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Nearly all new diesel cars exceed official pollution limits

153 points by known 11y ago

f_allwein 11y ago
> 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.
- stinos 11y ago
  I thought it was common knowledge the lab tests are a joke? Has been posted on HN as well IIRC.
  - f_allwein 11y ago
    I thought it was more a case of "some car manufacturers cheated" and not "almost all diesel cars emit several times more than they should". How is this possible?
    - Spare_account 11y ago
      The test is accurate and measures emissions very well. The cars emit NOX at levels lower than the legal limits during the test. There is no mistake during the test and no cheating (apart from VW). However, when the cars are used by normal drivers, the usage patterns are so significantly different than the test sequences that the emissions profile changes. In the majority of cases the NOX emissions from cars used by normal people exceed the EU limits. This does not, as I understand it, mean that the cars are illegal. The cars all passed the tests in the test environment. That is the requirement and they met the requirement. No law is being broken but that is only because the law is not fit for purpose.
    - makomk 11y ago
      The tests simply don't match modern real-world driving patterns. For example, apparently real-world drivers tend to accelerate much more rapidly than in the test sequence. It doesn't just affect diesel cars either; they tend to over-estimate the fuel efficiency of all cars and presumably under-estimate their pollution levels too.
    - DanBC 11y ago
      Some manfs were cheating - they increased tire pressure to levels that would be dangerous on roads, for instance. Some manfs were building to the type approval test, but not for real world driving. A car needs to accelerate from 0 kph to 100 kph over a certain time. Normal road drivers would accelerate faster than this test, and acceleration is when the vehicles emit a lot of stuff. The tests are run on engines at their normal operating temperature. So cold engines are allowed to emit more stuff to protect the engine. Many engines in real world use would be at this cold temperature. The US has particularly stringent testing, and it might not be possible to meet those tests. They should probably have done other stuff to reduce diesel vehicles - taxes and duties on the vehicles and the fuel, with exemptions for commercial operators. It's clear now that manfs build to the test, and that type approval testing needs to include better real world driving testing.
    - lb1lf 11y ago
      Also, the number of car manufacturers outnumber the number of car engine manufacturers - so if one company which actually makes engines (cough) optimizes their engines for testing, several car manufacturers may be caught with their trousers down. (Which, I am sure, will lead to all sorts of interesting lawsuits.) For instance, the engine in cars as different as the Land Rover Defender (sadly, no longer among us) and the Volvo, say, S80 is basically the same Ford-engineered unit.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 11y ago
    > I thought it was common knowledge the lab tests are a joke it was common knowledge for a long time that the lab tests were not the same as real world driving. But we thought that, even though the lab tests were better, there was some meaningful relationship. As it turns out, they are wildly divergent in a lot of cases. And the repercussions are ongoing. Long-term, this might turn out to a turning point in the history of internal-combustion engines.
- Someone 11y ago
  A bit/lot of it may be "optimize for the test", not cheat. They know at what temperature the test is done, so they optimize the chemistry for that case. They know it will be done with new cars, so they do not optimize "emission over the car's lifetime". They also have drivers who are above average. That will help with manually shifted cars. And of course, they pick the best car they can produce, and prepare it optimally. Tyre pressure will be optimized, the car will be perfectly polished, if that helps, etc. Cheating starts when they tape shut doors to decrease air resistance, or when they explicitly detect "test is being run" and act upon it. IMO, the real problem is twofold: firstly, the existing tests were designed in such a way that their results do not reflect what happens in the real world, and secondly, some manufacturers went criminally far in optimizing for it.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    "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-should-do-more-road-emissions-tests-critics-say http://www.autonews.com/article/20150929/OEM11/150929807/epa... 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.
    - cptskippy 11y ago
      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?
      - jacquesm 11y ago
        No, that's not what I'm implying, no idea where you got that idea.
- D_Alex 11y ago
  >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. It depends how the law is written. Case a) - the cars must never emit more pollutants than specified in these rules - then yes, you are correct. The car manufacturers would be rightly concerned about the wide range of situations they would need to account for. Case b) - the cars must not emit more than the specified amount of pollutants under these specific test conditions (implying hopefully "we understand that the real world performance will differ, and are willing to accept this for the sake of simplicity in testing/lawmaking") - in this case the system is working as intended. I am not sure which case we are dealing with, maybe someone can advise us.
