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Germany Orders Daimler to Recall 774,000 Diesels in Europe

106 points by felixbraun 8y ago

izend 8y ago
I'm really surprised the Europe big car manufacturers spent so much effort on small Diesel engines instead of Turbo gasoline engines. My theory is the fact that having a majority of Diesel vehicles in Europe lowers their oil consumption vs Gasoline engines, hence, lowers their CO2 production but with the extremely negative fact of increased local smog.
- zwieback 8y ago
  Diesel was always popular due to high fuel efficiency. Since diesel also has lower CO2 emissions they really took of in the 90s. However, gas engines are catching up in both areas.
- trhway 8y ago
  Modern small diesels are also turbo, they just more efficient than the gas ones.
- beberlei 8y ago
  Diesel has a much lower tax than gasoline per liter. The car manufacturers just serve the higher demand for diesel cars, because it is cheaper to operate monthly.
  - gambiting 8y ago
    There's at least few EU countries where Diesel is much more expensive than petrol at the moment. People like diesels because it's actually hard to get huge fuel consumption with those, while if you're not particularly careful any turbo petrol will drink fuel quickly. I had a 1.6dCi Qashqai and that car would not burn more than 10L/100km, no matter what I did or how aggressively I drove. Zero chance. I also have a 1.2TSI petrol Polo, and you can easily make it use 20L/100km if you drive it like a maniac - you have to be actively careful to keep it in the 6-7L/100km range, while the 1.6dCi would easily do 5L/100km without really thinking about it.
    - danieldisu 8y ago
      Wow, I have a Seat with the same 1.2 engine and is really really hard for me to surpass the 8L/100. Maybe driving very fast can get you over these numbers but driving in the legal limit of most countries won't make you burn that much fuel!
      - gambiting 8y ago
        It has absolutely nothing to do with driving above the speed limit -as a matter of fact driving at a completely legal 120km/h won't use anywhere near as much fuel because you are travelling pretty fast and not accelerating anymore, so the consumption will be decent. But try accelerating from every stop in the city all the way to the redline, pedal to the floor, but never going above 50km/h - you would never go above the speed limit, but the tank would disappear in no time at all. I'm certain that if I tried I could burn the entire 50L tank of the Polo in ~250km, by just keeping it in high revs and accelerating hard(as hard as you can in a 90bhp Polo anyway) and frequently. The injectors will happily keep feeding the engine more and more fuel as you do this, while diesel common rail systems have almost a hard limit of how much fuel they can inject - no matter what you do you won't go above certain values.
        Y_Y 8y ago
        > not accelerating anymore maybe in a frictionless vacuum! At high speeds the force you have to exert to counter wind resistance is less than what you need to gently accelerate when going slowly.
      - growlist 8y ago
        Agree with you on this. I had a Golf 1.4 TSI which I drove quickly and it was amazingly frugal.
- rb808 8y ago
  Exactly, global warming is the main environmental target in the news and laws. NOx is secondary.
- Pulcinella 8y ago
  Diesel emissions standards are lower in Europe than in US. So that makes diesels easier to produce and sell in Europe. I believe, as you said, diesels also have lower CO2 emissions per mile than gasoline engines. The problem is the increased SOx and NOx emissions as well as soot emissions that contribute to smog. In theory, Diesel engines should have much lower smog than gas engines because Diesel engines require excess oxygen rather than stoichiometric ammounts like in gas engines. The problem is that diesel fuel doesn’t vaporize nearly as well as gasoline, so you end of with tiny droplets of diesel in the engine rather than pure vapor. So even though there is excess oxygen, the O2 can’t get to the inside of the droplets and the engine heat basically cooks them into soot.
  - seanalltogether 8y ago
    Is this simply because diesel is less refined, so it has less overall hydrocarbons then gasoline and higher amounts of other junk molecules?
    - ihsw2 8y ago
      Perhaps but car manufacturers will point fingers at higher sulfur content in lower-graded diesel. Other issues like fuel filters and water traps performing sub-optimally (due to age or lack of replacement/maintenance) can introduce contaminants that further exacerbate the situation, surely there are sensors for this.
      - growlist 8y ago
        People also deliberately disable the DPF between annual checks here in the UK. The DPF equals lower emissions but also worse mpg.
    - abakker 8y ago
      Diesel is not really "less refined" it is a different distillate of crude oil, and contains heavier molecules. I think major contributor to its worse atomization is it's higher viscosity and lower vapor pressure at room temperature. It just evaporates a lot less readily. If you've never handled gas and diesel, diesel feels a lot oilier and if you soak a rag with diesel vs gas, the gas will evaporate a lot sooner.
- gascan 8y ago
