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VW Scandal Will Speed Up Diesel's Demise
- 1971genocide 11y agoDuring the financial crisis - everyone and their mom blamed the whole thing on the big bad wall street bankers. And during this one its again being blamed on a individual company. The real blame lies with government. why did the US govt fail to properly test a car made by a foreign company ?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- tzmudzin 11y ago> why did the US govt fail to properly test a car made by a foreign company ? I propose that we focus on what's right to do rather than who gets the pie, so: Why did the US govt fail to properly test a car that was destined for consumer use (regardless of company origin)?
- twanvl 11y ago> The real blame lies with government. why did the US govt fail to properly test a car made by a foreign company ? What does VW being foreign have to do with it? Are US companies inherently more trustworthy? You should ask "Why did the US government fail to properly test a car made by any company?"
- mhw 11y agoWe'll find out when we can compare the fine that VW gets with the one that GM got for selling cars that actually killed their occupants.
- jeromeflipo 11y agoNow that VW is investigated, we should focus on the emission standard themselves - not the tactics to avoid or optimize for the tests. In Europe, the standards are a joke (no one drives like we test the cars).
- junto 11y agoI'd be interested to know what the US public opinion was on diesel engines before the scandal. British opinion on diesel was really positive and I know lots of people that purchased diesel engined vehicles when (to my knowledge) they were unsuitable for the type of driving those people were undertaking. In Germany, people will not buy a diesel if they are mostly driving short trips. It is common knowledge (here) that the air filters on diesel engines need time (~15 minutes) to properly warm up to be able to burn off the soot in the filter. Therefore, only the traditional fleet cars who are driven by salesmen driving long stretches on the Autobahn tend to buy diesels. Was this also the same in the US, because many of my friends that own diesels in the UK had never heard of this?
- frgewut 11y agoMost people I know in US consider diesel dirty.
- imglorp 11y agoOur experience is with unfiltered, sooty heavy vehicles emitting large visible clouds, due largely to trucking industry lobbying. For decades, this has been normal here. Just recently, CA passed actual emissions standards that apply to heavy diesels but exempt emergency vehicles. http://forcechange.com/1141/california-passes-toughest-diesel-emissions-standards-in-us/ http://forcechange.com/1141/california-passes-toughest-diese...
- jacobolus 11y agoI cannot wait until buses, delivery trucks, and other urban-driving large vehicles are electric.
- iheartmemcache 11y agohttp://www.transportation.anl.gov/pdfs/B/855.PDF http://www.transportation.anl.gov/pdfs/B/855.PDF This is a surprisingly approachable analysis (albeit already almost 5 years old, it seems fairly accurate (n.b. not in industrial battery production)). 20 pages on what it takes in energy to produce the precursors (primarily lithium carbonate), then what it takes to manufacture the actual cells, followed by an analysis of what we can recycle from cells which no longer hold a charge. I'm not saying fossil fuels are the way to go, but if you're driving around a Tesla in Nashville, odds are you're burning a boatload of coal in the process to get your charge from the regional power plant (blowing off the tops of mountains in the process to get that goal).
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- gambiting 11y agoMeh. I've already decided my next car won't be a diesel. I bought a 1.6dCi Nissan Qashqai in 2013 and that engine has only one advantage - ridiculously low fuel consumption. Seriously, my usage is usually around 5L/100km or less(56 UK MPG/47 US MPG). But - the engine is very noisy and rumbly, plus it takes forever to warm up in winter. Seriously, I drive on the motorway on my way to work and it's still a solid 10 minutes before any warm air starts to enter the cabin. For the temperature indicator to get to the middle, operational position, it's 20 minutes of driving. It's unacceptable. My partner has a small petrol powered car, and she is warm within a minute of starting it. The emissions scandal has only cemented my decision to not buy a diesel in the future.
- tdkl 11y agoIsn't the low fuel consumption + low diesel price the biggest point to buy a diesel fueled car?
- gambiting 11y agoIn UK diesel was always more expensive. Not long ago I was paying £1.30/litre when Petrol was £1.10/litre(£1.30/litre is $7.5/US gallon for US readers). It's only very recently that the two fuels are nearly at the same price everywhere.