- TheCondor 11y ago
  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
  - MadManE 11y ago
    If NOx was really a priority, then the large producers would be subject to increased regulations rather than the tiny fraction that's produced by individual passenger vehicles.
codemusings 11y ago
Color me shocked.
_yosefk 11y ago
"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 governments "failed" without either suggesting to strip the governments of those powers which they failed to use so consistently throughout all of Europe, or charging government officials with criminal incompetence or fraud.)
- halviti 11y ago
  Governments 'failing' in this scenario seems to be referring to not acting quickly enough. If you're going to strip governments of power for this, there would be no more governments left in the world.
  - _yosefk 11y ago
    Not acting quickly enough?.. VW's "defeat device" wasn't uncovered by the government, and it's been deployed for years. I'm not sure what would make governments do anything about this at any future point in time if the issue wasn't reported by a non-government entity. The article also elaborates the measures governments are taking to let perpetrators get away with this into the future (and another source reported how governments keep postponing random checks of cars on actual roads.) There are at least three reasons for governments to side with the perpetrators - campaign contributions or outright bribes to politicians, concerns about the economy/employment, and a revolving door between car makers and regulatory agencies, all this is true for any big business regulated by the government. The belief that fraud is conducted on this scale but the regulator is not to blame is stunning to me (same with banking fraud etc.) I didn't say governments should necessarily be stripped of this power, just that if they all fail so miserably at something, you ought to either suggest that they cannot ever succeed (and if so of course you'll want to strip them of this power) or that people currently employed by governments to oversee this should be investigated, in the hope that eventually the governments can be trained to find competent people to fill these roles, and find some mechanism that prevents corrupting these people. Meeting extreme government incompetence with complete understanding ("they just didn't act quickly enough") and zero penalties, however, is IMO perpetuating the problem.
andy_ppp 11y ago
Ouch, that's gotta hurt: "Surprisingly, the tiny number of models that did not exceed the standard were mostly Volkswagens"
- makomk 11y ago
  Not terribly surprising. Their engineers are competent, it's just that the US (where diesels are less popular) set some rather unpleasant requirements for diesel cars, in particular insisting that they couldn't require the diesel exhaust fluid tank to be topped up by the end user and setting lower NO2 limits. In order to meet these conflicting requirements, VW cheated. I think some of the VWs they tested actually have the same engine and emissions control system as some of the US models that cheated, just without the defeat device intended to reduce exhaust fluid usage.
  - teh_klev 11y ago
    > in particular insisting that they couldn't require the diesel exhaust fluid tank to be topped up by the end user Not being rude, but I'm having trouble parsing that part of your comment. Do you mean that the US authorities won't let diesel car owners re-fill the diesel exhaust fluid tank by themselves, i.e. the re-fill must be performed by a dealer? Also is the DEF tank just a US thing? I'd never heard it before (UK resident here).
    - kuschku 11y ago
      The DEF tank is a global thing – ever heard of AdBlue etc? But yes, the issue is that the US requires dealers to refill them. And also sets a limit for how often refill cycles may happen. And the weight of the tank sets a limit on how large it may be. The result is simple: Small Diesel cars can’t exist legally in the US.
      - teh_klev 11y ago
        This is all completely new to me (and probably most folks unless they're running around in brand new diesel vehicles). The last diesel car I owned was a 1998 (Euro-2 standard when NOx emissions were more relaxed - so no DEF required [0]) Ford Mondeo which I disposed of in 2006 when the timing belt snapped ruining the engine. Since then I've owned older petrol engined high mileage "bangers" so I would never have encountered DEF unless I won the lottery and fancied a new Landrover :) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards#Emission_standards_for_passenger_cars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards#Em...
tomtompl 11y ago
More central planning!
- donatj 11y ago
  Is that sarcasm or a genuine call to action? By Poes law I have no idea.
walrus01 11y ago
Now I wonder what the diesel emissions of a 20 year old ford f350 are. A lot, I imagine.
- Shivetya 11y ago
  Well it wasn't that long ago that a study found that school buses had many times the acceptable levels of pollutants inside because they sat idling while waiting for kids. All I have to do is watch the local bus service, mostly the city one, to see how bad some vehicles pollute. So let us be honest here, the government needs to clamp down hard on all vehicles in its employ at all levels even more than going after consumer cars
  - jschwartzi 11y ago
    I rode the bus every day as a child, and I will always associate the smell of diesel exhaust with the inside of the school bus, because it always smelled like exhaust.
