161–170 of 341 posts
What actually incentivizes a customer to take their car to a shop to get this fixed though? It's not causing harm to individual car owners, and it's not like they can get collections agencies to sieze them. Seems like they're going to have trouble getting compliance here...
[1] http://www.theicct.org/news/press-release-new-icct-study-sho... [2] http://www.euractiv.com/sections/health-consumers/eu-sends-b...
I drive a mazda, and my car definitely runs rich (visible buildup on tailpipe, the exhaust smells like gasoline when the engine is cold), but it just passed its first emissions test (at 6 years old) showing no detectable gasoline. I wonder if there's some gaming going on there too.
From the factory all vehicles run rich - it helps immensely with longevity as the extra fuel cools and lubricates the engine.
While this seems to be made on purpose, my gut feeling is that car makers shouldn't do software...
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I would like to see VW prohibited from selling any vehicles in the US for a small number of quarters. That would be real punishment. All those dealers and salespeople? There are a certain amount of cars that need to be sold. If VW is out of the mix, the demand is still there. The dealers can sell something else. I'm certain that Toyota and Ford can quickly come to some arrangement with those dealers, including any st…
Do you have even the faintest clue of how car sales work? Or of how regulatory enforcement works? The EPA can't ban VW sales entirely.
I research for the auto industry and this was very well known by the authorities. Fixed test cycles like the New European Driving Cycle https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dd/Ne... were easy to detect, and easy to optimize against. That's why coming regulations introduce more realistic cycles like WLTC https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/be/WL... and real road tests, where partic…
Harley Davidson and other are known to optimise for this test with movable parts in the exhaust pipes so these get much louder when the bikes goes faster than 50 Km/h.
How would this benefit Volkswagen? The article says the device activates emissions control systems when it detects the car is being tested... so it's not as if they're saving money by emulating a system they're not manufacturing.
The VW/Audi 2.0t EA888 engine is capable of producing 100 more hp with a software update. These turbo/diesel/supercharged engines have a million parameters that they can modify to change driveability. I cant believe that they would do something like that to pass emissions testing though, that seems incredibly foolish. I would imagine that with diesel engines, economy and certain emissions are at odds with each other.
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Total speculation based solely on experience as a consumer (and I own a 2013 VW Golf TDI, so it affects me), but my guess is that the fix would be updated software to apply the stricter emissions controls all the time, presumably at the expense of engine performance. EDIT: And reducing fuel economy, which is a huge selling point of the TDI in the first place. No idea "by how much" though, and typically TDI numbers ar…
Yea, I have a 2015 Jetta which is why I was curious. I wonder if this explains why my car sounds really weird for the first few minutes of running.
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California's CARB is the gestapo of car emissions. If anyone has the motivation, expertise, and evil disposition to detect this, it's the state of California. I've never lived in a state like this. Bi-yearly tailpipe sniffs and visual inspections. Even if your car's emissions are cleaner than their ridiculous requirements, they'll still fail your car if it has parts on it that are not stock. I ended up having to sell…
More interestingly: Did the German TÜV not detect this? They have even stricter rules.
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The technical debt of petrol engines is not relevant to this article: > The allegations cover roughly 482,000 diesel passenger cars sold in the United States since 2009.
Sorry, I'm not a native speaker. I thought the word "petrol" includes diesel, too!