- DanBC 11y agoWe have pretty good numbers for costs of diesel vs petrol. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/oil-and-petroleum-products-weekly-statistics https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/oil-and-... Diesel has always been more expensive, but there have been a few times (2007) where the prices got close. And that's just the cost of the fuel from the pump - it doesn't take into account MPG of the car or duty benefits for diesel car ownership.
- redcalx 11y ago> MPG of the car Also not that diesel is more energy dense per unit volume. (And a US gallon is different to an imperial/British one)
- toolslive 11y agowhat demise? http://www.acea.be/statistics/tag/category/diesel-penetration http://www.acea.be/statistics/tag/category/diesel-penetratio...
- jacobolus 11y agoNote that (a) European NOx emissions standards for diesel cars were made more than twice as strict in 2014, and (b) VW and perhaps other manufacturers were cheating American diesel emissions standards. It’s not an outrageous leap to suspect they may also have been cheating the new European emissions standards. If those are properly enforced, diesel cars could be in trouble. cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards#Emission_standards_for_passenger_cars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards#Em... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/road-and-rail-transport/11881954/Volkswagen-emissions-scandal-Which-other-cars-fail-to-meet-pollution-safety-limits.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/road-and-rail-transpo...
- selimthegrim 11y agoIt's frustrating to see another technology possibly go the way of nuclear for the sake of politics and optics, when the tools to remediate emissions exist. Granted emissions expenses for diesel are at first blush several times that of petrol engines, but a full comparison would include a) at least 25% greater carbon tax on petrol and b) gasoline particulate filter cost for complying with forthcoming PM2.5 regs for petrol engines, esp. the GDI engines so beloved on Audis.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- TheCondor 11y agoIs the irony lost on you? The technology exists but the leading proponents of diesel chose not to use it. Same with nuclear, sure there are pebble bed reactors and other safe designs, nobody proposes them on the industrial scale. Why is that? Efficient and cost impact profit.
- whatwherehowwhy 11y agoGee, I got sucked in big time and bought a diesel. I also lectured anyone and everyone how I was being environmentally more responsible than they were etc.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoWasn't your fault. Vent your anger against VW and other copmanies and people who deceive others. But please, above all, don't stop caring. We can have our better world, but only if there's enough people who still care.
- douche 11y agoNot your fault for buying the marketing. Maybe your fault if you were a smug[1] tool and pressured anyone else into also buying. [1] http://southpark.cc.com/clips/155193/thanks http://southpark.cc.com/clips/155193/thanks
- ptaipale 11y agoDon’t feel bad. Each and every technology has its failures which will bite at some point. I expect that in a few years, e.g. the recyclability or toxicity of batteries in electric vehicles will hit headlines. This NOx emission thing is more a PR disaster than an actual environmental problem. The VW diesel engines are still remarkably efficient and nice pieces of technology, at least if you compare them to the huge gasoline engines that they often replace. (FWIW, I drive a diesel but not made by VAG (this is Renault). It’s probably worse than any current VW engines, but because it’s a few years older, no one complains. It passes the local MOT tests with flying colours, and I get around 5.6 l/100 km or 42 mpg for a minivan which I think is nice enough).
- raur 11y agoI can't help but think that the whole 'clean coal' industry, and carbon capture and storage as a whole, will go exactly the same way.
- hit8run 11y agoIt is so obvious what is happening at the moment. One vendor gets "busted" for "optimizing" for a benchmark and everyone goes hysteric. Nothing really new happened here. Especially for those of us working in IT. Yes it is not honorable what they did and it is cheating but I bet that every vendor optimizes for benchmarks no matter which industry is affected. VW is probably only the first company in automotive that got busted. Others will follow soon..
- tptacek 11y agoThey didn't "optimize" for the benchmark. They detected that the benchmark was running, and then deliberately ran the car in a different, unrealistic mode.
- trymas 11y agoIt's just my opinion, but every major car manufacturer produces cars which have very similar test results compared to cheating VW results (fuel efficiency and such). I mean if VW got busted, with breaking NOx values by up to 20 times, for the purpose of better acceleration, fuel efficiency and other parameters. So does it mean that others somehow cheat, but do not get caught? Or VW, the biggest car company group in the world, were producing much worse engines, than any other car manufacturer (which sells cars in US) in the world. Somehow I think it's the first one...
- tptacek 11y agoI don't know, but when we think about computer hardware manufacturers "cheating" benchmarks, those vendors virtually always have plausible deniability. They game the benchmarks, optimizing part of their featureset to improve scores in ways that don't carry over to real-world use. That's not what happened here. VW has no plausible deniability in this case.