- LeifCarrotson 11y ago
  Or worse, the 20 year old dump truck and bulldozer used by the local excavating company.
- mtreis86 11y ago
  Or a 30 year old container ship
verytrivial 11y ago
I'm willing to take down votes for this position, I don't understand the fuss here, nor to credulity of the actors whom should have (and probably did) know better. If the tests were meant to reflect real-world conditions, they should be be designed to do that -- they clearly weren't, and were only tiny sample of performance from which (wild?) extrapolations were drawn. Don't have a cry about it, fix the tests. Get together some disinterested parties to design them to capture the behaviour we all apparently expected the current dud tests to measure. This actually reminds me of how the failure of the bodies responsible for banking oversight cry WOE when the industries they were charged with overseeing did bad things. Failure of real oversight again. And it the same way, we have these same bodies (NOT end users) expecting to be paid for making these mistakes. Who benefits from the fines? Not car owners, not car makers.
- awjr 11y ago
  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 road. Politically this is a hard thing to do, however some countries are forcing the issue http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/consumer-news/95237/dutch-move-to-ban-diesel-and-petrol-cars-by-2025 http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/consumer-news/95237/du... This is going to hurt the car industry in ways we don't fully understand yet. In the short term I would be end-of-lining their diesel production and restructuring to electric.
  - superuser2 11y ago
    The fact remains that millions of people park on the street or in alleys/garages they do not own. Until we start stomping on landlords' property rights to force them to install chargers, and also somehow install chargers in street parking spaces, EVs are just not usable for a huge segments of the population. The only way to make EV ownership practical is, ironically, to make your commute longer by living in the suburbs.
mhw 11y ago
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 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 driving styles that are found in the real world. Some people might be quite laid back about accelerating, but I think there's an awful lot of "floor the accelerator to get back up to the speed limit" as well. It's hardly surprising that in those periods the emissions from the engine will be higher than they were under the test cycle. So who do we blame? The vehicle manufacturers? Well, given current popular sentiment, down that path may lie vehicles which are designed to never exceed the emission limit. At the extreme end we might finish up with cars that automatically throttle back when they hit an emission limit, similar to processors throttling back when they hit thermal emission limits. But what do we do when we start having fatal accidents when people tried to overtake and the engine suddenly reduced power in an unpredictable way because it had gone over the emission limit? So, blame the emissions tests? Well, what should the emissions test be targeting? Never going over a particular threshold, say? In which case, how do you define a standard protocol (to ensure fairness across vehicles) that all vehicles will be able to follow? At one end you've got cars like the Peugeot Bipper Tepee with a 0-60 time north of 16 seconds (with both petrol and diesel engines - http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/carbycar/peugeot/bipper-tepee-2009/?section=data http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/carbycar/peugeot/bipper-tepee-20...). At the other you've got cars like the BMW X5 4.4 V8 which can accelerate roughly twice the mass in a quarter of the time (http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/specs/detail/?v=MBMWI-X50311 http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/specs/detail/?v=MBMWI-X50311 - the diesel engined version isn't far behind either). I'd imagine that a protocol that produces the highest emissions from the BMW would not even be achievable by the Peugeot. The only other party left to blame seems to be the drivers, and particularly their inability or unwillingness to drive in a style that minimises emissions (and at the same time most likely increases fuel economy). But the media seem reluctant to point the finger in that direction. I think we need to blame all of the above, but we need to get past the simplistic model of emissions being a constant that you can set a limit on for all vehicles regardless of how they are driven.
- 11y ago
mtgx 11y ago
Well this should put an end to the "It's not dieselgate, it's just VWgate" thing.
codecamper 11y ago
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.
- dclowd9901 11y ago
  Modern catalytic converters are so obscenely efficient, they barely have any effect, even cumulatively, on the amount of fuel lost. You have more loss in the drivetrain.
- TorKlingberg 11y ago
  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.
- ars 11y ago
  > The biggest problem today is global warming. No it is NOT! Before catalytic converters the air in many cities was killing people constantly. Global warming gets all the press, but pollution is FAR FAR worse. It will (and has killed) more people (and animals) than global warming ever could. The US is very clean (relatively) right now, so you think "oh everything is fine, let's bring back some pollution". But you have NO idea.
