> regarding the health effects of diesel vs petrol
There's a known solution to sort out the SO2 emission, but it would cost a bit more.
The problem isn't pushing diesel over petrol, the problem is letting the car vendors cheat so blatantly, apparently with political backing (in Germany at least).
>This article, as I read it, seems to imply that the engineers where technically unable to comply with the regulations, that why they cheating.
They can comply, but fuel economy will plummet. Other negatives can happen as well, the engines can get crudded up quickly, which has already been a problem in VW diesels, and in some Mercedes models as well.
The EPA has also been criticized here as being a tool to prevent foreign competition from high efficiency diesels available in Europe and Asia.
>They told, that they need a greater budget per car to comply with the regulations.
The second problem I mentioned is caused by the EGR Exhaust Gas Recirculation systems, which are primitive; so, yeah, throwing money at that would help.
Overall, I'm fairly confident that the VW mess is the tip of a huge iceberg. Other mfrs have been caught doing this exact same thing before.
> The latest EU diesel standards for passenger cars are actually on par with the gasoline standards. Don't know what the standards are for heavy trucks though.
Can we trust any of the big automotive manufacturers to actually meet those standards without cheating?
> It definitely looks like it is wishful thinking for diesel engines to meet those standards and be cost-competitive with gasoline-fueled alternatives
The technology that would have brought "Dieselgate" diesels into compliance with EU emissions rules was said to cost manufacturers something on the order of US$100 per vehicle: Selective catalytic reduction (SCR) with a refillable AdBlue (urea) tank.
However, prior to Dieselgate there is alleged to have been collusion between the major German automakers and a secret agreement not to install it on small vehicles.
This collusion, rather than the emissions cheating itself, is the focus of ongoing criminal investigations in Germany. (Cheating on emissions tests itself was not actually illegal in Europe, because the legislation was created with loopholes).
As of 2019, AdBlue is becoming common on new small diesel vehicles in Europe.
> That's just not true. There were three options, stop selling diesels, implement a selective catalytic reduction system, cheat the test. All three were done.
What you are saying isn't accurate. A selective catalytic reduction system wasn't sufficient to pass the test without also cheating. Many of the affected VW cars did have selective catalytic reduction. Post lawsuit required fix these cars now use MASSIVE amounts of urea requiring constant refills, wear out the SCR components frequently on short intervals, and don't have nearly the performance they were designed to have. These companies were unable at the time to figure out how to get vehicles, even with SCR to have the performance and reliability buyers were expecting without also cheating on the tests. After the VW scandal, it was later found that BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar, Fiat Chrysler, Toyota, Nissan, and several other companies were all also cheating. I am not aware of a single diesel passenger vehicle sold in the ~2009-2016 time period in the USA that wasn't later found to be cheating on emissions tests.
> Generally the rules are stronger and the enforcement is weaker (because turning the screws on the poors over a check engine light isn't as tractable for us as it is for Europe, generally speaking).
To be fair the amount of Diesel cars on the road in the EU with abhorrently poor emission systems is shocking; I was at VW during dieselgate, and worked with Bosch and VW during the buy-back program and VW are by far the only violators in the EU and in the periphery countries for lacking emission standards.
I was behind mid 2010s diesel Opel for ~35km on my way to Slovenia and I have been in enclosed green houses with diesel tractors so I'm pretty sensitive to it, and it was so absurd that such a thing was allowed on the road.
Typical check engine light failures (P14X/0420) are susceptible to modifications to pass if you know what you are doing, visual inspection isn't always as stringent as you'd think even with the STAR test sites in CA, which has the strictest emission laws in the World. When I was in motorsports we had a series of people we could rely on to pass our respective track-built machines on the road, but ultimately you realize that it's not worth the time, resources or risk and that the car (if properly built) no longer belongs on the road anyway.