  Small turbodiesels were way ahead of small gasoline engines for decades in fuel economy, power, and so forth. Diesel, which uses direct injection and compression ignition, has always been a natural fit with turbocharging, which makes them intrinsically suited to the paradigm of a small engine for efficiency with a turbo for power. They also intrinsically have great low-end torque, which complements the top-end power of turbos. Turbo gasoline engines were hard to make well, I gather mostly due to predetonation. Gasoline engines historically use manifold injection and spark ignition, which limits compression ratios. However, with advances in technology, particularly in engine computers & sensors, small turbo gas engines have recently become far more competitive. So, basically, from the vantage point of 2018 turbodiesels might seem like a questionable choice- but ten or twenty years ago, good small turbocharged gasoline engines mostly didn't exist.
  - rconti 8y ago
    This is my understanding as well. Highly advanced knock and temperature sensors, high pressure gasoline direct injection, turbochargers, and high compression ratios in gasoline engines are a relatively new combination. Gasoline engines have seen huge leaps in efficiency in the past decade.
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    Personally I find it much easier to drive Diesels in a fuel-economic fashion. With gasoline cars you really have to watch it.
- InternetOfStuff 8y ago
  Because of their process, diesels are also more efficient at partial loads (e.g. city driving) than petrol engines. This gives you an efficiency advantage right off the bat.
samfriedman 8y ago
>Germany’s automotive regulator KBA found five unapproved software functions in Daimler’s Euro 6 diesel engines, affecting as many as 1 million vehicles in Germany, Bild am Sonntag reported Sunday. And then, >“We don’t see any evidence that Daimler was designing software to deliberately cheat on emission testing,” said Arndt Ellinghorst, an analyst with Evercore ISI in London. If it's not a defeat device like the VW scandal, then what specifically is the prohibited function causing the recall? The article doesn't really explain what the device or function in question is.
- bald 8y ago
  One way to reconcile these seemingly contradictory statements is the following. The actual programmer & designer of the software is the supplier of the engine control units (ECUs), in most cases Bosch. The software that they supply actually already contains these cheating routines. These routines are delivered as a part of the software packages, and can be turned on/off with some flags. It is up to the auto company how to set these flags. Source: Close relatives working in the car industry.
  - okmokmz 8y ago
    So is the issue that those routines are supported regardless of the configuration, or that they were delivered in a way that the routines can still be used?
    - endymi0n 8y ago
      Exactly. This very ambiguity makes it easy for both sides to just shift the blame to the other side in case this whole collusion gets discovered – which you can now nicely see in the wild. In the best case scenario for both companies, both just get away with it this way. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability Obviously, no parts supplier would integrate these functions in the first place if nobody asked for it...
    - gascan 8y ago
      Taking this a step further, presumably an honest vendor only need flash a new firmware at the dealer to the ECU with the unused cheating codeblocks removed, while a secretly cheating vendor is suddenly trapped.
ProfessorLayton 8y ago
The most vexing part of this is how long it took for others to notice. Did no competitor try to legitimately meet emissions requirements, fail, and immediately turn to Dalimer/VW to see how they "met" those requirements? If the answer is collusion, then that only raises more questions on what else they could all be working to sweep under the rug.
- ummonk 8y ago
  Mazda announced in 2012 that it was going to introduce the Mazda 6 diesel in the US, but kept delaying due to having trouble getting it to meet US and California emissions standards. It has only now figured out a way to meet emissions standards without overly compromising performance, and is releasing a diesel vehicle in the US (the CX-5) now, after a 6 year wait.
- stefan_ 8y ago
  Well, if you look at the third-party emissions tests from normal city driving, emissions of basically all brands are many times above the limit. They were just smart enough not to sell in the US. But really the bigger question is: surely if this was somehow fixable by a software ECU update, they would have done so? Defeat devices are an old game in the car industry. But as long as those recalls consist of merely software updates, it's clear they are just preparing the next, even bigger con while apologizing for the current one, and EU governments are happy to look the other way.
  - namibj 8y ago
