151–160 of 341 posts
> The software was designed to conceal the cars’ emissions of the pollutant nitrogen oxide, which contributes to the creation of ozone and smog. Is this an error in the article or is creating ozone a bad thing?
Ozone production at ground level won't reach the upper atmosphere. It is too reactive. So all it's doing is burning people.
And, also, heavier than air.
This is actively malicious. There had better be criminal charges filed.
I would like to see VW prohibited from selling any vehicles in the US for a small number of quarters. That would be real punishment. All those dealers and salespeople? There are a certain amount of cars that need to be sold. If VW is out of the mix, the demand is still there. The dealers can sell something else. I'm certain that Toyota and Ford can quickly come to some arrangement with those dealers, including any st…
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There is a more charitable interpretation. When engines are colder, they burn less efficiently and produce "worse" emissions. A system that treats the warmup period differently than the steady-state of running a hot engine is potentially quite reasonable.
Shh... logic, facts, and reasoning have no place in an argument about _the environment_
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Yes, on second thought, they probably confused secondary air injection ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_air_injection ) with EGR. It's very possible they were explaining secondary air, which doesn't compress exhaust gas, but does inject air into the exhaust gas to help burn more efficiently (not clear on the mechanism, I always thought it was a method to improve catalytic converter efficiency at startup).
The usual failure mode is that it sounds like a loud vacuum cleaner for ~90 seconds after cold start up.. not sure about clunking.
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Yes, a common strategy is to inject more EGR (exhaust gas) into the fresh intake air. As EGR is already burned, it is inert, so it negatively affects the combustion, lowering the temperature. With lower combustion temperature you get less NOx... but less power for each amount of fuel, so your efficiency/performance is lower, and also non burned products (CO, C) increase. You then trap those with the Diesel Particulat…
Since this EPA action is about NOx, it seems VW will need to lower combustion temperature, leading to higher soot and therefore more particulate filter cycles. That will also increase fuel consumption.
The tech industry has been guilty of this in the past as well. Example: Nvidia and AMD drivers detected if you were running certain benchmarks or games, and would cheat by downgrading various rendering settings that had minimal effect visually. Often this was a simple check to get the process's executable name; simply renaming the .exe would get you significantly different perf results.
http://semiaccurate.com/2010/07/07/nvidia-purposefully-hobbl...
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Just like sports, even stiffer fine and ruined reputation on being caught cheating.
Just like sports, even stiffer fine and ruined reputation on being caught cheating. Just like sports, companies will still cheat. When punishment doesn't work, the answer is rarely more punishment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a more charitable interpretation. When engines are colder, they burn less efficiently and produce "worse" emissions. A system that treats the warmup period differently than the steady-state of running a hot engine is potentially quite reasonable.
Shh... logic, facts, and reasoning have no place in an argument about _the environment_
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not a good idea. If you ban a large auto maker, you might create a shortage of vehicles, driving prices up for consumers. Also, the affected auto maker would surely try to mitigate the damage by cutting costs, closing down factories, firing workers. Dealerships would have to close as well. In other words, you would cause a lot of collateral damage instead of taking it directly from shareholders via a large fin…
Every time you arrest a parent for committing a crime, you destroy a part of their child's life. Using collateral as justification to avoid punishment results in a system where entities can become to important to punish at all.