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EU Car Makers Manipulating Fuel Efficiency Figures
pev writes with a report in The Guardian that "European car manufacturers are rigging fuel efficiency tests by stripping down car interiors, over inflating tyres, taping over panel gaps and generally cheating. This overestimates the figures by 25% to 50%. One would have thought that a simple clause stating that cars have to be tested in the conditions that they are sold in would have been obvious?"
Got to love it. There has to be a way to turn this kind of work-creativity to something more useful then circumventing regulations...
I'm shocked - I had always taken it as read that the figures were very optimistic and now this is considered news.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Haven't we all been taught to take all of these "tests" with a grain of salt?
I would add they should be tested as not only they are sold to the consumer but with the an average combined weight of all passenger seats filled plus common luggage in the trunk with a filled gas tank.
Fuel efficiency tests are for comparison purposes. If all makers cheat equally, comparisons are still meaningful. When legislators set an standard, they'll probably take that into account and make the standard a bit tighter.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
If all we have to do is over inflate your tires, tape over the panel gaps, and keep your car empty ( find somewhere else to park your junk ), to get 25% - 50 % better gas milage, why don't we all do it ?
This is no different from dot matrix printer specifications from long ago. Sure your printer would do 250cps as long as all the characters were the number 1.
This topic comes up every time we discuss fuel efficiency on here. Someone inevitably complains that the high-efficiency European cars are not available in the US, and then someone else points out that the Euro cars would not do very well on the EPA test. Hijinks ensue.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Over inflating tires maybe not, but taping over panel gaps for -10% in fuel would interest a lot of people.
I have a Mini Cooper, estimated to get 37 mpg highway. It's averaged 38 over 1500 miles! Damn liars! WOOHOO!!!!
Get a Mini! Eff the rest!!! XD
The EPA standards that were implemented in 2008 supposedly imposed tougher standards on manufacturers, taking into account colder temperatures, faster driving, and AC use. I found in my own car I get much better mileage than what the window sticker advertised. A little surprised the US seems better regulated on this one small issue.
Another way to cheat is they use diesel, which is more energy dense.
For the sarcasm-impaired, I am very much in favor of diesel and have been complaining for at least a decade that we don't get a good selection of diesels in the U.S. All I want is a diesel sports sedan with manual transmission. My only choice right now is the Jetta. No thanks.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Understimates? EU figures are presented in liters fuel per 100 km. I'm sure that the manufacturers rig to underestimate.
Maybe some of these 'tricks' can actually be used to improve fuel efficiency.
Can we make tires that are safe at higher pressures? Or improve the aerodynamics?
no matter what test they devise it will _always_ be a number that is only valid for that test, you may get better or worse milage depending on how much your driving pattern look like the test
as long as they all "cheat" the same it is still a valid test, tested as 50mpg might not mean 50mpg the way you drive, but it is better than tested as 40mpg
Why do they let the automakers run the test? Instead the regulatory bodies should ask for 3 production samples and an application fee and then the regulatory body should do the tests themselves.
DOG BITES MAN!
Wait....that's not how cars are supposed to be sold? The dealer assured me that was "perfectly normal"
When Consumer Reports wants to test a product (including cars), they don't go to the manufacturer, much less let the manufacturer run the testing process! They buy the product anonymously at normal retail, and then test it in their own labs. Why can't regulatory agencies like the EPA and its European Union equivalent do the same thing?
Only "obvious" to neurotypicals.
To a sociopath the lack of external verification and penalties makes it "obvious" that society intends the test to be cheated by those clever enough to do it.
A few years back I remembered reading an article from car and driver about them winning a MGP competition put on for the original Honda Insight. The games they played make the cheating going on here seem like the work of petty amateurs. Of course that was for fun and bragging rights for the magazines that participated so excessive bending of the rules was to be expected. If interested I suggest reading the article "How We Won the Insight Fuel-Economy Challenge. Without Cheating. Much". I am surprised that the car manufactures in the EU also don't try lowering the oil level so that it barely covers the oil pickup tube when running thus keeping the crank from hitting the oil in the sump or have most vehicles gone over to a dry sump setup. Also if they are going to disconnect the alternator why not also disconnect the water pump and replace it with an electric one like the drag racers do? Granted it won't work for an extended period of time (the electric racing ones are fairly low volume) but I would imagine the vehicle would survive the test track with it.
