Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nearly all new diesel cars exceed official pollution limits

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 133 posts

Re: Nearly all new diesel cars exceed official pollution limits

#51

Post by lb1lf »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #42
mhw wrote: post #23

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 dri…

>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, suc…

> 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.

Re: Nearly all new diesel cars exceed official pollution limits

#52

Post by takno »

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…

The maximum allowable age for London Taxis is 15 years. The actual breakdown is detailed here https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/spread_of_ages_of_lon...

Re: Nearly all new diesel cars exceed official pollution limits

#54

Post by ams6110 »

bkor wrote: post #39
verytrivial wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This story is not about the VW cheating, it's about diesel cars in general, and the tests that don't measure what they are supposed to be measuring.

Re: Nearly all new diesel cars exceed official pollution limits

#55

Post by _yosefk »

joosters wrote: post #25
_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…

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.

Re: Nearly all new diesel cars exceed official pollution limits

#56

Post by hcrisp »

selimthegrim wrote: post #47
teh_klev wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

There's no limp mode?

A truck mechanic told me that drivers have been rumored to urinate in the DEF tank to bring the level of urea up to the point that it can be driven.

Re: Nearly all new diesel cars exceed official pollution limits

#57

Post by TorKlingberg »

codecamper wrote: post #45

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.

Diesel cars have lower CO2 emissions. That is one of the reasons they are so popular en Europe where vehicle taxes are often based on CO2.

Re: Nearly all new diesel cars exceed official pollution limits

#58

Post by verytrivial »

bkor wrote: post #39
verytrivial wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Nearly all new diesel cars exceed official pollution limits

#59

Post by TheCondor »

f_allwein wrote: post #2

> 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.

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

Re: Nearly all new diesel cars exceed official pollution limits

#60

Post by jacquesm »

cptskippy wrote: post #38
jacquesm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

No, that's not what I'm implying, no idea where you got that idea.
Post reply on HN