6 ms·

and what about the ones at literally every other company that produces diesels?

by soperj 6y ago

MrApathy 6y ago
My own admittedly uninformed understanding is that there was cheating all around, but VW was by far the most flagrant. BMW and Mercedes diesels required DEF (diesel exhaust fluid), whereas VW did not. Marketing and/or executive leadership (again, as per my understanding) pushed the notion that the additive would make diesels appear to be less attractive and who wants to add a second liquid beyond fuel every few hundred miles? But weren't they all cheating? The diesels with DEF were still above the legal limits, albeit to a lesser degree than the VW's who didn't even bother with DEF because, I guess, if you're going to cheat anyway... How incorrect is my understanding?
- davedx 6y ago
  Our VW Sharan required DEV.
hinkley 6y ago
How about 'rolling coal'?
- Syonyk 6y ago
  What about it? No vehicle will do it from the factory, so I don't see how it's relevant here. It's the result of running a diesel massively, massively over-rich (with aftermarket tuning), and it's absolute hell on the engine - that amount of diesel in the cylinder washes down the cylinder walls and wipes off the lubricating film, so the cylinder wear is insane from even fairly short periods of it. Even in diesel truck circles, "the other 99.9%" of truck owners think it's just as stupid as everyone else does - in addition to being engine abuse, it tends to attract an awful lot of unwelcome attention, and there are people who won't distinguish between "You've modified your truck to belch a column of coal black smoke for attention" and "An older diesel puts out a bit of brown smoke if you get on it hard suddenly," which can lead to some nuisance emissions testing. My truck (24 years and change) will smoke a bit if I stand on it and the fuel flow outruns boost coming up, but it's also entirely emissions compliant and passes the tests cleanly - it's just something older diesels do under certain conditions. I try my best to avoid it, but if I need to get a trailer up to speed (especially quickly, if someone is coming up hard behind me), it'll put out a bit of brown smoke until the turbo gets spinning. None of that has anything to do with VW, though. They were burning clean, which any sort of modern high pressure injection system will typically do, they just had really high NOx emissions for their emissions tier.
  - yread 6y ago
    > My truck (24 years and change) will smoke a bit if I stand on it and the fuel flow outruns boost coming up, but it's also entirely emissions compliant and passes the tests cleanly - it's just something older diesels do under certain conditions I always thought that banning old diesels from centers of European cities was just silly (they passed their emissions after all so they can't be billowing smoke, right?), thanks for changing my opinion
    - Syonyk 6y ago
      No problem. If your concern is the particulate matter, then, yes, banning old diesels makes some sense. They don't have the particulate filters - those started showing up in the 2000-2010 era. However, I would rather see that implemented as tighter standards, and if you can meet them with a retrofit kit, you can continue driving the older ones. We saw this with noise kits for older jets (retrofit kits that reduce the noise to the new standards), and if the concern is specifically emissions, then if you can make an older vehicle meet the newer standards, there's no reason to keep them out. I'm not a fan of arbitrarily destroying old but operational equipment. My truck is a '97, and I believe the smoke opacity limit for emissions testing is 40% (it's allowed to block/scatter 40% of the light going through the exhaust). I believe commercial trucks of the same age are held to roughly the same standards. That's a good bit of smoke in the exhaust. But until you get into the high pressure common rail stuff (up at 30k+ psi, multiple injections per cycle), you'll get some smoke under certain conditions.
