the US it's different.
Third, historically everybody was cheating with those NOx tests. The US companies starting with that, the Asians got caught, now everybody got caught, with the new VW and Audi A5 engines actually having the least emissions of all, together with Skoda Superb and BMW 3.
Limiting the damage done to VW was a good marketing trick, and you are still falling for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi Owner Volkswagen Group (99.55%)
Go and read the Wikipedia page on the New European Driving Cycle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_European_Driving_Cycle. Notice that in the test procedure every instance of acceleration is described as "the car slowly accelerates". Now think about the range of driving styles that are found in the real world. Some people might be quite laid back about accelerating, but I think there's an awful lot of "floor the accelerator to get back up to the speed limit" as well. It's hardly surprising that in those periods the emissions from the engine will be higher than they were under the test cycle.
So who do we blame? The vehicle manufacturers? Well, given current popular sentiment, down that path may lie vehicles which are designed to never exceed the emission limit. At the extreme end we might finish up with cars that automatically throttle back when they hit an emission limit, similar to processors throttling back when they hit thermal emission limits. But what do we do when we start having fatal accidents when people tried to overtake and the engine suddenly reduced power in an unpredictable way because it had gone over the emission limit?
So, blame the emissions tests? Well, what should the emissions test be targeting? Never going over a particular threshold, say? In which case, how do you define a standard protocol (to ensure fairness across vehicles) that all vehicles will be able to follow? At one end you've got cars like the Peugeot Bipper Tepee with a 0-60 time north of 16 seconds (with both petrol and diesel engines - http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/carbycar/peugeot/bipper-tepee-20...). At the other you've got cars like the BMW X5 4.4 V8 which can accelerate roughly twice the mass in a quarter of the time (http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/specs/detail/?v=MBMWI-X50311 - the diesel engined version isn't far behind either). I'd imagine that a protocol that produces the highest emissions from the BMW would not even be achievable by the Peugeot.
The only other party left to blame seems to be the drivers, and particularly their inability or unwillingness to drive in a style that minimises emissions (and at the same time most likely increases fuel economy). But the media seem reluctant to point the finger in that direction.
I think we need to blame all of the above, but we need to get past the simplistic model of emissions being a constant that you can set a limit on for all vehicles regardless of how they are driven.
From reading the article it should not be difficult to extend the testing abilities to cover all pollutants you want to measure
http://www.motortrend.com/news/real-numbers-mpg-101/
When I took my UK driving test (quite a few years ago) my instructor informed me that I needed to accelerate hard on a [uphill] dual carriageway section in order to not be perceived as "failing to make progress" (ie. keeping up with traffic). I wonder if modern tests take account of safer aspects of fuel economy, such as slower acceleration, or if it's still penalised?
Accelerating hard isn't a cause for failing, but after the test the examiner gives advice on driving style, particularly around "eco-friendly driving". (I was told I was too slow moving to higher gears.)
Example: https://www.learnerdriving.com/ld-system/driving-lessons/pro...
-When I took my driver's licence last year (I am in my mid-thirties, only didn't have any need to be able to drive a car until recently), part of the curriculum was economic (=less damaging to the environment) driving.
However, my instructor told me that if the examinator brought up the subject, I just had to murmur the right noises - while accelerating hard so as not to upset traffic flow.
Bingo, the examinator suggested I explain to him a couple of principles of green driving, and after doing so, I observed that I had yet to see another car in traffic that morning which paid attention to said principles.
He shrugged and suggested that if I did drive like we had just discussed, I would probably fail the test for being a traffic hazard and general nuisance - but he had to ask, I had to answer - and now, could we get on with the test, if I didn't mind?
I think we follow an EEC guideline for driver's training, so presumably it is the same all over the EU.
The biggest problem today is global warming. We want to stop burning diesel. By hiding the NOx, there is less of a problem with burning diesel so we burn more. That's sort of a hard ass approach, but.
Also using a catalytic converter also saps some energy and so requires more diesel to be burned and so more CO2 released.
No it is NOT! Before catalytic converters the air in many cities was killing people constantly.
Global warming gets all the press, but pollution is FAR FAR worse. It will (and has killed) more people (and animals) than global warming ever could.
The US is very clean (relatively) right now, so you think "oh everything is fine, let's bring back some pollution". But you have NO idea.
And just like advertised fuel consumption figures, it will meet the standard under very controlled circumstances. In case of fuel consumption the manufacturers can reach the figure by taping shut door seams, using overinflated tyres, throwing out interior to reduce weight etc. Those aren't "real world conditions" but apparently they are real-world enough to use in advertising. Presumably the same conditions can and are used when testing emissions.
The only conclusion we can draw is that emissions tests aren't used to make manufacturers build cars that emit at most X in real world conditions. That would be both unfair and expensive - it's better to say "use whatever extreme conditions you want and the emissions should be at most Y".
In that case authorities can make Y < X and the whole thing is simpler and easier for everyone. If cars emit too much in real-world conditions? Then tighten the limits.
This of course only works so long as no one cheats and designs workarounds specifically for the test conditions (which is what VW did).
Testing and compliance is an engineering problem. It should treated as such.
A better comparison would be something like UL or FCC. Make the standards and testing body liable for their claims. Require PEs to be part of the organization and personally responsible for signing off.
This is a solved problem. We build bridges and electronics that don't kill people using similar methods.
What would be interesting, is if diesels were predominantly more likely to exceed those lab levels than gasoline cars to a significant amount, or if they were exceeding those standards to an unexpected level.
That's still possible, and it would mean we need to update the emissions standards and/or the test process, but this article doesn't make that case.
I don't know that EVs are the savior they're pitched as, unless we can make battery tech and power generation cleaner. It looks like there is progress in that arena, so hopefully that continues. I think that we have demonstrably cleaned up gasoline cars while also increasing power output and MPG, and progress in that arena should continue as well. I think that diesel for passenger cars is a dead end, and it should be left to big rigs and heavy duty vehicles.
[1] http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=327&t=9 [2]https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/di_diesels.shtml
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel_production