    It's relatively simple. If you have AdBlue, you pretty much eliminate NOx. PM2.5 should be fix-able with either filters or driving the engine iirc more lean, to incentivize full combustion. That might increase the use of AdBlue required, but I am not sure. If I were driving, I'd look for a car that, based on my own testing (e.g., during a test drive at the dealer), measures sane emissions and drinks AdBlue. But for all I know, such a car does not exist. I really wish they make them take all the dirty cars from the streets, mandating a retrofit AdBlue system to allow them back onto the street. With an allowance for those that have an AdBlue system already to measure at a test drive, i.e., with a probe shoved up the tailpipe, and the mechanic/owner driving a loop around the block or so, maybe with some mandatory measuring for the first 100km after installation or so, and if the car at any point during this fails the standards, don't allow it back on the road. The effect from this would be that teaching the car to cheat would be next to impossible, especially if you could mandate another test e.g. at any point between 10000 and 15000km, as best fits the owner schedule. While it should be possible to engineer a cheat for this, it would be hard to conceal as an accidental bug, which would be what they'd have to make it look like to avoid potential criminal liability (they could certainly create suitable criminal statutes along with the testing requirements, and make sure these hit those that actually do it, along with everyone up the chain. Make it conspiracy or so, and catch all at once. Some prosecutor would have a lot of fun.)
mkirklions 8y ago
Automotive seems so broken. Japan hasnt innovated in 30 years. US companies are too big/corrupt to make good decisions. European cars are all style. Expensive, non-reliable, hard to fix. Not sure what the solution is, everyone else is a low quality copycat(Tesla/Kia/Chinese car companies). Not to say any cars are bad, but the companies are awful. A car is entirely dependent on the engineering team behind it, you can only hope that a company set things up to be successful.
- ddoolin 8y ago
  I know this is not really your point, but what do you mean the US manufacturers are corrupt? From where I'm standing, it looks like European autos have that problem more than the US does.
  - mkirklions 8y ago
    I think everyone gets a piece of the profit rather than going back to customers. Unions exploiting the company. Sales people getting special favors. It seems sick.
- Spearchucker 8y ago
  Just as interesting as the charge that US auto companies are all corrupt - how are European cars unreliable? German cars especially are amongst, if not the most reliable in the world, no? Bear in mind I'm not a petrol head so this is my perception.
  - mkirklions 8y ago
    The make/model matters more than company. An f150 is wayyy better than anything else ford makes. Its really uncomparable. As another note, the Chevy Sonic was designed in Germany and is probably the worst car GM made in recent memory. But yes, German cars are known to be a pain to own due to problems and the difficulty to fix them.
  - rconti 8y ago
    European cars are considered unreliable in the US because they're generally high-end models with newer tech (and more of it), and that kind of stuff tends to break and be expensive to fix. From a mechanical standpoint, they're not particularly unreliable, but again, parts can be pricier (particularly in the US). The way I view it is that Japanese cars are built with extreme precision in high volume to exactly the right tolerances. They tend to be very consistent and reliable and parts are cheap due to volume. However, if things DO fail, it's generally because they're just slightly underbuilt and built to a pricepoint. German cars tend to be overbuilt from a mechanical standpoint (heavier/sturdier parts) but that doesn't mean they're more reliable as a finished product.
Tomte 8y ago
Another development: two top executives of Audi are being investigated, and the prosecution has executed search warrants on their private homes.
Mizza 8y ago
Diesel engines should be banned entirely. The collective effects on human health are catastrophic, even when compared to gasoline. You will find a lot of Europeans, particularly Germans, who still believe in the "efficiency" and "cleanness" of diesel engines, but this is really just a residual effect of VW's extensive marketing campaign during their turbodiesel "glory days" - before they got caught lying about it. VW really caused crimes against humanity that we're still paying for. There is no such thing as "clean" diesel and there never will be.
- abakker 8y ago
  Evidence for this? They product more soot and smog, but less CO2. For certain driving characteristics they are MUCH better than gas. (E.g. heavy trucks that require larger amounts of torque)
  - Mizza 8y ago
    There is detailed discussions about SOx/NOx further down this thread. News articles are easily found as well: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/15/diesel-emissions-test-scandal-causes-38000-early-deaths-year-study https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/15/diesel-e... http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/17/4/733 http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/17/4/733 https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jan/27/diesel-engine-fumes-worse-petrol https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jan/27/diesel-engine-fum... etc etc Diesel is significantly worse for human health than gasoline.
  - iguy 8y ago
    Googling for numbers, many sources quote these EU tests which everyone's cheating on. Out in the real world it sounds like switching Petrol -> Diesel saves maybe 20-30% CO2, and emits 10-20x the NOx. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969717333296 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896971...
    - namibj 8y ago
      You can fix NOx with AdBlue. You can't fix CO2.

