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How the car industry hid the truth about diesel emissions

theguardian.com

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

#71

Post by fulafel »

eertami wrote: post #56
fulafel wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this reasoning pins down the wrong variables of the equation. You can pick your housing and location based on not owning a car (among other criteria). And it scales too. And for decision-makers it's responsible to nudge your citizenship to this direction.

>You can pick your housing and location based on not owning a car Only if you want to live in a large city and don't do anything outdoors. I go skiing, hiking, mountain biking, camping 3-4 times a week. Where I live (the Alps), it is extremely difficult to not own a car. There is no infrastructure and the terrain is unfriendly. There isn't a housing or location option in Europe that allows me to give up my car and ha…

Usually you can also comfortably live in a small city few km from its center and have good outdoor options.

People will need to compromise of course. The alternative, not beating global warming is a big compromise too.

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

#72

Post by vvillena »

blub wrote: post #27
ummonk wrote: post #7

I remember Mazda having trouble making their diesel engines performant while conforming to California emissions regulations, and wondering why they were having so much trouble compared to European car manufacturers. Then this scandal broke and it was obvious why.

Were they having technical trouble or just having trouble finding a cost-efficient solution? AFAIK the technical solution (Urea injection) works fine, but it's expensive and VW didn't want to include it in all cars.

VW uses urea injections, but they wanted to make it transparent to the end user. The urea was to be refilled during maintenance, and disconnecting the system was the only way to make the tank last that long.

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

#73

Post by fulafel »

pjmlp wrote: post #54
fulafel wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this reasoning pins down the wrong variables of the equation. You can pick your housing and location based on not owning a car (among other criteria). And it scales too. And for decision-makers it's responsible to nudge your citizenship to this direction.

Assuming one can get a house at an affordable rate to start with. It doesn't scale because not everyone is rich enough to live close to transportation hubs nor they can take everyone that wants to live nearby.

Housing supply and transport infra mostly responds to demand without pricing out people. Outside of urban hotspots where rent seeking rules.

Most cities, and most people's home vicinities, are not land cramped like the world's megacities.

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

#74

Post by clarry »

fulafel wrote: post #50
lb1lf wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High-speed trains are wonderful where the population density is sufficiently high, but in more sparsely populated parts, the car (and, for longer distances, the plane) is likely the only viable solution for decades to come. With that as a starting point, the cars and planes might as well be electric. (Or hydrogen powered!)

I think this reasoning pins down the wrong variables of the equation. You can pick your housing and location based on not owning a car (among other criteria). And it scales too. And for decision-makers it's responsible to nudge your citizenship to this direction.

> You can pick your housing and location based on not owning a car

If all I ever wanted from life was to go to work and back to my apartment, via a grocery store.

As a matter of fact, I can't choose where my friends and relatives live, and I'd probably have to drop some of my hobbies too if I were to live without a car.

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

#75

Post by blattimwind »

jokoon wrote: post #45
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Spain we have a similar exam and unfortunately I know that there are indeed people that cheat. I don't know the details but there are ways to make their car emit less smoke only that day, and then go back to "normal". Probably we should do as many Asians do in this, and make it normal to go out with a face mask. Not sure what kind of masks have to be used to effectively not breathe pollution, and their effectivity…

no mask can filter particles

Filtering airborne particulates is pretty much the baseline reason to use masks ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(However surgical masks aren't meant to do that, they're only meant to catch things expelled from you, not the other way around. So I guess your interjection is somewhat correct in that running around with a surgical mask does pretty much nil to improve the quality of the air you inhale.)

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

#76

Post by Theodores »

oska wrote: post #4
joelkevinjones wrote: post #2

A coworker and I had a discussion with another coworker when this scandal broke. We couldn't convince him that he was wrong when he said there is no way car software could "cheat" like that. Even after we came up with several things that could be done in the space of about a minute, he remained unconvinced. If you follow through the article to the reference US DoJ press release, VW's software used several of the idea…

What's the point of this anecdote other than to make you look smart and your coworker look dumb? Maybe both things are true but it's hardly a very interesting observation that there are both smarter and dumber people in the population.

