Is there any detailed information anyone can find on what they allegedly did, at a technical level? "Defeat device" is such a broad category of term that it's useless for understanding the details of what it's claimed they did.
The Justice.gov writeup [0] isn't any better.
> The company allegedly installed defeat devices on 630,000 model year 2013 to 2019 RAM 2500 and 3500 pickup truck engines. The company also allegedly installed undisclosed auxiliary emission control devices on 330,000 model year 2019 to 2023 RAM 2500 and 3500 pickup truck engines.
I'd be interested in reading technical details on what, exactly, they did or didn't supposedly do.
I want to know the technical details of what Cummins allegedly did "enough that they're not arguing a massive fine, while claiming they didn't do it on purpose."
Claiming they "installed defeat devices" isn't nearly enough detail. How did it alter either the engine combustion cycle or the emissions control system behavior?
> Cummins says it "has seen no evidence that anyone acted in bad faith and does not admit wrongdoing."
I guess they just added a device made to defeat controls in good faith then. I'm glad they consider that good, and consequently learned nothing from it.
> The company was accused of installing defeat devices and other "undisclosed" emissions equipment on almost a million engines used in Ram pickups
I get that this is how the settlement works, but we're talking about a million cars with emission level measures considered having been cheated. At this stage it becomes a public safety thing, the details should be made very public. And maybe they should actually try these instead of settling
The charge against them is very clear. The feature is changing the performance which enabled excess emissions. Whether is it software or hardware does not really matter.
> Today, the Justice Department reached an initial agreement with Cummins Inc. to settle claims that, over the past decade, the company unlawfully altered hundreds of thousands of engines to bypass emissions tests in violation of the Clean Air Act.
This was a longstanding practice to make diesel engines more efficient while passing the official emissions test. There was a similar enforcement against Caterpillar and other truck makers in 1998:
For anyone treating this as new information... it's not. The etymology of "defeat device," the term the EPA is using, dates back to the 70s when automakers started pulling similar crap.
Chrysler, Ford, GM, Honda, Toyota, Caterpillar, Cummins, Detroit Diesel, Mack, Navistar, Renault, and Volvo Trucks have all been caught rigging their vehicles to lie to owners and emissions testers, with varying degrees of plausible deniability.
>The owners and operators of more than half a million diesel pickup trucks have been illegally disabling their vehicles’ emissions control technology over the past decade, allowing excess emissions equivalent to 9 million extra trucks on the road, a new federal report has concluded.
I'm aware we're technically strict, but I don't see the EPA shutting down roll coal culture any time soon. It took us this long to catch Cummins[1] after VW got dragged through the courts. At this point I find it hard to believe any diesel motor truly passes US emission standards.
> A late model diesel truck capable of "rolling coal" almost certainly has an emissions defeat device or tune, or has otherwise been modified. These devices are not always about trying to extract the performance lost to emissions control.
However I tuned my diesel pickup to increase efficiency and torque which included what is known as an “EGR Defeat” and a “Texas Cat”. It’s registered outside of an enforcement area, however just for grins I ran it through an emissions check and dyno and it passed with flying colors without tweaking it for emissions. That’s because between the “tune”, the turbo, and now-mandatory everywhere low-sulfur diesel the emissions are way reduced. Mine is a pre-DEF model. I imagine it will produce substantial NOx if I gun it on a hot day with a heavy load, but that also results in 3MPG performance so I just don’t do that except when absolutely necessary.
Not everyone is trying to choke people with black smoke, some of us “ranchers" just want to stop strangling on pointless micro-regulation that doesn’t fit the situation.
It's going to be difficult to prove that VW cheating led to asthma deaths and pollution. It's easy to say that VW is the root of all evil, but the most popular vehicles sold in the US are pickup trucks, which have a diesel engine variant.
But pickup truck are not classified as cars, so their emissions were complying to the higher truck limits of 0.4g/mile of nox, unlike VW which was supposed to comply to the stringent car limits of 0.07g/mile. And of course they found that cummins diesels also cheated (less blatantly).
And anyway, the US is still the biggest contributor on earth of air pollution, and I doubt that it comes from the few VW vehicles sold there
I have no problem with fining the idiots who remove particulate filters and sensors to be able to 'roll coal' at urban stoplights. That's senseless. But expensive emissions control systems are a problem.
One part of this issue is that regulations to require expensive emission control systems work for OEMs, but they are much harder to apply to an individual with a truck at >200,000 miles. The regulations are designed for new vehicles, and the components in those new vehicles are designed to last for 10 years or 100,000 miles. It's one thing to roll the costs of installation and purchasing these particulate filters and catalytic converters onto the OEM (who gets to install them on new, clean steel with working fasteners) and another thing entirely to ask it to be done two or three times on the same vehicle.
An advantage of a diesel truck is that the engine may last for 300,000 miles, but if you're looking at a bill of $5,000 on a truck that's only worth $5,000, and you already have a welder...that particulate filter, EGR cooler, catalytic converter, etc. are awfully hard to justify compared to a big steel pipe.
I just helped my brother install a 'bypass kit' for offroad use on his 2009 Toyota Sequoia (which has a 5.7L gas engine). The 'smog pump' valves are known to be failure points - Toyota got sued over the 2005-2007 engines and recategorized the system into the powertrain to extend the warranty. The system costs almost $3,000 to repair, because you need to remove the entire intake to get at the valves. This system only exists to pass OEM emissions tests - specifically, while the engine is completely cold, the first 60 seconds of exhaust contains methane slightly in excess of the legal limit. The programming only cycles the valves once, for only 60 seconds, only when it's been more than 7 hours since the last start-up, only when the engine is cold, only when the ambient temperature is under 5 degrees C. The bypass kit removes this problem, it just lies to the engine and tells it that the temperature is above the threshold.
It's June; none of these things applied when he, his wife, and his 4 kids under 4 were stuck in the humidity and sun with the truck in limp-home mode trying to pull their camper home because the 12-year old system with 180,000 miles on it freaked out while leaving the gas station.
I wish that we could have repaired the system to work properly. I don't want to emit excess methane, neither does he! But there's no calculus in which spending either $3,000 on that vehicle or spending $600 on parts and taking 3 days off work to replace them ourselves makes sense for those 60 seconds of recirculation on cold winter mornings. What do you want him to do, buy a new $60,000 truck off the dealership and send the old one to the junkyard? I'm pretty confident that would be a lot worse for the environment than keeping the old one going another 6 years.
The problem is that Toyota has no incentive to care that these limited-lifetime components are inaccessible because they're off the hook after the truck is out of warranty.
"Only" $15B for this part, but they still face Clean Air Act penalties and another 80,000 vehicles with larger engines that aren't a part of this deal.
>The settlement, to be announced on Tuesday in Washington, includes $10.03 billion to offer buybacks to owners of about 475,000 polluting vehicles
They'll buy back my diesel so that I can get another one that pollutes less, thus getting my cheater car off the road, thus addressing the environmental damage going forward.
They're not just paying me money as a "we're sorry" factor.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20151002043823/http://www2.epa.g...
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