As an environmentalist who has struggled with addictions to 'car-caine' I've since downsized from a revolving inventory of 5-6 cars, and 3 motorcycles to one of each: what I think is even tougher is to actually make sensible policy and regulation regarding them without it being simply a way induce needless consumption.
Case in point is the absurd World of the 2-3rd Gen Prius used car market and the catalytic converters, which has always had a lot of theft since it was released but have reached an Worldwide [0] extreme this year due to the astronomical rise in PM prices for those metals (inflationary pressure more than demand) so coupled with the supply chain shortages from Toyota and the rise in sudden demand many cars which were in compliance and within emission specs were simply scrapped because when Toyota couldn't deliver there was no other certified manufacturer for the part and something as simple not having a Toyota stamp was an automatic failure.
Even though some owners reported emission testing within spec of counties within WA or OR which have less stringent standards than CA but still worth noting their compliance. Their insurance policies payout wouldn't cover a similar ranged car purchase and the only alternative was to sell it out of state and use that sum (usually half the cost of properly registered Prius in CA) and to buy another used one.
> couldn't figure out how to meet US emission standards for diesel without cheating
Isn't it less that they couldn't figure out how to meet the standard, but rather that they did not like the consequences? Evidently the cars in question could operate in a lower-emission mode.
> One would expect that after VW dieselgate there would be very close and frequent testing by all possible cars by regulatory bodies (or even competition). What a fail.
The governments were more interested in keeping their car industries chugging happily (and keeping voters' jobs, and probably their own political jobs), so they preferred to keep the easy emissions test: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/24/uk-franc...
> And no manufacturer has been able to achieve the technology to meet that level.
Urea-injection seems to work (that's what Mercedes does). But it requires another tank and special equipment.
And VW could meet the emissions requirements. That was the cheat. When they detected that they were being tested, they tuned the engine to meet emissions requirements. During normal use, the engine would make better power or efficiency but higher emissions.
> Just searched "emissions cheating" and uh, is like, every auto maker cheating on emissions?
More or less, yes, they all did.
As an European I'd say it's a shared blame, though, as in the officials around Europe (both at national and at the EU level) who had very strongly pushed for diesel for the previous two to three decades (mostly through taxation/pricing policies) also deserve a very big part of this blame.
The Americans got it right (especially states like California) when relegating diesel to mostly commercial/truck/public transport use, but the hybris and the "we know better than the silly Americans when it comes to the environment" prevailed in the end, that's why it took Dieselgate and at least a couple of decades for those officials to reverse their past mistakes.
>The US auto lobby was the reason the US NOx diesel emission requirements are more stringent than EU in the first place
No, that was a result of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 for the reduction of acid rain. Though it was targeted towards industrial emissions of SO2 & NOx, but stricter regulation for vehicles were an additional effect.
>specifically disadvantaging European diesel cars
That's a weird argument given that diesel passenger vehicles in the US are held to the same standard as gasoline ones, but to a separate standard from their petrol counterparts in the EU. I mean, one could argue the opposite, that an EU emissions policy favorable to diesels amounted to an equivalent 13-16% import tariff. [1]
Several domestic rather than just foreign diesel engine manufacturers were also penalized for using defeat devices in 1998.[2]
> (which are much cleaner overall)
That's quite arguable, trading lower CO2 & CO for increased NOx & PM.
>On that topic, some cities in Germany are so fed up with the pollution levels, they're thinking of banning diesel cars, which is being argued before a court today.
Bigger cities already ban diesel cars that don't adhere to Euro IV (or V?), and gasoline cars without catalytic converters. You have to have an "umweltplakette" sticker to drive in the cities.
> I'd like to know how they expected to get away with this?
The whole industry has been getting away with similar schemes for decades, why shouldn't they get away with one more?