106 points by felixbraun 8y ago

I'm really surprised the Europe big car manufacturers spent so much effort on small Diesel engines instead of Turbo gasoline engines. My theory is the fact that having a majority of Diesel vehicles in Europe lowers their oil consumption vs Gasoline engines, hence, lowers their CO2 production but with the extremely negative fact of increased local smog.

zwieback 8y ago
Diesel was always popular due to high fuel efficiency. Since diesel also has lower CO2 emissions they really took of in the 90s. However, gas engines are catching up in both areas.
trhway 8y ago
Modern small diesels are also turbo, they just more efficient than the gas ones.
beberlei 8y ago
Diesel has a much lower tax than gasoline per liter. The car manufacturers just serve the higher demand for diesel cars, because it is cheaper to operate monthly.
- gambiting 8y ago
  There's at least few EU countries where Diesel is much more expensive than petrol at the moment. People like diesels because it's actually hard to get huge fuel consumption with those, while if you're not particularly careful any turbo petrol will drink fuel quickly. I had a 1.6dCi Qashqai and that car would not burn more than 10L/100km, no matter what I did or how aggressively I drove. Zero chance. I also have a 1.2TSI petrol Polo, and you can easily make it use 20L/100km if you drive it like a maniac - you have to be actively careful to keep it in the 6-7L/100km range, while the 1.6dCi would easily do 5L/100km without really thinking about it.
  - danieldisu 8y ago
    Wow, I have a Seat with the same 1.2 engine and is really really hard for me to surpass the 8L/100. Maybe driving very fast can get you over these numbers but driving in the legal limit of most countries won't make you burn that much fuel!
    - gambiting 8y ago
      It has absolutely nothing to do with driving above the speed limit -as a matter of fact driving at a completely legal 120km/h won't use anywhere near as much fuel because you are travelling pretty fast and not accelerating anymore, so the consumption will be decent. But try accelerating from every stop in the city all the way to the redline, pedal to the floor, but never going above 50km/h - you would never go above the speed limit, but the tank would disappear in no time at all. I'm certain that if I tried I could burn the entire 50L tank of the Polo in ~250km, by just keeping it in high revs and accelerating hard(as hard as you can in a 90bhp Polo anyway) and frequently. The injectors will happily keep feeding the engine more and more fuel as you do this, while diesel common rail systems have almost a hard limit of how much fuel they can inject - no matter what you do you won't go above certain values.
      - Y_Y 8y ago
        > not accelerating anymore maybe in a frictionless vacuum! At high speeds the force you have to exert to counter wind resistance is less than what you need to gently accelerate when going slowly.
    - growlist 8y ago
      Agree with you on this. I had a Golf 1.4 TSI which I drove quickly and it was amazingly frugal.
rb808 8y ago
Exactly, global warming is the main environmental target in the news and laws. NOx is secondary.
Pulcinella 8y ago
Diesel emissions standards are lower in Europe than in US. So that makes diesels easier to produce and sell in Europe. I believe, as you said, diesels also have lower CO2 emissions per mile than gasoline engines. The problem is the increased SOx and NOx emissions as well as soot emissions that contribute to smog. In theory, Diesel engines should have much lower smog than gas engines because Diesel engines require excess oxygen rather than stoichiometric ammounts like in gas engines. The problem is that diesel fuel doesn’t vaporize nearly as well as gasoline, so you end of with tiny droplets of diesel in the engine rather than pure vapor. So even though there is excess oxygen, the O2 can’t get to the inside of the droplets and the engine heat basically cooks them into soot.
- seanalltogether 8y ago
  Is this simply because diesel is less refined, so it has less overall hydrocarbons then gasoline and higher amounts of other junk molecules?
  - ihsw2 8y ago
    Perhaps but car manufacturers will point fingers at higher sulfur content in lower-graded diesel. Other issues like fuel filters and water traps performing sub-optimally (due to age or lack of replacement/maintenance) can introduce contaminants that further exacerbate the situation, surely there are sensors for this.
    - growlist 8y ago
      People also deliberately disable the DPF between annual checks here in the UK. The DPF equals lower emissions but also worse mpg.
  - abakker 8y ago
    Diesel is not really "less refined" it is a different distillate of crude oil, and contains heavier molecules. I think major contributor to its worse atomization is it's higher viscosity and lower vapor pressure at room temperature. It just evaporates a lot less readily. If you've never handled gas and diesel, diesel feels a lot oilier and if you soak a rag with diesel vs gas, the gas will evaporate a lot sooner.
gascan 8y ago
Small turbodiesels were way ahead of small gasoline engines for decades in fuel economy, power, and so forth. Diesel, which uses direct injection and compression ignition, has always been a natural fit with turbocharging, which makes them intrinsically suited to the paradigm of a small engine for efficiency with a turbo for power. They also intrinsically have great low-end torque, which complements the top-end power of turbos. Turbo gasoline engines were hard to make well, I gather mostly due to predetonation. Gasoline engines historically use manifold injection and spark ignition, which limits compression ratios. However, with advances in technology, particularly in engine computers & sensors, small turbo gas engines have recently become far more competitive. So, basically, from the vantage point of 2018 turbodiesels might seem like a questionable choice- but ten or twenty years ago, good small turbocharged gasoline engines mostly didn't exist.
- rconti 8y ago
  This is my understanding as well. Highly advanced knock and temperature sensors, high pressure gasoline direct injection, turbochargers, and high compression ratios in gasoline engines are a relatively new combination. Gasoline engines have seen huge leaps in efficiency in the past decade.
- blattimwind 8y ago
  Personally I find it much easier to drive Diesels in a fuel-economic fashion. With gasoline cars you really have to watch it.
InternetOfStuff 8y ago
Because of their process, diesels are also more efficient at partial loads (e.g. city driving) than petrol engines. This gives you an efficiency advantage right off the bat.