Time to offend someone
Ever since government mandated fuel efficiency testing programs were instituted in the 1970s, pretty much all major car manufacturers have rigged fuel efficiency tests...
ftfy
The real news should be about why this is allowed. Here in the US we've known for many years that these tests are fudged and don't represent real-life figures. I'm very surprised that this as also happening in the EU, as over here we generally view the EU as having stricter consumer-protection laws. I always subtract a full 15% and that seems to be about accurate, hence a "40mpg" car will really get around 34mpg in real life use (assuming you aren't a "hyper-miler" driver). Although sometimes the difference is greater. They did change the way the test were done recently, but I haven't seen much of a difference in the accuracy. The absurdity, in my opinion, is that this type of blatantly false advertising is allowed anywhere. I suppose that's just the world we live in. How Sad.
regulations require a certain amount of ethanol to be blended into the real-world gasoline supply (up to 10% and the lobby wants to raise it higher), and this drastically hurts efficiency
For all of you who endlessly call for bigger and bigger government: this is it. This is exactly what you asked for. You asked that coercive authority be richer and more powerful, and your wish was granted. Your mistake, however, was in assuming this revenue and power would be used to benefit you, rather than the elite few at the top of the pyramid.
So can we finally learn the lesson nobody wants to learn? The lesson is that power WILL be abused, and the ONLY way to stop it is with strict upper limits on both power and revenue.
I've always wonder why we didn't have the MPG stated with the amount of weight in the car. Would a 180 lbs driver drive experience the same MPG as the same car with a 300 lbs driver and (2) 250 lbs passengers. I guess it's not politically correct to have the fine print state "mileage may very depending how fat you are"
... always use independent measuring. Corporations, even in EU, have people at the helm that are fundamental liars.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Personally, I like to blame broccoli for anything that isn't perfect in my life.
Hyundai actually got nailed for doing this in the US last year. They were selling Accents with an advertised 40MPG, while actually performing at 36-39 depending on the car. What ended up happening is that the car owners got a debit card with the difference plus interest, they bring the card back every year and it gets updated based on the odometer reading.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
In your nice computer analogy of this fuel efficiency rigging, you mentioned dot matrix printers printing at 250cps when printing all numeral 1's... How did these printers do printing all periods (.) ??? I would think even faster. The printer companies could have boasted 600cps maybe ?? haha funny, though, how they lie. Sure they might get more sales initially but, sooner or later, the company will be shitlisted by the general population for not being honest.
The ECU in many cars is tuned to recognize an EPA drive cycle and react accordingly. The drive cycles are apparently pretty specific and, much like video drivers, can be gamed to get higher performance under specific conditions. The EPA uses pretty bad testing methodology too and it's only slowly being updated. There's an article in one of the Road and Track type mags on the stand this month detailing it and discussing the methodology, I was surprised they didn't also mention the ECU tuning
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
This isn't just a european thing. When do we get the investigation into US car-makers fake fuel economy ratings as of late?
For example, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Equinox#Debate_about_EPA_fuel_economy_ratings
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Have an independent company go out and buy each vehicle in question from a retailer, perform the same standard tests and then compare the results to what the manufacturer claims their test results where. Then fine them if the independent test disagrees with their claimed test results by more than a fixed percentage. Make the fines progressive, based on the number of units sold and geometrically increasing with the number of vehicles which don't match the reported tests.
If you make the fines bad enough, manufactures will clean up their acts... It won't cost much either, because you can just turn around and sell the slightly used vehicles for most of what you purchased it for (assuming you don't want to do crash testing too).
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Doesn't mean they shouldn't be regulated more strictly.
How am I supposed to compare two vehicles based on their mpg? Hope and pray that they're both defrauding me equally?
this is really some more non news from slashdont
this stuff came out over 5 weeks ago
its official slashdont is dead time to move over to some other tech site
They are in Europe
http://cars.uk.msn.com/features/green-motoring/car-fuel-economy-the-truth-about-mpg
Like, duh! I strongly suspect the surprise is not that car manufacturers do this, but that they don't get caught more often.
But wait, does this mean if I strip the inside of the car and tape over gaps in the panels, I can get up to 50% increase in gas mileage? Hmm....
