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> VAG just got caught first. Sure. Since the VW incident, many cars from several of the big automakers have been found to fail emissions tests. > I wonder if

• nashashmi 8y ago
  > You don't get to cheat on a test, brag about how you passed, and then if you're discovered, claim that the test was too hard. Too late. It is the competition that pushes you to such extremes. If others are doing it, then what is to stop you. Too much regulation and court procedures are preventing others from coming out and blowing the whistle on themselves.
  • stochastic_monk 8y ago
    The point of regulation is so that everyone has to reach the same bar. Breaking the rules to cut costs doesn’t absolve you.
    • nashashmi 8y ago
      And when the regulation fails to regulate for a long period of time, such that all eventually meet the regulation with either a loophole or a crime, it does not make the system any fairer when the axe falls. If the reg's were never put into effect, and companies never given citations, it is institutional failure. And very unfair to all entities who are suddenly scolded at not meeting the criteria. VW presumably started it. Other companies eventually competed. And all of a sudden everyone is now in violation. It is like cheating on a test. One kid starts it. Teacher does not care. Kid does not get scolded. Competition gets intense. Rest of kids start cheating too. The axe falls, sometimes on the dull, slow kid, and then everyone falls in line. But then teacher goes back and sees who else cheated in the past, and the entire class is outed. How is this fair again?
  • jrockway 8y ago
    > Too much regulation and court procedures are preventing others from coming out and blowing the whistle on themselves. "The penalties for murder are too harsh, so people aren't confessing to many unsolved murders." Well, yeah. I would not blame "the system" for this, however.
    • nashashmi 8y ago
      Murder and emissions fraud are like apples to oranges. Emissions fraud are a corporate practice, while murder is a one-off event. Coming clear on the latter improves all industry. For the record, there have been cases where criminals have come forward for crimes after statute of limitations expired. I am not sure it if was in particular to murder though.
      • jrockway 8y ago
        I think you get my point, though. Amnesty for rule violations does not discourage future violations. "Everyone's cheating on emissions testing and there's no penalty" isn't going to dissuade anyone from cheating on emissions testing. You can compare it to "you are allowed to murder anyone you want, as long as you confess afterwards" and see that that's not the best public policy if your goal is to reduce murders.
• gascan 8y ago
  It's not even like the test couldn't be met, VAG just wanted to skip the urea system. At the same time as they were cheating, they were selling other diesels with urea that met the regs just fine, no cheating.
  • selectodude 8y ago
    The test could even be met without the urea system. But the car would have to run rich and flush out its NOx system more often, which uses fuel and lowers performance. The thing that was so marvelous about the Volkswagen TDI engine was how all of its performance numbers and fuel economy were better than what was advertised. Other manufacturers were racking their brains trying to figure out how they did it.
    • lttlrck 8y ago
      It seems a little hard to believe that other manufacturers had no idea how they did it. If it was so confounding it could quickly resolved by plugging in an analyzer and run a test cycle... Maybe VW isn't the origin of this, they could have seen another manufacturer doing something similar, decided to join in and took it too far.
      • zwily 8y ago
        They may have done exactly that, but not in highway conditions, and so got fooled just like the inspection locations.
    • tormeh 8y ago
      What's the point? Urea is almost free. I don't get why it was ever a big deal.
      • selectodude 8y ago
        The DEF itself is pretty inexpensive (though not free, like $8/gal), but the system to keep it from freezing in wintertime is actually kind of a pain, since it freezes at -10C but decomposes around 60C so your heating element can't be too hot. The cost savings from not using it were rather substantial. Volkswagen TDIs were the cheapest performance diesel cars by a rather large margin.
• Klathmon 8y ago
  I don't have any evidence on hand, but I distinctly remember most of the auto makers complaining every step of the way about most emissions regulations. Granted, it tends to get a "boy who cried wolf" feel to it as they've always done it, but they absolutely raised a stink about the constantly rising regulations.
  • freehunter 8y ago
    Like you said, everyone is going to cry when their burden is increased in any way, even if it's a completely reasonable increase. Companies complain if their employees request cost of living raises, and people complain when prices rise due to rising cost of living. At some point, it drowns out any legitimate complaints. If you've been saying the regulations are too high yet have been meeting it every time, then a new regulation comes out that is actually too high and you can't meet it, people will take you less seriously. If you then pretend to meet those requirements even though they were too high, you get zero points.
