Study: Some car models consuming around 50% more fuel than official results

None of this is really new, the mostly German car lobby has resisted European emissions testing on testing strict real-world usage, as opposed to testing on a roller.

Anyone who spent 10 minutes looking into this in the past years could've told you that, and it wasn't some big secret. A lot of it was stuff everyone was doing, like fitting certain tires and inflating them such that the rolling resistance is reduced. At the end of the day, there are limits to those gains and everyone does it, so in can't set you apart from the competition and once the basic manipulations are exhausted and the emissions goalposts are moved you can't make gains anymore without actually improving the car. Further most of these are for CO2 emissions / fuel efficiency, which is different from the VW fraud which was about NOx emissions.

The difference with the VW case is that VW essentially defrauded the test by building a device that measured various factors to establish whether it was being driven normally or whether it was being tested. In the former case it'd shut down (allowing 35x the legal limit of NOx emissions into the air while driving), while in the latter case it'd dampen the emissions (at the cost of engine performance, which is why they shut it off during regular driving). That's a different level of fraud, one that has very few bounds and can change results by much more than an order of magnitude, and is hugely controversial because it makes every test meaningless in the short, medium and long term and isn't practiced by everyone, and so different from manipulating tests by e.g. inflating tires which can still produce meaningful test, benchmarks and comparisons, when you start building 'defeat devices' all of that goes out the window completely.

From the third paragraph of your article:

>Mercedes cars have the biggest average gap between test and real-world performance, with real-world fuel consumption exceeding test results by nearly half.

I agree that cars are very heavy now, though, usually there are few 'types' of car weight. I do not know which where is used.

Usually there are 2 weights: unladen weight and maximum weight. I've heard about some third weight which is between the unladen and maximum weights, something like a car's weight with full tank and a driver, but don't quote me on this.

Probably you have the maximum weight listed. My Skoda Fabia (Audi Q3 equivalent) has maximum weight of 1680kg and unladen weight of 1200kg. I refuse to believe that VW Up is heavier than the Skoda Fabia.

AFAIK, minivans have quite big weight on their papers, but empty minivan can't weigh 3000kg, which is only possible if it's loaded.

Paris is one of the densest cities in the world[1], placed 6th if you disregard cities with a population of less than a million. It's the most dense large city among G8 countries. The only vaguely comparable European cities are Athens and Barcelona, both smaller and less dense. London has about a quarter of the density of Paris. The most dense large German cities, Munich and Berlin, less than a quarter. The city I live in -- part of one of the world's largest conurbations --, less than a tenth.

Statistics like these should be taken with a grain of salt (for one thing, city delimitations are fairly arbitrary), but the details are not worth haggling about: the point is that Paris is not at all representative of large European cities.

[1] if Wikipedia can be trusted on this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_d...