How the car industry hid the truth about diesel emissions • Hacker News Board

Re: How the car industry hid the truth about diesel emissions

#61

Post by Reason077 » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 10:49 AM UTC

junga wrote: post #43

alkonaut wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Euro6 standard was launched back in 2014, following the Euro4- and 5 standards that most of the diesel-gate cars adhered to. Most cars manufactured from around 2016/17 are Euro6, and as far as I’m aware Urea tanks are in use on most or all. I honestly don’t understand why it would have been an issue to have it before. My diesel tank is 65L and it takes me over 1000km. Even if they had made a 10L Urea tank and shr…

> Filling it takes 5 minutes once every 1-2 years Isn‘t this a part of the problem? The urea tanks are way too small and need refilling way too seldom which means a too low urea usage? Volkswagen wanted urea to be refilled by your service station and not by the customers themselves because they might have found this inconvenient.

Exactly. If it's only being filled with (eg) 8L every 1-2 years, then it's not being used much and is probably not very effective at reducing NOx emissions.

Depending on the engine, driving style, etc, it should really be using something on the order of 20-60 litres of AdBlue per 1000 litres of diesel.

Re: How the car industry hid the truth about diesel emissions

#62

Post by makomk » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 10:50 AM UTC

mirimir wrote: post #16

makomk wrote: post #6

" Schmied responded that as long as emissions went down when limits were tightened, his department didn’t mind they were many times higher than allowed." Some context for this: the official European test cycle was known not to be representative of real driving conditions. Because it was less aggressive than real-world driving, it pretty much always overstated fuel efficiency and understated emissions. So real-world e…

Sure, but don't the laws limit emissions? Irrespective of how well standard government tests were measuring those emissions? So "We publish this data" just sounds like "I'm doing my job. Anything more is not my problem."

The laws limited emissions in the standard government test cycle, and the thresholds on emissions were chosen based on how well cars could be made to perform in those test cycles. While actual defeat devices were illegal, the legal emissions limit wasn't actually the real-world emissions limit and everyone knew it.

(The EU is now gradually moving to real-world emissions testing and a more realistic test cycle, though judging from the other reply they might have some cheating problems with that - especially as real-world testing inherently has wider errors than lab testing.)

Re: How the car industry hid the truth about diesel emissions

#63

Post by stefan_ » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 10:54 AM UTC

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #8

I work in this industry, so I've been following it from the start. I've run test cells and written software to analyze the results from the emissions cycles that the government uses to validate the emissions compliance. I have worked around and for a very large diesel engine manufacturer who I am convinced does not cheat on this test. You'll understand why, below. I recently leveled-up my career, and I now work with…

Why do you think escalating emissions standards exist? The entire purpose is to gradually retire whole technologies!

It is essentially deprecation. The ultimate goal is always reduce to zero, you will find very few emissions in our continuous world that are somehow safe at arbitrary cutoff X but unsafe above.

Re: How the car industry hid the truth about diesel emissions

#64

Post by close04 » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 10:59 AM UTC

bboreham wrote: post #30

alkonaut wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why mazda or some other competitor didn’t find this by doing their own research? I make software for structural engineering and when some competitor launches a program that makes “better designs” it has usually turned out to be because they simply don’t follow the design codes/regulations. We wouldn’t be pushed from the market by that - we’d fund the analysis, reverse engineering and legal processes necessar…

My conclusion, from the first time I thought about it, is that they were all cheating. Engineers move job; they talk to each other. Every car company had to have people who knew the truth and, if they were being unfairly competed against, could publish this truth.

Correct. Every single manufacturer in the industry knows what the others are doing. They all buy each other's vehicles and tear them down to the last bolt and bit to see how they work and how they can "borrow" some ideas without infringing on any patent (or breaking the law maybe).

They were all aware of what VW was doing and it wasn't a surprise, lots of companies did it [0] a lot of times [1]. Usually though the penalties were light. Many times they involved US companies and the strong local lobby pushed for the lighter fines. Like the heavy duty diesel engines case where 7 truck manufacturers were ordered to pay $1bn together for doing the exact same thing. Which in the grand scheme of things was peanuts compared to VW's $4.5bn (plus the tens of $bn of extra costs). So the expectation was always "it's just the cost of doing business, pay it and let bygones be bygones".

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/22/us/record-penalty-likely-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal#Previ...

Re: How the car industry hid the truth about diesel emissions

#65

Post by justasimpleman » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 11:01 AM UTC

maccam94 wrote: post #59

justasimpleman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My next car will be "no car at all". Even electric cars have huge externalities that you do not pay for, but your children, namely, the disposal of the batteries, pollution created by the manufacturing, costly extraction of rare earths etc. Instead we should heavily invest in high-speed trains.

Except lithium ion batteries are very recyclable, and rare earth elements aren't in limited supply, they're just usually very sparsely distributed.

Wear from car tires cause the majority of microplastics that get into the seas (around 50%, if I'm reading understanding this study correctly):

http://epanet.pbe.eea.europa.eu/ad-hoc-meetings/workshop-pla...