  • wahern 8y ago
    “It’s sort of a case where the dog actually caught the bus,” Gillis told me. “Now what’s it going to do?” (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/how-the-carmakers-trumped-themselves/562400/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/how-the-...) Referring to American car manufacturers' anti-CAFE wishlist being adopted by Scott Pruitt's EPA. The wishlist was submitted as a sort of bargaining piece, the idea being that industry demand something extreme expecting the incoming administration to meet them halfway. Except Pruitt just accepted it without reservation[1], and the industry was caught flat-footed. So now they're actually _repudiating_ some of their arguments. The dirty little secret of the car industry is that efficiency and safety regulations help drive the upgrade cycle. When every car from this year has feature X, then all used cars instantly become out-dated and even unsafe in the minds of consumers. And the timelines set out by the regulators help to coordinate competition in a way that would be illegal otherwise. For example, if a new efficiency or safety standard is still 5 years out, then everybody knows to a high degree of certainty how each competitor will time and stage their rollout (not too early, not too late). The benefits may not exceed the overall costs of the regulation, but the industry is built around the system and pulling the rug out creates chaos. [1] I guess this was a case of the Trump administration taking industry's rhetoric literally and not seriously.
• hwillis 8y ago
  Seriously- the Jetta TDI made 11% less power[1] in compliance mode. This isn't about the regulations being hard to meet, it's about flagrantly disregarding the EPA. It's about how pathetically toothless the EPA is, that they didn't have the funding or reach to discover this and instead college students figured it out. [1]: https://jalopnik.com/heres-how-much-horsepower-volkswagens-lose-from-their-d-1734341446 https://jalopnik.com/heres-how-much-horsepower-volkswagens-l...
  • Reason077 8y ago
    Toothless? The EPA is like a great white shark compared to European regulators.
    • jacquesm 8y ago
      Was.
      • NeoBasilisk 8y ago
        Yeah, the fact that Scott Pruitt was the head of the EPA for over a year was a sick joke.
  • hinkley 8y ago
    The year I bought my Jetta it was the most efficient midsize sedan by a wide margin. I bought it because my friends had Priuses and it was feeling pretty monochromatic at my house. The skeptic in me should have known better. One manufacturer was blowing everyone else out of the water? German engineering? A seriously nifty gearbox? Are those enough to explain the difference? Apparently not.
• jerf 8y ago
  "It's telling that the automakers have chosen to cheat rather than call out the tests for being unrealistic" They do that, too. You can probably imagine the response the HN crowd would give, which is pretty much the same response the news media would spin it with... money-grubbing rich companies trying to escape from beneficent, unambiguously good laws so they can make more dirty, polluting money. It doesn't play well, so they don't make this argument in public. But if you live in Michigan, you can find plenty of engineers who grouse about the standards in various ways, and not just "they're hard". (Believe it or not, engineers have families too, and like them and their families to not die in the cars they quite likely drive themselves.) Between the media's drive to drum up antipathy towards the automotive companies for both their own ideological reasons and simply because stories about big corrupt companies sell, and the ever-present and unavoidable politics (of all kinds) involved in any sort of standards setting, there's so much noise that on those occasions where literally impossible regulations are created, the system is not very good at dealing with it. I am speaking neutrally here, because in the real world, balancing between costs and benefits of regulations is a very hard problem and I'm not really yelling at any particular party here for not getting it perfect. It's a systemic problem. I rather strongly suspect that if we could get a perfect judge that the current set of regulations is probably already impossible to comply with at all; failing that it probably can't be complied with economically. I seriously doubt emissions are the only problems, they're just the ones people are motivated to test. I bet if Consumer's Reports or a similar organization set up a full legal compliance suite they couldn't buy a single car from a dealership lot that complied completely with everything. I think they'd be close on most measurements. But I bet every vehicle would fail something, and there'd be a non-trivial number of rather substantial failures. (For an example of the latter, noise regulations on how loud cars can be as they pass you at various speeds are really easy to fail on a specific car. A particular bit of trim that came loose during shipping or something can fail you out very easily. Now, this one is less important in the grand scheme of things than emissions, but it's an example of a regulation that could pass at the test site but fail on many or even most cars in the field.)
  • gwbas1c 8y ago
    Considering that, in recent years, cars got larger, more powerful, have better mileage, and pollute less: I think the regulations are extremely realistic. It's not like that late 1970s and early 1980s when cars became smaller and had anemic engines in order to meet with new regulations.