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Obvious depends on your point of view. If your aim is to inflate the metrics, it is obvious that you do whatever (is legal) you can to make your car do well on the metrics. It is obvious that manufacturers would game the system. And if a customer complains? Well, it is obvious you trade off lawsuit costs against profits.
What is more striking to me is that we seem to be relying on the manufacturers to run the tests and report their figures. This is "obviously" wrong. If a regulator were to drive the car, they would see any taping over. They would notice that the interiors have been stripped down. And they should put a stop to it. Basically, they should be given a car by the manufacturers, and the regulator should hire someone to do the road tests. What next, the safety dummy has sensors in places that won't get triggered or exposed to large shocks to game safety requirements? "Obviously" the car tested will not be the same as the one I buy off a dealership: they might tweak the code to change firing timings or something similar. But it shouldn't be significantly different.
I detest it when cars are tested on the Nurburgring to tweak their design. I will mostly never get a chance to drive that circuit. Yet many manufacturers test on those conditions. It isn't the unrealistic nature that bothers me. I feel that all tests should be conservative (drive the car at 150 mph or some such ridiculous speed - much larger than any car would go - to do crash tests). Instead, they go to wrong extreme of unrealistic tests - instead of being conservative, they are optimistic.
Well one good thing this shows is that gas economy is at least seen as an attractive quality. They wouldn't falsify it if they didn't think their customers valued such things. I remember not long ago when people didn't care anything about gas mileage. But now it is important, so in this sense there is some progress.
But human nature is what it is - so much easier to cheat than to work at making something good. Hopefully the government steps in and punishes the offenders.
Over inflating tires is dangerous. The whole idea of the correct tire pressure is to give you the full width of the tire to grip the road. If you over inflate, the tire might not blow, but your stopping distance when having to do an emergency stop, will increase dramatically. The exact amount of grip you lose will also make you lose control in corners much quicker.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Significantly over inflating tires will reduce tire life. And it may reduce traction.
Typical normal wheel alignment requires that the front tires be pointed slightly inward, for safe handling and long tire life. Manipulating the wheel alignment to optimize mileage is not wise on an everyday car.
You can and should use synthetic lubricants. Most new cars come from the factory with Mobil 1 and 10,000 mile or longer change interval.
In fact, in 1980 when Mobil 1 was introduced it was good for 1 year of use under non-severe* service. That's why its called Mobil 1.
Arnold Palmer and Jiffy Lube (perhaps auto dealerships, too) balked and Mobil retracted their 1 year interval.
For the last 20+ years Amsoil (est. in 1970) offers engine oil with life of 25,000 miles in non-severe service. I don't think Syntec, Royal Purple, Red Line, Mobil 1, or any others meet or exceed Amsoil's interval.
If one doubts the validity of 1 year or 25,000 life engine oil, simply have your oil analyzed - AAA will do it free or inexpensively for members. Oil Analyzers will test any lubricant for $25. Nothing mysterious here. With oil analysis many Amsoil drivers go longer than 1 year with the same engine oil.
Oil analysis seems odd or unnecessary. My engine oil is black it needs to be changed. Wrong. Would you try to analyze your own blood by looking at it? Can you analyze tap water by looking at it?
I do not sell Amsoil. I do not work for or derive any money from Amsoil. I have used Mobil 1 and Syntec. I have used Amsoil for 15+ years. I have had my own oil analyzed and go 1 year between changes. My cars have over 100k miles and do not leak or burn oil. My cars, which include Honda Civics, Prelude SE (200k miles), Ford Taurus, Buick LeSabre, all exceed EPA mileage by 10% or more. My 2012 Prius is new and I am still comparing the factory Mobil 1 to Amsoil for mileage.
The 1995 Prelude 2.3L EPA rated 24 mpg highway, I easily get 30 mpg.
Often the weekend car expert will say, "...synthetic oil will cause oil leaks by ruining the gaskets."
Wrong.
In fact, synthetic oil molecules are significantly smaller and more consistent size than non-synthetic oil molecules. If your engine has an oil leak the synthetic oil will find it. However synthetic oil did not cause the leak.
