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Nearly all new diesel cars exceed official pollution limits

theguardian.com

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Re: Nearly all new diesel cars exceed official pollution limits

#31

Post by riffraff »

leoc wrote: post #20
_yosefk wrote: post #5

"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 gov…

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.

Are you sure this is the case?

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.

Re: Nearly all new diesel cars exceed official pollution limits

#32

Post by DanBC »

f_allwein wrote: post #6
stinos wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was common knowledge the lab tests are a joke? Has been posted on HN as well IIRC.

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?

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.

Re: Nearly all new diesel cars exceed official pollution limits

#33

Post by verytrivial »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #21
verytrivial wrote: post #17

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 to…

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. Imag…

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.

Re: Nearly all new diesel cars exceed official pollution limits

#35

Post by kuschku »

teh_klev wrote: post #30
makomk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

> 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 (U…

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.

Re: Nearly all new diesel cars exceed official pollution limits

#36

Post by lucaspiller »

teh_klev wrote: post #30
makomk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

> 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 (U…

This page from Land Rover has a good overview, apparently it's a new requirement in Europe (I've also never heard of it before):

http://www.landrover.co.uk/ownership/euro-6-emissions-standa...

Re: Nearly all new diesel cars exceed official pollution limits

#37

Post by makomk »

teh_klev wrote: post #30
makomk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

> 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 (U…

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.

Re: Nearly all new diesel cars exceed official pollution limits

#38

Post by cptskippy »

jacquesm wrote: post #11
Someone wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 optima…

"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." from: http://www.autonews.com/article/20150929/OEM11/150929807/epa... So the manufacturer apparently does not get to chose the vehic…

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?

Re: Nearly all new diesel cars exceed official pollution limits

#39

Post by bkor »

verytrivial wrote: post #33
InclinedPlane wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Imag…

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…

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.

Re: Nearly all new diesel cars exceed official pollution limits

#40

Post by kuschku »

MagnumOpus wrote: post #22
awjr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 roa…

> 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…

> (This is probably similar to much of the rest of Europe)

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.

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