alkonaut 11y ago
Nothing strange about that - if there is a limit that is hard to meet (which there should be) then manufacturers will make a car that exactly meets the standard. And just like advertised fuel consumption figures, it will meet the standard under very controlled circumstances. In case of fuel consumption the manufacturers can reach the figure by taping shut door seams, using overinflated tyres, throwing out interior to reduce weight etc. Those aren't "real world conditions" but apparently they are real-world enough to use in advertising. Presumably the same conditions can and are used when testing emissions. The only conclusion we can draw is that emissions tests aren't used to make manufacturers build cars that emit at most X in real world conditions. That would be both unfair and expensive - it's better to say "use whatever extreme conditions you want and the emissions should be at most Y". In that case authorities can make Y < X and the whole thing is simpler and easier for everyone. If cars emit too much in real-world conditions? Then tighten the limits. This of course only works so long as no one cheats and designs workarounds specifically for the test conditions (which is what VW did).
- deelowe 11y ago
  Why couldn't a third party just take a production car and do the testing? This is how it works for most compliance testing. This whole situation seems needlessly complex. Or, probably more aptly, it reeks of crony capitalism and politics. Testing and compliance is an engineering problem. It should treated as such.
  - mikekchar 11y ago
    Although keep in mind that requiring 3rd party, independent auditors creates a market for crappy/soft auditors. I learned that from ISO 9000 work. Companies don't want to hire someone who will fail their product/process, so they hire someone who will conveniently look the other way. Probably the only way is to have government testing... which brings us full circle to the potential of crony capitalism and politics.
    - deelowe 11y ago
      Industrial certifications like ISO 9000, six sigma, etc... are kind of a joke. What happens to those companies if they fail to maintain an acceptable standard? Quality goes down? Who cares? There's no liability. A better comparison would be something like UL or FCC. Make the standards and testing body liable for their claims. Require PEs to be part of the organization and personally responsible for signing off. This is a solved problem. We build bridges and electronics that don't kill people using similar methods.
kinofcain 11y ago
Every gasoline car is going to put out more pollution in "real world" driving scenarios as well. This isn't a problem with diesels, per se, it's a problem with all emissions standards.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Its supposed to be 'built-in' to the emissions standard. The lab levels are so low, because that makes the road emissions in an acceptable range. Everybody involved knows this; its not a secret; there's no news here.
  - kinofcain 11y ago
    Yes, I was trying to figure out an eloquent way to add something to that effect to my comment, but I think you've done a better job than what I had drafted anyway. What would be interesting, is if diesels were predominantly more likely to exceed those lab levels than gasoline cars to a significant amount, or if they were exceeding those standards to an unexpected level. That's still possible, and it would mean we need to update the emissions standards and/or the test process, but this article doesn't make that case.
- _ph_ 11y ago
  The problem is not, that in "real world" driving they exhaust some more (like 20%) but rather 10x (1000%) more than during those tests. That means, the pollution numbers are not just a bit "optimistic" like with fuel consumption, but completely unrelated to the real life numbers.
TwoWheelWonder 11y ago
My 1998 Ram with 12 valve 5.9L Cummins then... Is killing us all, loudly. Gets 25mpg on the highway though.
S_A_P 11y ago
I don't get the math about diesel. American refineries produce 12 gallons of diesel and 19 gallons of gasoline on average[1] from a barrel of oil(42 gallons). I seem to remember that figure being lower and it looks like googles answer was 10 gallons at one point using the same site reference. I think that there was a push to get most cars off of gasoline and on to diesel before the VW scandal, and that diesel was going to save the world. I didn't see how we were going to make that work when there is 50-80% less of the stuff per barrel of oil. I think in the real world the MPG gains are 25-35%[2] I don't know that EVs are the savior they're pitched as, unless we can make battery tech and power generation cleaner. It looks like there is progress in that arena, so hopefully that continues. I think that we have demonstrably cleaned up gasoline cars while also increasing power output and MPG, and progress in that arena should continue as well. I think that diesel for passenger cars is a dead end, and it should be left to big rigs and heavy duty vehicles. [1] http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=327&t=9 http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=327&t=9 [2]https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/di_diesels.shtml https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/di_diesels.shtml
- commenter1239 11y ago
  I think the main push to go off gasoline onto diesel, is mainly biodiesel, where crude oil is not required for production. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel_production

