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I used to live next to a freeway and I know the true cost of dirty diesel engines. Get on any US freeway and you'll notice that while a majority of diesels are

by ak217 6y ago

I used to live next to a freeway and I know the true cost of dirty diesel engines. Get on any US freeway and you'll notice that while a majority of diesels are fine, there is a minority that is belching soot any time the driver steps on the gas. This is simply unacceptable - this tiny minority of diesels kills people over time - especially the poorer populations who live close to the freeways. I would prefer much more stringent enforcement where any truck belching smoke can be spot checked and impounded. The emissions testing is not a "nuisance". It saves lives. A noisy motorcycle would be a better example of a nuisance.

Syonyk 6y ago
The pointless out of band emissions testing of an emissions compliant truck (that easily passes the tests) having to go in for a test because it smokes a bit under hard acceleration and someone called it in for "rolling coal" is very much a nuisance to the truck owner and a waste of time/resources for all parties involved. An older diesel engine can smoke a decent bit under hard acceleration and still be entirely emissions legal - it's not until you get into the particulate filters in the... oh, 2010s or so (not sure, I don't have anything that new) that you can contain all the particulate matter. If your stance is that diesels shouldn't be permitted, or that anything older than a certain age shouldn't be allowed to be registered, that's fine, but that's not what I'm referring to here.
- ak217 6y ago
  My stance is that diesels should only be permitted if they satisfy the EPA 2008 diesel PM standards or better. No older engines should be permitted unless they are retrofitted to comply with the standard and pass regular state tests. We could have a "cash for clunkers" type program to incentivize them to be lawfully scrapped. I appreciate that you are as annoyed as the rest of us at the coal rollers. I think we need much more aggressive fines and impounds for those, too.
  - Syonyk 6y ago
    Destroying nearly-new trucks for emissions reasons is a pretty questionable use of funding (and, yes, a 12 year old truck is still quite new) - and you're not going to be able to get away with a token few thousand dollars to encourage people to scrap them. A decently maintained heavy road engine (tractor trailer) is a million+ mile motor, easily. A medium truck engine (think your typical toolbox work trucks, tow trucks, International boom trucks, etc) will do 300k-500k miles, and depending on how much the truck is used, that may be 20-30 years of operation. Same for the light diesels - they tend to have a practical service life of decades. My 24 year old truck is starting to be a little bit more rare on the roads out here, but I still see plenty... If you know what to listen for, you can identify a lot of diesels by sound - and the International T444E (mid-90s design, the Ford 7.3 Powerstroke is that engine with a few tweaks) has a very distinctive snap at idle from the single shot injectors. There are still an awful lot of those on the road, and the youngest of them is almost 20 years old. "Destroying 30-50% of the diesel fleet on the road" is not something I'd be particularly excited about - especially since new vehicle production isn't particularly environmentally friendly either. If you're specifically focused on the PM emissions, there may be ways to retrofit those older engines (at the cost of likely a substantial increase in fuel burn from the backpressure), but if you're going to hold them to the newer NOx standards, there's just no way to do it. They don't have the injection pressure and EGR systems in place to do it. As of right now, they'd just be replaced with new diesels, because there are no electrics meaningfully on the market that solve the problems a large diesel engine solves right now. Plenty have been announced, very few are actually shipping, and of those announced, everyone is silent on their towing capabilities (I don't care if you can tow 15k lbs on a receiver mount, that kind of trailer weight should be on a gooseneck or 5th wheel hitch, and everyone is really, really silent on how their announced electric trucks fit either of those). I also very much dislike "Cash for Clunkers" type programs in that they're one of the most nastily regressive programs one can possibly create. That program ruined the bottom end of the used car market for most of a decade, and permanently destroyed a lot of vehicles of a particularly easy to maintain and cheap to operate era (low pressure single point throttle body injection, not a ton of luxury features). It was a nice little handout to the next couple tiers up, but if you were operating in the "$100 car" realm (which were a thing at the time, I've owned 4 sub-$400 cars in the 2000-2010 era), it was absolutely devastating to your ability to find cheap cars. That sort of effective floor on vehicle prices for a while, followed by the hollowing out of anything below that price in the market... eh. Let's not do that again. As far as coal rollers, though, the best thing that could happen is that everyone stops getting worked up about them and ignore them. They do it for the attention, and I'll suggest that it works really, really well. If you see one, get the plate, call it into your local emissions enforcement hotline if that's a thing, and move on with life. Everyone getting all wound up about them on the internet is exactly what I expect a lot of them enjoy about it anymore.
FooHentai 6y ago
I’m obsessive about using the air recirculation button when driving to isolate the cabin any time I’m in the wake of a diesel vehicle, for this reason. While health issues from diesel particulate is documented on a wide statistical basis, there’s ample reason to believe single exposure events may lead to individual negative health outcomes i.e. getting a lungful one time might just kill you.
hinkley 6y ago
Shit I see that in town. Shiny new cars.

