And we have already seen glimmers of such behavior with all the emissions scandals around diesel cars... the outcome is not immediate death of passengers, but car companies were/are skirting health regulations to increase profits.
Safe? Air pollution has been estimated to kill about 200,000 Americans per year.
With the recent VW scandal of modifying software to cheat at pollution tests we can eliminate safe in for that company.
Anyone remember when Ford accountants calculated that a Pinto defect in which people would burn to death would be more expensive to fix than the lawsuits so they decided to not recall the car?
"Profit from selling cars" would be a much more honest mission statement for most of them.
There's been some articles on the subject (which is, admittedly complicated, since so many things shoot toxins into the air, and our understanding of its impact is still uncertain):
I guess it's possible to look at these numbers, and compare them to the number of deaths caused by autos in general (even the ones that follow all the rules), and consider it a small thing; something that doesn't justify a massively disruptive response.
But, from my perspective, VW made a conscious decision, and an ongoing choice over many years, to violate the law, and caused illegal levels of dangerous emissions in exchange for greater profits.
So...I don't think I'm responding irrationally when I am extremely critical of a company that would make those decisions over a span of many years, knowingly trading human life and human health for greater profits.
I'm critical of internal combustion auto companies, in general, but I'm not calling for them to be destroyed, and I don't go out of my way to talk trash about them. I'm pretty specific in my ire toward VW (though others have suggested several car manufacturers are pulling similar tricks and emitting illegal and dangerous levels in real world environments), and if that's the case, I'd consider those to be criminal companies, as well. I hope such companies will also be investigated, and also face consequences. But, "everybody's doing it" shouldn't be a defense when the stakes are this high.
I was just thinking "wasn't Volkswagen vilified for this not long ago?"
So basically all automakers with diesel do the needful and fake around results anyways. I guess these rules are merely up for interpretation loosely, and this is why the planet is dying.
What happened is car companies weaseled around the law and lied to the public, causing death and damage. This is more than idle "cheating", as if it were a game. This is poisoning the air.
For automotive scandals like e.g this one and Dieselgate it's always surprising how much outrage people muster.
If an automaker sells N cars exceeding some emissions limit by 100%, people get out the pitchforks.
But if that same automaker sells 2N conforming cars, it's widely heralded as a Good Thing.
However, to a first approximation, the environmental impact is equivalent in each case (or arguably worse in the latter case, because of increased energy and materials consumption).
Good observation. The VW emissions cheating was a technical violation that didn't have much of a real-world impact, because the percentage of diesel cars sold in the USA is tiny.
It often seems that there's something of an inverse proportion in the public outrage over some event vs. the actual damage caused.
VW cheats on emissions for cars that are a tiny of a percent of total cars sold in the USA --- huge fines, mass outrage, because why not? There's really no downside.
New Orleans is chemically polluted for decades, cancer hot zone, etc --- shut up, business as usual, because we need the jobs.
Good point. Furthermore, those deaths would have probably been caused anyway, since diesel technology doesn't suddenly make 2x less emissions. Maybe fewer diesels would have been sold, so
there would have been 800 deaths instead of 1200
deaths, because the drivers would have bought one running on gas, but yeah, the law isn't designed for these number games.
VW was caught faking Diesel safety starting somewhere around 2006-2008 (it would be interesting to see the roll out.) So rise in small particulates causing any and all respiratory problems does not have to correlate to smoking.
Diesel vehicles kill people, period. It's very difficult to reduce emissions sufficiently to change that but it's nigh impossible to ban diesel cars and trucks from the road. Given that, the only reasonable alternative is stringent tests that push diesel technology to the limit in terms of minimizing health impact. Which is what we have. Could the tests be better? Certainly. But that doesn't excuse the cheating. Imagine if airplane manufacturers had been found to be cheating on safety tests. That's how serious and how immoral this cheating is.
They cheated on an arbitrary number in an EPA regulation, with emissions that were completely legal only a few years earlier. You might as well complain that all car companies are killing people because whatever their emissions levels are, it's more than zero, and therefore cumulatively, statistically, causing some number of deaths.
If _everyone_ is doing it, maybe the regulators should ask themselves if the physics of a diesel ICE actually make it possible to comply with emission standards.
I mean if we have 100% of brands implementing some deception strategy, then you either need to:
1. Admit you can't make diesel engines comply with standards and ban them outright.
2. Relax regulations to what's possible to create with best current tech and accept the cost of pollution on health.
Doing this catch and release shit is just outright corruption and slaps on the wrist for their buddies at the cost of those millions of lives you mentioned.
5000 persons will die per year in the EU due to diesel cheating. 15000 persons will die per year due to excess Nox emissions i.e. the result of selling in "clean diesel" by the car industry when in effect it is very dirty.
What if the goal is to regulate diesel out of existence unless it can be much better pollution-wise?
What if the car companies could make a much cleaner diesel engine, but it just wasn't cost efficient?
What if this kind of regulation is the stick to go with the various green regulation carrots (tax credits on fuel efficient vehicles, subsidies for renewables, etc...)?
What if making lawmakers responsible for legislating something out of business has unintended effects? Consider that in some places tobacco companies are suing governments over labeling, imagine the lawsuits if a car company could sue when they didn't like emission laws.
I agree it is easy to look at this with a sympathetic eye to automakers, but I think we cannot condone cheating when other alternatives exists. It may well be impossible to build a clean enough diesel engine. If so we should drop diesel and figure out something with another energy store
Note that (a) European NOx emissions standards for diesel cars were made more than twice as strict in 2014, and (b) VW and perhaps other manufacturers were cheating American diesel emissions standards.
It’s not an outrageous leap to suspect they may also have been cheating the new European emissions standards. If those are properly enforced, diesel cars could be in trouble.
> 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).
reply