It is how scandals work. Lots of people believe the lies and can't be persuaded to think from an evidence first viewpoint. They need the story to be headline news on the BBC or some other reputable source before they will 'believe it'.

Every scandal relies on groupthink to keep it quiet.

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

#77

Post by makomk »

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.

The problem wasn't just that it was an inconvenience. Under the EPA rules of the time, urea refills were considered critical emission-related maintenance. Initially, this meant that they had to last 100,000-150,000 miles unless the EPA gave a waiver allowing more frequent servicing intervals.[1] This wasn't physically feasible. A couple of years into Dieselgate, they decided they'd allow DEF refills at the oil change interval, which still required much larger tanks than the European models (typically replacing the spare tyre) or cheating.[2] It wasn't until mid-2014 that they decided users could be allowed to refill their own urea tanks and lowered the minimum DEF refill interval for cars to a slightly more reasonable 4,000 miles.[3]

[1] https://iaspub.epa.gov/otaqpub/display_file.jsp?docid=16677&...

[2] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2009-11-09/pdf/E9-269...

[3] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2014-08-08/pdf/2014-1...

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

#78

Post by fulafel »

clarry wrote: post #74
fulafel wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this reasoning pins down the wrong variables of the equation. You can pick your housing and location based on not owning a car (among other criteria). And it scales too. And for decision-makers it's responsible to nudge your citizenship to this direction.

> You can pick your housing and location based on not owning a car If all I ever wanted from life was to go to work and back to my apartment, via a grocery store. As a matter of fact, I can't choose where my friends and relatives live, and I'd probably have to drop some of my hobbies too if I were to live without a car.

The change is going to have to affect your friends and relatives too.

You can always adjust your hobbies, or work. Global warming is more important.

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

#79

Post by clarry »

fulafel wrote: post #78
clarry wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can pick your housing and location based on not owning a car If all I ever wanted from life was to go to work and back to my apartment, via a grocery store. As a matter of fact, I can't choose where my friends and relatives live, and I'd probably have to drop some of my hobbies too if I were to live without a car.

The change is going to have to affect your friends and relatives too. You can always adjust your hobbies, or work. Global warming is more important.

Doesn't mean they'll be living next door all of a sudden!

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

#80

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

topspin wrote: post #46
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…

"Excuse me, but what more did the author expect the government to do?" It is not some outrageous expectation that the $8,000,000,000+/year, 14,000+ employee EPA and/or DOT independently verify the real world emissions performance of passenger cars and other vehicles. The cars were so grossly out of compliance that anyone with a ordinary field emissions testing machine could have caught it. If, as is very likely the c…

I still shake my head at this. If you wrote laws that said manufacturers of a particular thing had to do X, and expected them to adhere to it internally, and then paid expert testing facilities to validate those results, why would you EXPECT that you would have to do additional testing to validate the validation?

And further more, why would you think that merely testing the test would lead to a different result? You can say that the Euro V is "not representative" (as someone else did in this thread) of normal driving, but the FTP test's torque and RPM curves were lifted from real-world driving through hilly areas. It most definitely is representative. I don't know about the Euro V.

So I don't get it. In this scenario, what people are asking the EPA to have done was load up vehicles with mobile emissions equipment (which is a very difficult thing to do, by the way), and validate that the TEST ITSELF correlated with real-world driving. Granted, this is an interesting exercise, but one that I would expect the EPA to - again - pay someone else to do.

Given the engineering that went into the spec on the US side, I wouldn't expect that this was something they should have needed to do. You can say that they were the regulatory body in charge of this, and therefore should be responsible for catching cheaters, but I don't see how a reasonable person can find that the EPA was intentionally negligent in this matter.

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