samfriedman 8y ago

>Germany’s automotive regulator KBA found five unapproved software functions in Daimler’s Euro 6 diesel engines, affecting as many as 1 million vehicles in Germany, Bild am Sonntag reported Sunday. And then, >“We don’t see any evidence that Daimler was designing software to deliberately cheat on emission testing,” said Arndt Ellinghorst, an analyst with Evercore ISI in London. If it's not a defeat device like the VW scandal, then what specifically is the prohibited function causing the recall? The article doesn't really explain what the device or function in question is.

bald 8y ago
One way to reconcile these seemingly contradictory statements is the following. The actual programmer & designer of the software is the supplier of the engine control units (ECUs), in most cases Bosch. The software that they supply actually already contains these cheating routines. These routines are delivered as a part of the software packages, and can be turned on/off with some flags. It is up to the auto company how to set these flags. Source: Close relatives working in the car industry.
- okmokmz 8y ago
  So is the issue that those routines are supported regardless of the configuration, or that they were delivered in a way that the routines can still be used?
  - endymi0n 8y ago
    Exactly. This very ambiguity makes it easy for both sides to just shift the blame to the other side in case this whole collusion gets discovered – which you can now nicely see in the wild. In the best case scenario for both companies, both just get away with it this way. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability Obviously, no parts supplier would integrate these functions in the first place if nobody asked for it...
  - gascan 8y ago
    Taking this a step further, presumably an honest vendor only need flash a new firmware at the dealer to the ECU with the unused cheating codeblocks removed, while a secretly cheating vendor is suddenly trapped.

ProfessorLayton 8y ago

The most vexing part of this is how long it took for others to notice. Did no competitor try to legitimately meet emissions requirements, fail, and immediately turn to Dalimer/VW to see how they "met" those requirements? If the answer is collusion, then that only raises more questions on what else they could all be working to sweep under the rug.

ummonk 8y ago
Mazda announced in 2012 that it was going to introduce the Mazda 6 diesel in the US, but kept delaying due to having trouble getting it to meet US and California emissions standards. It has only now figured out a way to meet emissions standards without overly compromising performance, and is releasing a diesel vehicle in the US (the CX-5) now, after a 6 year wait.
stefan_ 8y ago
Well, if you look at the third-party emissions tests from normal city driving, emissions of basically all brands are many times above the limit. They were just smart enough not to sell in the US. But really the bigger question is: surely if this was somehow fixable by a software ECU update, they would have done so? Defeat devices are an old game in the car industry. But as long as those recalls consist of merely software updates, it's clear they are just preparing the next, even bigger con while apologizing for the current one, and EU governments are happy to look the other way.
- namibj 8y ago
  It's relatively simple. If you have AdBlue, you pretty much eliminate NOx. PM2.5 should be fix-able with either filters or driving the engine iirc more lean, to incentivize full combustion. That might increase the use of AdBlue required, but I am not sure. If I were driving, I'd look for a car that, based on my own testing (e.g., during a test drive at the dealer), measures sane emissions and drinks AdBlue. But for all I know, such a car does not exist. I really wish they make them take all the dirty cars from the streets, mandating a retrofit AdBlue system to allow them back onto the street. With an allowance for those that have an AdBlue system already to measure at a test drive, i.e., with a probe shoved up the tailpipe, and the mechanic/owner driving a loop around the block or so, maybe with some mandatory measuring for the first 100km after installation or so, and if the car at any point during this fails the standards, don't allow it back on the road. The effect from this would be that teaching the car to cheat would be next to impossible, especially if you could mandate another test e.g. at any point between 10000 and 15000km, as best fits the owner schedule. While it should be possible to engineer a cheat for this, it would be hard to conceal as an accidental bug, which would be what they'd have to make it look like to avoid potential criminal liability (they could certainly create suitable criminal statutes along with the testing requirements, and make sure these hit those that actually do it, along with everyone up the chain. Make it conspiracy or so, and catch all at once. Some prosecutor would have a lot of fun.)