Smaller molecular size and greater heat tolerance are two reasons synthetic oil lubricates better than non. Synthetics reach and remain on the piston rings and lands and lubricate more effectively - better sealing the combustion chamber.
* Severe service typically includes diesel engines, turbo charged engines, routine dusty driving conditions, short trips and prolonged idling.
Significantly over inflating tires will reduce tire life. And it may reduce traction.
Typical normal wheel alignment requires that the front tires be pointed slightly inward, for safe handling and long tire life. Manipulating the wheel alignment to optimize mileage is not wise on an everyday car.
You can and should use synthetic lubricants. Most new cars come from the factory with Mobil 1 and 10,000 mile or longer change interval.
In fact, in 1980 when Mobil 1 was introduced it was good for 1 year of use under non-severe* service. That's why its called Mobil 1.
Arnold Palmer and Jiffy Lube (perhaps auto dealerships, too) balked and Mobil retracted their 1 year interval.
For the last 20+ years Amsoil (est. in 1970) offers engine oil with life of 25,000 miles in non-severe service. I don't think Syntec, Royal Purple, Red Line, Mobil 1, or any others meet or exceed Amsoil's interval.
If one doubts the validity of 1 year or 25,000 life engine oil, simply have your oil analyzed - AAA will do it free or inexpensively for members. Oil Analyzers will test any lubricant for $25. Nothing mysterious here. With oil analysis many Amsoil drivers go longer than 1 year with the same engine oil.
Oil analysis seems odd or unnecessary. My engine oil is black it needs to be changed. Wrong. Would you try to analyze your own blood by looking at it? Can you analyze tap water by looking at it?
I do not sell Amsoil. I do not work for or derive any money from Amsoil. I have used Mobil 1 and Syntec. I have used Amsoil for 15+ years. I have had my own oil analyzed and go 1 year between changes. My cars have over 100k miles and do not leak or burn oil. My cars, which include Honda Civics, Prelude SE (200k miles), Ford Taurus, Buick LeSabre, all exceed EPA mileage by 10% or more. My 2012 Prius is new and I am still comparing the factory Mobil 1 to Amsoil for mileage.
The 1995 Prelude 2.3L EPA rated 24 mpg highway, I typically get 30 mpg, on optimal conditions 31.5mpg.
Often the weekend car expert will say, "...synthetic oil will cause oil leaks by ruining the gaskets."
Wrong.
In fact, synthetic oil molecules are significantly smaller and more consistent size than non-synthetic oil molecules. If your engine has an oil leak the synthetic oil will find it. However synthetic oil did not cause the leak.
Smaller molecular size and greater heat tolerance are two reasons synthetic oil lubricates better than non. Synthetics reach and remain on the piston rings and lands and lubricate more effectively - better sealing the combustion chamber.
* Severe service typically includes diesel engines, turbo charged engines, routine dusty driving conditions, short trips and prolonged idling.
Under deceleration the wheels keep the engine turning, which is why it can cut the fuel supply. Once you get slow enough or put in the clutch it will start feeding fuel to the engine again.
This is why you don't want to put in the clutch until you're almost stopped, in order to keep fuel shut off for as long as possible.
They make cars run horribly to get good emission figures in just the standard test. They actually actively harm real world emissions and economy figures just to get a better test score.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
When purchasing my dishwasher a couple of years ago I went through the manual to learn what each program button does. To my astonishment one of the programs under "eco" label was described as: "Do not use. Only for EU dishwasher economy testing." How ingenuous!
-- "In theory, theory is the same as practice, but not in practice."
Is there a difference in the standard between the US and Europe? My understanding was that the EPA (US) does the testing for the US market, and you put the number on the car that the EPA gives you. The test methods are well know, so the results should not be a surprise to the mfgs.
I am a little surprised that Europe, of all places, would let mfgs determine their own mileage figures without a regulator supervising the test, or an agency running the test ala the EPA.
by up to 9 MPG !
Even on a car (see Ford C-Max) that gets 37.7 MPG on average (taken from everyone who owns one, drives in the real world and reports their fuel-ups through a standard MPG computation site) that is an enormous 25% gap when compared to the heavily advertised 47 MPG.