153 points by known 11y ago

> 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.

stinos 11y ago
I thought it was common knowledge the lab tests are a joke? Has been posted on HN as well IIRC.
- f_allwein 11y ago
  I thought it was more a case of "some car manufacturers cheated" and not "almost all diesel cars emit several times more than they should". How is this possible?
  - Spare_account 11y ago
    The test is accurate and measures emissions very well. The cars emit NOX at levels lower than the legal limits during the test. There is no mistake during the test and no cheating (apart from VW). However, when the cars are used by normal drivers, the usage patterns are so significantly different than the test sequences that the emissions profile changes. In the majority of cases the NOX emissions from cars used by normal people exceed the EU limits. This does not, as I understand it, mean that the cars are illegal. The cars all passed the tests in the test environment. That is the requirement and they met the requirement. No law is being broken but that is only because the law is not fit for purpose.
  - makomk 11y ago
    The tests simply don't match modern real-world driving patterns. For example, apparently real-world drivers tend to accelerate much more rapidly than in the test sequence. It doesn't just affect diesel cars either; they tend to over-estimate the fuel efficiency of all cars and presumably under-estimate their pollution levels too.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    Some manfs were cheating - they increased tire pressure to levels that would be dangerous on roads, for instance. Some manfs were building to the type approval test, but not for real world driving. A car needs to accelerate from 0 kph to 100 kph over a certain time. Normal road drivers would accelerate faster than this test, and acceleration is when the vehicles emit a lot of stuff. The tests are run on engines at their normal operating temperature. So cold engines are allowed to emit more stuff to protect the engine. Many engines in real world use would be at this cold temperature. The US has particularly stringent testing, and it might not be possible to meet those tests. They should probably have done other stuff to reduce diesel vehicles - taxes and duties on the vehicles and the fuel, with exemptions for commercial operators. It's clear now that manfs build to the test, and that type approval testing needs to include better real world driving testing.
  - lb1lf 11y ago
    Also, the number of car manufacturers outnumber the number of car engine manufacturers - so if one company which actually makes engines (cough) optimizes their engines for testing, several car manufacturers may be caught with their trousers down. (Which, I am sure, will lead to all sorts of interesting lawsuits.) For instance, the engine in cars as different as the Land Rover Defender (sadly, no longer among us) and the Volvo, say, S80 is basically the same Ford-engineered unit.
- SideburnsOfDoom 11y ago
  > I thought it was common knowledge the lab tests are a joke it was common knowledge for a long time that the lab tests were not the same as real world driving. But we thought that, even though the lab tests were better, there was some meaningful relationship. As it turns out, they are wildly divergent in a lot of cases. And the repercussions are ongoing. Long-term, this might turn out to a turning point in the history of internal-combustion engines.
Someone 11y ago
A bit/lot of it may be "optimize for the test", not cheat. They know at what temperature the test is done, so they optimize the chemistry for that case. They know it will be done with new cars, so they do not optimize "emission over the car's lifetime". They also have drivers who are above average. That will help with manually shifted cars. And of course, they pick the best car they can produce, and prepare it optimally. Tyre pressure will be optimized, the car will be perfectly polished, if that helps, etc. Cheating starts when they tape shut doors to decrease air resistance, or when they explicitly detect "test is being run" and act upon it. IMO, the real problem is twofold: firstly, the existing tests were designed in such a way that their results do not reflect what happens in the real world, and secondly, some manufacturers went criminally far in optimizing for it.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  "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-should-do-more-road-emissions-tests-critics-say http://www.autonews.com/article/20150929/OEM11/150929807/epa... 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.
  - cptskippy 11y ago
    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?
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      No, that's not what I'm implying, no idea where you got that idea.
D_Alex 11y ago
>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. It depends how the law is written. Case a) - the cars must never emit more pollutants than specified in these rules - then yes, you are correct. The car manufacturers would be rightly concerned about the wide range of situations they would need to account for. Case b) - the cars must not emit more than the specified amount of pollutants under these specific test conditions (implying hopefully "we understand that the real world performance will differ, and are willing to accept this for the sake of simplicity in testing/lawmaking") - in this case the system is working as intended. I am not sure which case we are dealing with, maybe someone can advise us.
TheCondor 11y ago
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
- MadManE 11y ago
  If NOx was really a priority, then the large producers would be subject to increased regulations rather than the tiny fraction that's produced by individual passenger vehicles.

codemusings 11y ago

Color me shocked.