mkirklions 8y ago

Automotive seems so broken. Japan hasnt innovated in 30 years. US companies are too big/corrupt to make good decisions. European cars are all style. Expensive, non-reliable, hard to fix. Not sure what the solution is, everyone else is a low quality copycat(Tesla/Kia/Chinese car companies). Not to say any cars are bad, but the companies are awful. A car is entirely dependent on the engineering team behind it, you can only hope that a company set things up to be successful.

ddoolin 8y ago
I know this is not really your point, but what do you mean the US manufacturers are corrupt? From where I'm standing, it looks like European autos have that problem more than the US does.
- mkirklions 8y ago
  I think everyone gets a piece of the profit rather than going back to customers. Unions exploiting the company. Sales people getting special favors. It seems sick.
Spearchucker 8y ago
Just as interesting as the charge that US auto companies are all corrupt - how are European cars unreliable? German cars especially are amongst, if not the most reliable in the world, no? Bear in mind I'm not a petrol head so this is my perception.
- mkirklions 8y ago
  The make/model matters more than company. An f150 is wayyy better than anything else ford makes. Its really uncomparable. As another note, the Chevy Sonic was designed in Germany and is probably the worst car GM made in recent memory. But yes, German cars are known to be a pain to own due to problems and the difficulty to fix them.
- rconti 8y ago
  European cars are considered unreliable in the US because they're generally high-end models with newer tech (and more of it), and that kind of stuff tends to break and be expensive to fix. From a mechanical standpoint, they're not particularly unreliable, but again, parts can be pricier (particularly in the US). The way I view it is that Japanese cars are built with extreme precision in high volume to exactly the right tolerances. They tend to be very consistent and reliable and parts are cheap due to volume. However, if things DO fail, it's generally because they're just slightly underbuilt and built to a pricepoint. German cars tend to be overbuilt from a mechanical standpoint (heavier/sturdier parts) but that doesn't mean they're more reliable as a finished product.

Tomte 8y ago

Another development: two top executives of Audi are being investigated, and the prosecution has executed search warrants on their private homes.

Mizza 8y ago

Diesel engines should be banned entirely. The collective effects on human health are catastrophic, even when compared to gasoline. You will find a lot of Europeans, particularly Germans, who still believe in the "efficiency" and "cleanness" of diesel engines, but this is really just a residual effect of VW's extensive marketing campaign during their turbodiesel "glory days" - before they got caught lying about it. VW really caused crimes against humanity that we're still paying for. There is no such thing as "clean" diesel and there never will be.

abakker 8y ago
Evidence for this? They product more soot and smog, but less CO2. For certain driving characteristics they are MUCH better than gas. (E.g. heavy trucks that require larger amounts of torque)
- Mizza 8y ago
  There is detailed discussions about SOx/NOx further down this thread. News articles are easily found as well: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/15/diesel-emissions-test-scandal-causes-38000-early-deaths-year-study https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/15/diesel-e... http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/17/4/733 http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/17/4/733 https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jan/27/diesel-engine-fumes-worse-petrol https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jan/27/diesel-engine-fum... etc etc Diesel is significantly worse for human health than gasoline.
- iguy 8y ago
  Googling for numbers, many sources quote these EU tests which everyone's cheating on. Out in the real world it sounds like switching Petrol -> Diesel saves maybe 20-30% CO2, and emits 10-20x the NOx. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969717333296 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896971...
  - namibj 8y ago
    You can fix NOx with AdBlue. You can't fix CO2.