Re: How the car industry hid the truth about diesel emissions

#66

Post by blattimwind » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 11:09 AM UTC

bboreham wrote: post #30

alkonaut wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why mazda or some other competitor didn’t find this by doing their own research? I make software for structural engineering and when some competitor launches a program that makes “better designs” it has usually turned out to be because they simply don’t follow the design codes/regulations. We wouldn’t be pushed from the market by that - we’d fund the analysis, reverse engineering and legal processes necessar…

My conclusion, from the first time I thought about it, is that they were all cheating. Engineers move job; they talk to each other. Every car company had to have people who knew the truth and, if they were being unfairly competed against, could publish this truth.

> My conclusion, from the first time I thought about it, is that they were all cheating.

Mazda did, in fact, admit to cheating in emissions testing.

In other words, yes, pretty much the entire automobile industry cheated on those tests to varying degrees. The current "iteration" was also by far not the only one.

Re: How the car industry hid the truth about diesel emissions

#67

Post by alkonaut » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 11:09 AM UTC

junga wrote: post #43

alkonaut wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Euro6 standard was launched back in 2014, following the Euro4- and 5 standards that most of the diesel-gate cars adhered to. Most cars manufactured from around 2016/17 are Euro6, and as far as I’m aware Urea tanks are in use on most or all. I honestly don’t understand why it would have been an issue to have it before. My diesel tank is 65L and it takes me over 1000km. Even if they had made a 10L Urea tank and shr…

> Filling it takes 5 minutes once every 1-2 years Isn‘t this a part of the problem? The urea tanks are way too small and need refilling way too seldom which means a too low urea usage? Volkswagen wanted urea to be refilled by your service station and not by the customers themselves because they might have found this inconvenient.

My last car was a diesel-gate car (09 Audi) which didn’t have a Urea tank at all.

I know VW managers first thought Urea was an inconvenience to have at all, then an inconvenience for owners to refill so should last a service interval. My new car has a Urea tank and isn’t a diesel-gate car. It need to refill maybe 1 time before the service intervals. I can’t see why it would be considered inconvenient - it’s easier to refill than windshield wiper fluid (that you need to pop the hood for!). So if it would have come at a price of 20L diesel capacity space, and require refills every month, I still wouldn’t have found it inconvenient.

I don’t know how they determine how much AdBlue to consume now, but I’m guessing since they now manage to comply with regulation they just use as little as possible? If they can further limit emissions by using more, then there’s some headroom for improving too.

Re: How the car industry hid the truth about diesel emissions

#68

Post by close04 » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 11:10 AM UTC

xedeon wrote: post #58

close04 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They state very clearly They state it in the fineprint. This is what the Tesla Autopilot page used to say for years (this is a 1+ year old screenshot) [0]. Which part of that is accurate? How clear are they about the limitations and the real capabilities of the system? Tesla took the narrow areas where those systems can do a reasonably good job and extrapolated to the whole self-driving experience, blaming regulati…

> No, they state it in the fineprint so to speak. Self-Driving is not even released yet, prove me wrong otherwise. What you're attempting to quote are forward looking statements. Maybe you need to read the document you linked, slowly this time.

I don't have to prove anything, I know they're not flat out lying [0], they're just misleading. Many drivers (ask the dead) are/were under the impression that the car can drive itself. And Tesla doesn't do much to make this distinction clear.

[0] Except for the "we'll have it next year" bit. That's just to get a little more cashflow, pretty sure not even Musk expects to have FSD ready "next year" unless it's a perpetual "next year".

Re: How the car industry hid the truth about diesel emissions

#69

Post by blattimwind » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 11:12 AM UTC

akanet wrote: post #42

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why "unfortunately"? Would it be better if every company that does a bad thing was forced to just close shop? If that be the case I'm pretty sure we'll have to shut down Tesla within a couple of years over their "Autopilot"/"Full Self Driving" claims.

"Do a bad thing" is a pretty major understatement of the degree of criminality we're talking about here. Over-representing the capabilities of Autopilot is a totally different thing that embedding a defeat device to defraud every national regulatory agency.

If you excluded every manufacturer that did this at some point, you're pretty much only left with Tesla and probably some other smaller new EV companies.

Re: How the car industry hid the truth about diesel emissions

#70

Post by makomk » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 11:12 AM UTC

alkonaut wrote: post #23

Reason077 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It definitely looks like it is wishful thinking for diesel engines to meet those standards and be cost-competitive with gasoline-fueled alternatives The technology that would have brought "Dieselgate" diesels into compliance with EU emissions rules was said to cost manufacturers something on the order of US$100 per vehicle: Selective catalytic reduction (SCR) with a refillable AdBlue (urea) tank. However, prior to…

The Euro6 standard was launched back in 2014, following the Euro4- and 5 standards that most of the diesel-gate cars adhered to. Most cars manufactured from around 2016/17 are Euro6, and as far as I’m aware Urea tanks are in use on most or all. I honestly don’t understand why it would have been an issue to have it before. My diesel tank is 65L and it takes me over 1000km. Even if they had made a 10L Urea tank and shr…

There were some pretty big licensing hurdles to getting the EPA to accept urea tanks as part of an emissions control system: https://iaspub.epa.gov/otaqpub/display_file.jsp?docid=16677&...

Also, note that the 2007 Tier 2 NOx emissions standards mentioned in that document are pretty much as strict as the 2014 Euro6 standard, at least for manufacturers which mainly produce diesel cars. The EU emissions standards were much weaker back then, giving manufacturers more time to develop tech to meet the stricter standard.