_yosefk 11y ago

"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 governments "failed" without either suggesting to strip the governments of those powers which they failed to use so consistently throughout all of Europe, or charging government officials with criminal incompetence or fraud.)

halviti 11y ago
Governments 'failing' in this scenario seems to be referring to not acting quickly enough. If you're going to strip governments of power for this, there would be no more governments left in the world.
- _yosefk 11y ago
  Not acting quickly enough?.. VW's "defeat device" wasn't uncovered by the government, and it's been deployed for years. I'm not sure what would make governments do anything about this at any future point in time if the issue wasn't reported by a non-government entity. The article also elaborates the measures governments are taking to let perpetrators get away with this into the future (and another source reported how governments keep postponing random checks of cars on actual roads.) There are at least three reasons for governments to side with the perpetrators - campaign contributions or outright bribes to politicians, concerns about the economy/employment, and a revolving door between car makers and regulatory agencies, all this is true for any big business regulated by the government. The belief that fraud is conducted on this scale but the regulator is not to blame is stunning to me (same with banking fraud etc.) I didn't say governments should necessarily be stripped of this power, just that if they all fail so miserably at something, you ought to either suggest that they cannot ever succeed (and if so of course you'll want to strip them of this power) or that people currently employed by governments to oversee this should be investigated, in the hope that eventually the governments can be trained to find competent people to fill these roles, and find some mechanism that prevents corrupting these people. Meeting extreme government incompetence with complete understanding ("they just didn't act quickly enough") and zero penalties, however, is IMO perpetuating the problem.

andy_ppp 11y ago

Ouch, that's gotta hurt: "Surprisingly, the tiny number of models that did not exceed the standard were mostly Volkswagens"

makomk 11y ago
Not terribly surprising. Their engineers are competent, it's just that the US (where diesels are less popular) set some rather unpleasant requirements for diesel cars, in particular insisting that they couldn't require the diesel exhaust fluid tank to be topped up by the end user and setting lower NO2 limits. In order to meet these conflicting requirements, VW cheated. I think some of the VWs they tested actually have the same engine and emissions control system as some of the US models that cheated, just without the defeat device intended to reduce exhaust fluid usage.
- teh_klev 11y ago
  > in particular insisting that they couldn't require the diesel exhaust fluid tank to be topped up by the end user Not being rude, but I'm having trouble parsing that part of your comment. Do you mean that the US authorities won't let diesel car owners re-fill the diesel exhaust fluid tank by themselves, i.e. the re-fill must be performed by a dealer? Also is the DEF tank just a US thing? I'd never heard it before (UK resident here).
  - kuschku 11y ago
    The DEF tank is a global thing – ever heard of AdBlue etc? But yes, the issue is that the US requires dealers to refill them. And also sets a limit for how often refill cycles may happen. And the weight of the tank sets a limit on how large it may be. The result is simple: Small Diesel cars can’t exist legally in the US.
    - teh_klev 11y ago
      This is all completely new to me (and probably most folks unless they're running around in brand new diesel vehicles). The last diesel car I owned was a 1998 (Euro-2 standard when NOx emissions were more relaxed - so no DEF required [0]) Ford Mondeo which I disposed of in 2006 when the timing belt snapped ruining the engine. Since then I've owned older petrol engined high mileage "bangers" so I would never have encountered DEF unless I won the lottery and fancied a new Landrover :) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards#Emission_standards_for_passenger_cars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards#Em...

tomtompl 11y ago

More central planning!

donatj 11y ago
Is that sarcasm or a genuine call to action? By Poes law I have no idea.

walrus01 11y ago

Now I wonder what the diesel emissions of a 20 year old ford f350 are. A lot, I imagine.