Cars in Germany have to undergo emission tests every two years, and even older gasoline cars with rudimentary engine computers will perform vastly different when subjected to its standardized testing interval – and if they don't, it's all sorts of trouble for the owner and mechanic responsible. My dad is a car mechanic, and he has been complaining about engine computers occasionally not going into emission test mode for as long as I can think. It's an open secret and the testing agencies are actively helping their mechanics to make sure the cars pass.
> Most companies decided to just pull diesel cars from the US market, and it turns out that all of the ones that stayed were tricking the tests in one way or another.
That's just not true. There were three options, stop selling diesels, implement a selective catalytic reduction system, cheat the test. All three were done.
> Have you ever been stuck behind a car with a broken exhaust system? The amount of pollution coming out of such a car is surprising, and that's with relatively clean gasoline.
For a diesel engine (which is the subject here) that has very little to do with the exhaust system but usually everything to do with the engine (and more specifically, the injectors) itself.
Relatively clean gasoline only pollutes more when the catalytic converter isn't working properly but you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference without a measurement.
So if you see 'clouds of smoke' coming from a car that's either a badly injecting diesel (droplets too large to combust) or a gasoline engine that is burning engine oil.
The exhaust system is 'not guilty' in either case.
> When examined side by side with European emissions standards, the economics of CAFE become more transparent. EU are relatively straight forward by comparison. Tailpipe CO2 emissions are measured and a de facto consumption tax is levied based on a vehicle’s output.
One downside of this is that it encourages diesel. While diesel has a less CO2 emissions, it tends to have a lot of other very harmful emissions. These can be regulated but companies do cheat (see VW).
> In 2015, regulators realized that diesel Volkswagens and Audis were emitting several times the legal limit of nitrogen oxides (NOx) during real-world driving tests. But one problem regulators confronted was that they couldn’t point to specific code that allowed the cars to do this. They could prove the symptom (high emissions on the road), but they didn’t have concrete evidence of the cause (code that circumvented US and EU standards).
I don't understand this from a regulator's point of view: as a regulator, all you have to do is test for symptoms. You don't have to explain root causes. You drive the vehicle in conditions as close as possible to real ones, measure emissions, and decide whether or not they're above the norms.
Why would regulators do this in a lab? It's like health inspections that would ask restaurants to send food to be tested, instead of showing up anytime, unannounced.
Regulators should pick up real cars from real owners and test them on the road, at regular intervals.
Or, modern technology should allow to test a car all the time and report emissions and fuel efficiency, etc. during its lifetime.
People cheat, and if cheating is easy they cheat more. The one thing a regulator cannot do is trust the industry.
According to VW, it affects 11 million cars with type EA 189 engines: "In its new statement, VW gave more details, admitting that "discrepancies" related to vehicles with Type EA 189 engines and involved some 11 million vehicles worldwide." (http://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/volkswagen-11-million-...).
>It has been a few years now that we (as customers) have to deal with the common industry practice of advertising unrealistic fuel consumption statistics, so I'd say to some extent more car-makers are similarly boned here.
No, that would be fraud. Care to cite examples of such "common industry practice"?
> Third, Volkswagen is a group
That won't make them less open to litigation.
> Fourth, it is common that such investigations go on for years without end.
Yes, investigation and litigation will take years, but effects will be felt suddenly, such as VW cars not being able to get re-registered and driven on roads since they don't comply with emission standards, causing economic hardship and potentially larger lawsuits against VW. I think juries will be rather sympathetic to a few testimonies to that effect.
> In 2015, regulators realized that diesel Volkswagens and Audis were emitting several times the legal limit of nitrogen oxides (NOx) during real-world driving tests.
This means that they can detect emissions levels during real world driving tests. What's wrong with just making those tests the actual regulatory ones? So whatever ingenuity automakers can use will be put to minimizing emissions in the exact same scenarios that will be used in real life.
There's a known solution to sort out the SO2 emission, but it would cost a bit more.
The problem isn't pushing diesel over petrol, the problem is letting the car vendors cheat so blatantly, apparently with political backing (in Germany at least).
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