    - gsnedders 6y ago
      Looking at emissions standards in Europe, a truck from 24 years ago in Europe, assuming its gross vehicle weight is between 1760 kg and 3500 kg, would be allowed to emit 0.25g of PM/km. The same limit for something built since 2013 is 0.0045g of PM/km. We're talking multiple orders of magnitude improvement here. As a sidenote, HO+NOx has gone from 1.7g/km to 0.350g/km in 2013 (and onto 0.215g/km since then, in 2016), which is often as significant when it comes to desires to reduce air pollution.
    - llampx 6y ago
      Emissions standards change over time. You could get some really polluting cars in the old days, and you can't anymore. Why should we be breathing in the smoke from these old cars from an era where emissions and pollution weren't taken as seriously as now?
- iso1631 6y ago
  Never heard of this before, I looked it up, but I still don't get it -- you're not getting more power, you're not getting better fuel efficiency, you're not getting a smoother ride, what's the point - you're literally burning money for no reason?
  - greedo 6y ago
    It's a popular way of making a political statement: Own the libs!
    - iso1631 6y ago
      cut off your nose to spite your face
  - Syonyk 6y ago
    > you're literally burning money for no reason? Correct. And destroying your engine in the process. Beyond washing down the cylinder walls (cylinder/ring wear) and diluting the engine oil in the process (worse lubrication for the bearings), EGTs tend to go absolutely nuts during the process (you're on the oxygen limited side of mixture, not the fuel limited side a diesel is intended to operate in), which means you stand a good chance of doing damage to the hot side of the turbocharger (high EGTs tend to start melting the corner tips of the turbine blades first, which is an easy check for a used diesel - if the blade corners aren't right, the engine has probably been abused), and it's hard on the rest of the engine too. It's quite literally as stupid as it sounds. There are cases where you do want to run a diesel like that - some of the custom tractor pulling engines will smoke an awful lot while they're spooling up and pulling, but that's an engine that's making insane horsepower for a short period of time, and they don't have a particularly long service life (like any competition engine). I believe they run on the rich side to use the excess fuel to keep combustion temperatures down (a stoichiometric mixture is usually far, far too hot). But on a road engine, it's just pointless engine abuse for style points (among the few people who actually think it's cool).
  - fossuser 6y ago
    I've only ever seen it once when I was in an EV Uber (it was a Model S) behind a pickup truck in Baltimore and the pickup kept blasting us with massive amounts of black soot (presumably because we were in an EV). There's a political element of "Truck Driving Republican" vs. "EV Driving Liberal" that powers some of this. I think Elon has been at last partially trying to reduce this polarization with how he behaves online to widen Tesla's appeal (though maybe I'm attributing too much intentionality here). On the west coast I was tailed super aggressively by a pickup in my model 3 on 280 which was a little scary (blinding me with headlights, switching lanes to stay 1 inch behind me). I watched cameras after to see if I cut him off or something, but I didn't. It has made me more wary of pick up trucks in general though.