Shivetya 11y ago
Well it wasn't that long ago that a study found that school buses had many times the acceptable levels of pollutants inside because they sat idling while waiting for kids. All I have to do is watch the local bus service, mostly the city one, to see how bad some vehicles pollute. So let us be honest here, the government needs to clamp down hard on all vehicles in its employ at all levels even more than going after consumer cars
- jschwartzi 11y ago
  I rode the bus every day as a child, and I will always associate the smell of diesel exhaust with the inside of the school bus, because it always smelled like exhaust.
LeifCarrotson 11y ago
Or worse, the 20 year old dump truck and bulldozer used by the local excavating company.
mtreis86 11y ago
Or a 30 year old container ship

verytrivial 11y ago

I'm willing to take down votes for this position, I don't understand the fuss here, nor to credulity of the actors whom should have (and probably did) know better. If the tests were meant to reflect real-world conditions, they should be be designed to do that -- they clearly weren't, and were only tiny sample of performance from which (wild?) extrapolations were drawn. Don't have a cry about it, fix the tests. Get together some disinterested parties to design them to capture the behaviour we all apparently expected the current dud tests to measure. This actually reminds me of how the failure of the bodies responsible for banking oversight cry WOE when the industries they were charged with overseeing did bad things. Failure of real oversight again. And it the same way, we have these same bodies (NOT end users) expecting to be paid for making these mistakes. Who benefits from the fines? Not car owners, not car makers.

awjr 11y ago
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 road. Politically this is a hard thing to do, however some countries are forcing the issue http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/consumer-news/95237/dutch-move-to-ban-diesel-and-petrol-cars-by-2025 http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/consumer-news/95237/du... This is going to hurt the car industry in ways we don't fully understand yet. In the short term I would be end-of-lining their diesel production and restructuring to electric.
- superuser2 11y ago
  The fact remains that millions of people park on the street or in alleys/garages they do not own. Until we start stomping on landlords' property rights to force them to install chargers, and also somehow install chargers in street parking spaces, EVs are just not usable for a huge segments of the population. The only way to make EV ownership practical is, ironically, to make your commute longer by living in the suburbs.

mhw 11y ago

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 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 driving styles that are found in the real world. Some people might be quite laid back about accelerating, but I think there's an awful lot of "floor the accelerator to get back up to the speed limit" as well. It's hardly surprising that in those periods the emissions from the engine will be higher than they were under the test cycle. So who do we blame? The vehicle manufacturers? Well, given current popular sentiment, down that path may lie vehicles which are designed to never exceed the emission limit. At the extreme end we might finish up with cars that automatically throttle back when they hit an emission limit, similar to processors throttling back when they hit thermal emission limits. But what do we do when we start having fatal accidents when people tried to overtake and the engine suddenly reduced power in an unpredictable way because it had gone over the emission limit? So, blame the emissions tests? Well, what should the emissions test be targeting? Never going over a particular threshold, say? In which case, how do you define a standard protocol (to ensure fairness across vehicles) that all vehicles will be able to follow? At one end you've got cars like the Peugeot Bipper Tepee with a 0-60 time north of 16 seconds (with both petrol and diesel engines - http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/carbycar/peugeot/bipper-tepee-2009/?section=data http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/carbycar/peugeot/bipper-tepee-20...). At the other you've got cars like the BMW X5 4.4 V8 which can accelerate roughly twice the mass in a quarter of the time (http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/specs/detail/?v=MBMWI-X50311 http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/specs/detail/?v=MBMWI-X50311 - the diesel engined version isn't far behind either). I'd imagine that a protocol that produces the highest emissions from the BMW would not even be achievable by the Peugeot. The only other party left to blame seems to be the drivers, and particularly their inability or unwillingness to drive in a style that minimises emissions (and at the same time most likely increases fuel economy). But the media seem reluctant to point the finger in that direction. I think we need to blame all of the above, but we need to get past the simplistic model of emissions being a constant that you can set a limit on for all vehicles regardless of how they are driven.

11y ago

mtgx 11y ago

Well this should put an end to the "It's not dieselgate, it's just VWgate" thing.

codecamper 11y ago

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.

dclowd9901 11y ago
Modern catalytic converters are so obscenely efficient, they barely have any effect, even cumulatively, on the amount of fuel lost. You have more loss in the drivetrain.
TorKlingberg 11y ago
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.
ars 11y ago
> The biggest problem today is global warming. No it is NOT! Before catalytic converters the air in many cities was killing people constantly. Global warming gets all the press, but pollution is FAR FAR worse. It will (and has killed) more people (and animals) than global warming ever could. The US is very clean (relatively) right now, so you think "oh everything is fine, let's bring back some pollution". But you have NO idea.