- steve19 11y agoSamsung has for example been known to detect benchmarks and then over clock the cpu and gpu. That is outright cheating. ://www.extremetech.com/computing/177841-samsungs-latest-android-update-no-longer-cheats-on-benchmarks
- alkonaut 11y agoWe all know the future is in hydrid and electric, but new cars sold today under requirements of 120g/km CO2 emissions will probably be mostly diesel. I'm getting a new car and there is just no way I can get anything other than a diesel with current regulations and taxes.
- ju-st 11y agoLPG or CNG probably?
- jeromeflipo 11y agoWould vote for a tax on fossil fuel to make electric/hybrid a better choice?
- supahfly_remix 11y agoJust curious, does anyone know if VW vehicles running biodiesel pollute just as badly as conventional diesel? If biodiesel is chemically identical to regular diesel, than I'd guess it would have identical NOx emissions, but I'm not sure if this is the case
- bigethan 11y agoI drove a 2001 TDI Golf for 12 years and used mostly Biodiesel. Not a chemist. The fuels pollute differently, as they aren't chemically identical. Bio creates more soot when it burns as it's not as efficient of a burn. But the main charm is that no/minimal greenhouse gasses are produced by the burning (it's corn oil, not dinosaur oil). But. The new Clean Diesel's aren't very Biodiesel friendly due to the cleaning process requiring a fuel that burns a little better than Biodiesel does. So it is a hassle if you wanted to try Biodiesel in your Clean Diesel. Not many people were trying it according to the folks at Dogpatch BioFuels, enough so that they looking to find new buyers for their fuel. I don't know what matters most to the EPA, and what VW was cheating at, to know if the defeat device in a Bio car does worse things to the environment.
- TheCondor 11y agoPretty sure biodiesel emits carbon when it burns, the charm is that it's renewable, so long as we can farm vegetables. It's not carbon that was sequestered in the earth but it's still carbon
- bigethan 11y agoYep that's the soot part I mentioned.
- jhayward 11y ago> The new Clean Diesel's aren't very Biodiesel friendly due to .. The only biodiesel restriction I'm aware of in larger (e.g., 3/4 to 1 ton pickups) is related to the amount of water bound to glycerin in the fuel. Common-rail injection systems are very finicky and any above-design-limit water can cause corrosion which damages the injectors or fuel pump. My truck is certified for only 5% (B5), newer ones are B20 certified. The only difference is the fuel system. I've not heard of any emissions impacts.
- jsudhams 11y agoAll most all cars encouraged more and more. 48 US MPG is the norm for petrol cars but the diesel is 25% less costly than petrol
- PinguTS 11y agoThis article has also some misinformation. This article, as I read it, seems to imply that the engineers where technically unable to comply with the regulations, that why they cheating. But it seems to be getting more clear over the last days it is the business people - the one that read Bloomberg - that are also the cause. Because the engineers where unable to do it within the given cost requirements. They told, that they need a greater budget per car to comply with the regulations.
- fnordfnordfnord 11y ago>This article, as I read it, seems to imply that the engineers where technically unable to comply with the regulations, that why they cheating. They can comply, but fuel economy will plummet. Other negatives can happen as well, the engines can get crudded up quickly, which has already been a problem in VW diesels, and in some Mercedes models as well. The EPA has also been criticized here as being a tool to prevent foreign competition from high efficiency diesels available in Europe and Asia. >They told, that they need a greater budget per car to comply with the regulations. The second problem I mentioned is caused by the EGR Exhaust Gas Recirculation systems, which are primitive; so, yeah, throwing money at that would help. Overall, I'm fairly confident that the VW mess is the tip of a huge iceberg. Other mfrs have been caught doing this exact same thing before.
- pi-err 11y agoModern Diesel technology requires maintenance, fine tuning and specific temperature ranges to live up to its hype. Outside of this envelope, the engines run noisy and produce high amounts of particules. Most people buy a diesel car because the fuel is cheaper, they will basically not care about those 3 aspects. As for the result, the article points to Paris: the city didn't have a smog problem 20 years ago, and now spends half the year with smog warnings (60% diesel cars in Paris area). Just walking by, you'll notice most cars are noisier and smell much more than in a comparable situation in London or NYC. By now, diesel cars in Paris area are the main particule emitters, ahead of heating. Diesel is a high price technology disguised as cost efficient by an inconsiderate european strategy. Can't wait to see diesel go away - a large scale environmental disaster.