and what about the ones at literally every other company that produces diesels?

by soperj 6y ago

and what about the ones at literally every other company that produces diesels?

My own admittedly uninformed understanding is that there was cheating all around, but VW was by far the most flagrant. BMW and Mercedes diesels required DEF (diesel exhaust fluid), whereas VW did not. Marketing and/or executive leadership (again, as per my understanding) pushed the notion that the additive would make diesels appear to be less attractive and who wants to add a second liquid beyond fuel every few hundred miles? But weren't they all cheating? The diesels with DEF were still above the legal limits, albeit to a lesser degree than the VW's who didn't even bother with DEF because, I guess, if you're going to cheat anyway... How incorrect is my understanding?

davedx 6y ago
Our VW Sharan required DEV.

hinkley 6y ago

How about 'rolling coal'?

Syonyk 6y ago
What about it? No vehicle will do it from the factory, so I don't see how it's relevant here. It's the result of running a diesel massively, massively over-rich (with aftermarket tuning), and it's absolute hell on the engine - that amount of diesel in the cylinder washes down the cylinder walls and wipes off the lubricating film, so the cylinder wear is insane from even fairly short periods of it. Even in diesel truck circles, "the other 99.9%" of truck owners think it's just as stupid as everyone else does - in addition to being engine abuse, it tends to attract an awful lot of unwelcome attention, and there are people who won't distinguish between "You've modified your truck to belch a column of coal black smoke for attention" and "An older diesel puts out a bit of brown smoke if you get on it hard suddenly," which can lead to some nuisance emissions testing. My truck (24 years and change) will smoke a bit if I stand on it and the fuel flow outruns boost coming up, but it's also entirely emissions compliant and passes the tests cleanly - it's just something older diesels do under certain conditions. I try my best to avoid it, but if I need to get a trailer up to speed (especially quickly, if someone is coming up hard behind me), it'll put out a bit of brown smoke until the turbo gets spinning. None of that has anything to do with VW, though. They were burning clean, which any sort of modern high pressure injection system will typically do, they just had really high NOx emissions for their emissions tier.
- yread 6y ago
  > My truck (24 years and change) will smoke a bit if I stand on it and the fuel flow outruns boost coming up, but it's also entirely emissions compliant and passes the tests cleanly - it's just something older diesels do under certain conditions I always thought that banning old diesels from centers of European cities was just silly (they passed their emissions after all so they can't be billowing smoke, right?), thanks for changing my opinion
  - Syonyk 6y ago
    No problem. If your concern is the particulate matter, then, yes, banning old diesels makes some sense. They don't have the particulate filters - those started showing up in the 2000-2010 era. However, I would rather see that implemented as tighter standards, and if you can meet them with a retrofit kit, you can continue driving the older ones. We saw this with noise kits for older jets (retrofit kits that reduce the noise to the new standards), and if the concern is specifically emissions, then if you can make an older vehicle meet the newer standards, there's no reason to keep them out. I'm not a fan of arbitrarily destroying old but operational equipment. My truck is a '97, and I believe the smoke opacity limit for emissions testing is 40% (it's allowed to block/scatter 40% of the light going through the exhaust). I believe commercial trucks of the same age are held to roughly the same standards. That's a good bit of smoke in the exhaust. But until you get into the high pressure common rail stuff (up at 30k+ psi, multiple injections per cycle), you'll get some smoke under certain conditions.
  - gsnedders 6y ago
    Looking at emissions standards in Europe, a truck from 24 years ago in Europe, assuming its gross vehicle weight is between 1760 kg and 3500 kg, would be allowed to emit 0.25g of PM/km. The same limit for something built since 2013 is 0.0045g of PM/km. We're talking multiple orders of magnitude improvement here. As a sidenote, HO+NOx has gone from 1.7g/km to 0.350g/km in 2013 (and onto 0.215g/km since then, in 2016), which is often as significant when it comes to desires to reduce air pollution.
  - llampx 6y ago
    Emissions standards change over time. You could get some really polluting cars in the old days, and you can't anymore. Why should we be breathing in the smoke from these old cars from an era where emissions and pollution weren't taken as seriously as now?
iso1631 6y ago
Never heard of this before, I looked it up, but I still don't get it -- you're not getting more power, you're not getting better fuel efficiency, you're not getting a smoother ride, what's the point - you're literally burning money for no reason?
- greedo 6y ago
  It's a popular way of making a political statement: Own the libs!
  - iso1631 6y ago
    cut off your nose to spite your face
- Syonyk 6y ago
  > you're literally burning money for no reason? Correct. And destroying your engine in the process. Beyond washing down the cylinder walls (cylinder/ring wear) and diluting the engine oil in the process (worse lubrication for the bearings), EGTs tend to go absolutely nuts during the process (you're on the oxygen limited side of mixture, not the fuel limited side a diesel is intended to operate in), which means you stand a good chance of doing damage to the hot side of the turbocharger (high EGTs tend to start melting the corner tips of the turbine blades first, which is an easy check for a used diesel - if the blade corners aren't right, the engine has probably been abused), and it's hard on the rest of the engine too. It's quite literally as stupid as it sounds. There are cases where you do want to run a diesel like that - some of the custom tractor pulling engines will smoke an awful lot while they're spooling up and pulling, but that's an engine that's making insane horsepower for a short period of time, and they don't have a particularly long service life (like any competition engine). I believe they run on the rich side to use the excess fuel to keep combustion temperatures down (a stoichiometric mixture is usually far, far too hot). But on a road engine, it's just pointless engine abuse for style points (among the few people who actually think it's cool).
- fossuser 6y ago
  I've only ever seen it once when I was in an EV Uber (it was a Model S) behind a pickup truck in Baltimore and the pickup kept blasting us with massive amounts of black soot (presumably because we were in an EV). There's a political element of "Truck Driving Republican" vs. "EV Driving Liberal" that powers some of this. I think Elon has been at last partially trying to reduce this polarization with how he behaves online to widen Tesla's appeal (though maybe I'm attributing too much intentionality here). On the west coast I was tailed super aggressively by a pickup in my model 3 on 280 which was a little scary (blinding me with headlights, switching lanes to stay 1 inch behind me). I watched cameras after to see if I cut him off or something, but I didn't. It has made me more wary of pick up trucks in general though.