alkonaut 11y ago

Nothing strange about that - if there is a limit that is hard to meet (which there should be) then manufacturers will make a car that exactly meets the standard. And just like advertised fuel consumption figures, it will meet the standard under very controlled circumstances. In case of fuel consumption the manufacturers can reach the figure by taping shut door seams, using overinflated tyres, throwing out interior to reduce weight etc. Those aren't "real world conditions" but apparently they are real-world enough to use in advertising. Presumably the same conditions can and are used when testing emissions. The only conclusion we can draw is that emissions tests aren't used to make manufacturers build cars that emit at most X in real world conditions. That would be both unfair and expensive - it's better to say "use whatever extreme conditions you want and the emissions should be at most Y". In that case authorities can make Y < X and the whole thing is simpler and easier for everyone. If cars emit too much in real-world conditions? Then tighten the limits. This of course only works so long as no one cheats and designs workarounds specifically for the test conditions (which is what VW did).

deelowe 11y ago
Why couldn't a third party just take a production car and do the testing? This is how it works for most compliance testing. This whole situation seems needlessly complex. Or, probably more aptly, it reeks of crony capitalism and politics. Testing and compliance is an engineering problem. It should treated as such.
- mikekchar 11y ago
  Although keep in mind that requiring 3rd party, independent auditors creates a market for crappy/soft auditors. I learned that from ISO 9000 work. Companies don't want to hire someone who will fail their product/process, so they hire someone who will conveniently look the other way. Probably the only way is to have government testing... which brings us full circle to the potential of crony capitalism and politics.
  - deelowe 11y ago
    Industrial certifications like ISO 9000, six sigma, etc... are kind of a joke. What happens to those companies if they fail to maintain an acceptable standard? Quality goes down? Who cares? There's no liability. A better comparison would be something like UL or FCC. Make the standards and testing body liable for their claims. Require PEs to be part of the organization and personally responsible for signing off. This is a solved problem. We build bridges and electronics that don't kill people using similar methods.

kinofcain 11y ago

Every gasoline car is going to put out more pollution in "real world" driving scenarios as well. This isn't a problem with diesels, per se, it's a problem with all emissions standards.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Its supposed to be 'built-in' to the emissions standard. The lab levels are so low, because that makes the road emissions in an acceptable range. Everybody involved knows this; its not a secret; there's no news here.
- kinofcain 11y ago
  Yes, I was trying to figure out an eloquent way to add something to that effect to my comment, but I think you've done a better job than what I had drafted anyway. What would be interesting, is if diesels were predominantly more likely to exceed those lab levels than gasoline cars to a significant amount, or if they were exceeding those standards to an unexpected level. That's still possible, and it would mean we need to update the emissions standards and/or the test process, but this article doesn't make that case.
_ph_ 11y ago
The problem is not, that in "real world" driving they exhaust some more (like 20%) but rather 10x (1000%) more than during those tests. That means, the pollution numbers are not just a bit "optimistic" like with fuel consumption, but completely unrelated to the real life numbers.

TwoWheelWonder 11y ago

My 1998 Ram with 12 valve 5.9L Cummins then... Is killing us all, loudly. Gets 25mpg on the highway though.

S_A_P 11y ago

I don't get the math about diesel. American refineries produce 12 gallons of diesel and 19 gallons of gasoline on average[1] from a barrel of oil(42 gallons). I seem to remember that figure being lower and it looks like googles answer was 10 gallons at one point using the same site reference. I think that there was a push to get most cars off of gasoline and on to diesel before the VW scandal, and that diesel was going to save the world. I didn't see how we were going to make that work when there is 50-80% less of the stuff per barrel of oil. I think in the real world the MPG gains are 25-35%[2] I don't know that EVs are the savior they're pitched as, unless we can make battery tech and power generation cleaner. It looks like there is progress in that arena, so hopefully that continues. I think that we have demonstrably cleaned up gasoline cars while also increasing power output and MPG, and progress in that arena should continue as well. I think that diesel for passenger cars is a dead end, and it should be left to big rigs and heavy duty vehicles. [1] http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=327&t=9 http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=327&t=9 [2]https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/di_diesels.shtml https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/di_diesels.shtml

commenter1239 11y ago
I think the main push to go off gasoline onto diesel, is mainly biodiesel, where crude oil is not required for production. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel_production