by ak217 6y ago

Syonyk 6y ago

The pointless out of band emissions testing of an emissions compliant truck (that easily passes the tests) having to go in for a test because it smokes a bit under hard acceleration and someone called it in for "rolling coal" is very much a nuisance to the truck owner and a waste of time/resources for all parties involved. An older diesel engine can smoke a decent bit under hard acceleration and still be entirely emissions legal - it's not until you get into the particulate filters in the... oh, 2010s or so (not sure, I don't have anything that new) that you can contain all the particulate matter. If your stance is that diesels shouldn't be permitted, or that anything older than a certain age shouldn't be allowed to be registered, that's fine, but that's not what I'm referring to here.

ak217 6y ago
My stance is that diesels should only be permitted if they satisfy the EPA 2008 diesel PM standards or better. No older engines should be permitted unless they are retrofitted to comply with the standard and pass regular state tests. We could have a "cash for clunkers" type program to incentivize them to be lawfully scrapped. I appreciate that you are as annoyed as the rest of us at the coal rollers. I think we need much more aggressive fines and impounds for those, too.
- Syonyk 6y ago
  Destroying nearly-new trucks for emissions reasons is a pretty questionable use of funding (and, yes, a 12 year old truck is still quite new) - and you're not going to be able to get away with a token few thousand dollars to encourage people to scrap them. A decently maintained heavy road engine (tractor trailer) is a million+ mile motor, easily. A medium truck engine (think your typical toolbox work trucks, tow trucks, International boom trucks, etc) will do 300k-500k miles, and depending on how much the truck is used, that may be 20-30 years of operation. Same for the light diesels - they tend to have a practical service life of decades. My 24 year old truck is starting to be a little bit more rare on the roads out here, but I still see plenty... If you know what to listen for, you can identify a lot of diesels by sound - and the International T444E (mid-90s design, the Ford 7.3 Powerstroke is that engine with a few tweaks) has a very distinctive snap at idle from the single shot injectors. There are still an awful lot of those on the road, and the youngest of them is almost 20 years old. "Destroying 30-50% of the diesel fleet on the road" is not something I'd be particularly excited about - especially since new vehicle production isn't particularly environmentally friendly either. If you're specifically focused on the PM emissions, there may be ways to retrofit those older engines (at the cost of likely a substantial increase in fuel burn from the backpressure), but if you're going to hold them to the newer NOx standards, there's just no way to do it. They don't have the injection pressure and EGR systems in place to do it. As of right now, they'd just be replaced with new diesels, because there are no electrics meaningfully on the market that solve the problems a large diesel engine solves right now. Plenty have been announced, very few are actually shipping, and of those announced, everyone is silent on their towing capabilities (I don't care if you can tow 15k lbs on a receiver mount, that kind of trailer weight should be on a gooseneck or 5th wheel hitch, and everyone is really, really silent on how their announced electric trucks fit either of those). I also very much dislike "Cash for Clunkers" type programs in that they're one of the most nastily regressive programs one can possibly create. That program ruined the bottom end of the used car market for most of a decade, and permanently destroyed a lot of vehicles of a particularly easy to maintain and cheap to operate era (low pressure single point throttle body injection, not a ton of luxury features). It was a nice little handout to the next couple tiers up, but if you were operating in the "$100 car" realm (which were a thing at the time, I've owned 4 sub-$400 cars in the 2000-2010 era), it was absolutely devastating to your ability to find cheap cars. That sort of effective floor on vehicle prices for a while, followed by the hollowing out of anything below that price in the market... eh. Let's not do that again. As far as coal rollers, though, the best thing that could happen is that everyone stops getting worked up about them and ignore them. They do it for the attention, and I'll suggest that it works really, really well. If you see one, get the plate, call it into your local emissions enforcement hotline if that's a thing, and move on with life. Everyone getting all wound up about them on the internet is exactly what I expect a lot of them enjoy about it anymore.

FooHentai 6y ago

I’m obsessive about using the air recirculation button when driving to isolate the cabin any time I’m in the wake of a diesel vehicle, for this reason. While health issues from diesel particulate is documented on a wide statistical basis, there’s ample reason to believe single exposure events may lead to individual negative health outcomes i.e. getting a lungful one time might just kill you.

hinkley 6y ago

Shit I see that in town. Shiny new cars.