- fnordfnordfnord 11y ago>Modern Diesel technology requires maintenance, fine tuning and specific temperature ranges to live up to its hype. The same is true for petrol engines. Diesel requires little or no additional maintenance. >Most people buy a diesel car because the fuel is cheaper Except the fuel isn't cheaper (in the US), even accounting for the higher specific energy. http://www.fuelgaugereport.com/ http://www.fuelgaugereport.com/ I like them because the engines last longer and get better fuel economy; and in my pickup truck, higher power. >As for the result, the article points to Paris: the city didn't have a smog problem 20 years ago The city didn't have as many of any kind of car 20 years ago. If you want less smog (particulates) from diesels, then relax NOx standards.
- selimthegrim 11y agoNOx generates smog
- fnordfnordfnord 11y agoSmog is a general term, it can be composed of a variety of compounds including nitrogen oxides.
- pi-err 11y ago
- rasz_pl 11y agoCO2 tax scam strikes again. I like how the Diesel craze in EU can be traced to stupid CO2 tax and incentives, with total disregard of real actual pollutants coming out of a tail pipe.
- ams6110 11y agoIt's possible that the [tax] incentives were the result of oil industry lobbying -- as the sales of fuel oil fell, refiners needed to sell more diesel fuel, which is a similar type of product. Unlikely. This may have been true a long time ago, but refining technology has come a long way. Diesel (or home heating oil, or kerosene, pretty much all the same thing) used to be something of a waste product in the refining process. Thus it was cheaper than gasoline, even though its energy content per volume unit is higher. Today, with improved cracking technology, refiners can make pretty much any amount of gasoline or diesel they need from a barrel of crude oil -- what waste is left is very heavy oil used for ship engines or industrial use.
- yason 11y agoI would be interested in driving a big naturally aspirated diesel engine for its longevity and torque, but they don't make those anymore at least in Europe. (Pollution restrictions.) Diesels have gone from simple and nearly infinitely durable to complex and easy to break constructs. There's EGR, DPF, direct injection, turbos, you name it, and those are expensive to replace/repair. On the other hand, modern diesels are quiet, they don't vibrate much, and they deliver a crazy amount of power. But that's just something totally different from what diesels used to be, and modern petrol engines are catching up, in a good way. I could imagine driving a 3-cyl turbo petrol, PSA makes a few surprisingly good ones.
- xorcist 11y agoI am completely clueless about cars and their technology, so let me ask a stupid question: From what I understand, VW didn't technically cheat the benchmark in the meaning that all the readings were truthful. What they did was enable a benchmark mode in their engine software, so the engine ran differently under those conditions. Or, framing the problem differently, they didn't let the user run the engine with the same parameters as the benchmarks ran under. So, what's stopping them? Why not give the users what they thought they paid for? I take it the engine would deliver less power with the economy parameters, but isn't those values easier to get away with? You could even have an economy mode button inside the vehicle (or perhaps they already do?) in which case all they wouldn't have been liable for anything as all the benchmarks would have been truthful.
- maxerickson 11y agoThe emissions mode delivers lower power and worse mileage than they are currently getting. That's the big issue, they sold them as emissions compliant vehicles that delivered some given performance/efficiency, and the software can't make both claims true at the same time.
- zardo 11y agoIt's not really a technology issue, its a regulatory one. They certified to the EPA that they had disclosed all parameters that affect emissions in their system. Which, not being true, was a criminal violation of the clean air act. They can't let users switch between modes, where one more violates pollution standards, the would still be considered a defeat device. They can update the cars to meet emission standards, but it might actually be the case that their cars can only pass the certification cycles in their cheatmode, but won't actually pass an in use monitoring test. Even if they can pass emissions, lowering the power and fuel economy is going to mean class action lawsuits from their customers.
- tefo-mohapi 11y agoOr perhaps also raise concerns about electric cars as they rely heavily on software? More and more governments are investigating VW --> http://www.africantechroundup.com/volkswagen-up-in-smoke-as-the-south-african-government-is-set-to-investigate/ http://www.africantechroundup.com/volkswagen-up-in-smoke-as-...