OTOH, the car that Ford compares itself to in the TV ads (Prius-v) gets its EPA figures (43) less about single MPG (42.7) in the real world of thousands of fill-ups, summer and winter, town and highway, little ol lady and daddy leadfoot.
fuelly.com is a useful tool to see what mileage real people are reporting. They even provide a easy to read graph showing how many people are reporting what mileage for the car and model year. The distribution varies wildly, for example the Prius-v reports vary from 34 MPG to 52 MPG with the most at 42 for a 43 MPG EPA car. The Ford C-Max from 31 to 47. So you can see the car, the conditions and the driver do make a difference.
The current test cycle setup is rubbish, even with approximations made for load on the rolling road based on the coast-down phase of the test. Undue importance is put on CO2 emissions whilst disregarding the really nasty exhaust gases, but obviously that's because most EU countries base their tax solely on CO2 output now.
That said, the car makers are not doing themselves any favours by playing around the edges of the stated legislation, even if you bear in mind that pushing the rules to the limits is one of the basic principles of motor racing in any format, and would be the default mindset of those engineering the cars.
Constructing a truly even, fair and representative test will be terribly difficult, if not impossible. I wonder if any changes they make will be worth the effort at all.
How about incorporating the "cheats" into the final design and making a legitemate 25-50% increase in economy.
Fiid - Ryhmes with Squid. Software Engineer
Mpg figures (in the UK at least) are done by connecting the car exhaust to monitoring equipment on a standard indoor rolling road. None of these tricks work. Done on a standard car by and independent testing lab. The vehicle is taken through a standard set of tests and mpg is calculated using well known stats based on the exhaust emissions.
And how do I know this? Because this has been demonstrated on various consumer TV watchdog type programs multiple times over the years. Various motoring magazines also cover this stuff.
Every car I've had has meet or exceeded the published mpg figures.
For example my 1997 Skoda Octavia Diesel with it's not very powerful 90bhp 1.9L TDI engine will give me 52mpg if I drive it hard. If I'm more careful I can exceed 60mpg (I did once get it up to 70mpg but that involved a lot of coasting and very gentle driving which you can rarely do because you have to think of other road users.
Either way, the claims in this article are thoroughly bogus.
Go back a few years.
My wife drove an Acura TL at 22.9 MPG with Premium fuel needed so the cost is about equivalent to getting 20.
She replaces with an Avalon which gets 25.3 for about 25% more miles per currency unit.
I drove a CRV at 22.2 and replace it with a Prius station wagon (so same class of car) at 42 for about 90% improvement.
(all fuelly figures, not EPA)
And someone buys our trade-in cars and potentially replaces 15MPG older cars and gets 50% improvements. And the 15 MPGs replace 12s and so on down the food chain until the oldest get wrecked or are uneconomical to repair and thus go to the scrapyard.
Sure, there are exceptions but this is how the higher EPA figures help over time.
(It is weird to realize your old car is parked right in front of you at the shopping center.)
So, the car manufacturers are resorting to a bunch of measly tricks to squeeze out the last bit of fuel economy. But they have the solution already - all they need to do is unearth all those patents and inventions they've bought up over the years that they're sitting on and suppressing, and start putting them on their cars! The magic carburettors I've heard so much about ought to do the trick, and wham! instant improvement. They'll outsell immediately any competitor who didn't have the foresight to buy up and bury all those 'free' energy devices over the years, the fools.
leave business alone - the market place can self-correct.
get rid of CAFE!!!
YMMV. Theirs did.
So what. Feel good for the US? The EU cars are still more efficient then the US cards. Even when there are from the same car manufacture. Which is far more interesting: Same manufacture says that new US laws are to tough while at the same time selling cars in Europe which fulfil the new law for 10+ years.
Only 0/0 is undefined and not infinitive.
Politicians lie by pretending they can legislate the laws of physics, and pass stupid laws to satisfy their base, whom they have whipped into an emotional frenzy in order to gain loyalty. Or, in order to squeeze the maximum amount of money to put in their own pockets, they make unrealistic promises to two completely opposed special interests, with the result being that everyone is equally screwed.
Corporations, who need to sell products in order to pay the workers, who need to eat, and have a roof over their head, then lie to satisfy the unrealistic expectations set by the politicians. Marketing has always been about tapping on the buyers emotions, thus resulting in people foolishly parting with their money. More lies in the name of greed, duh.
This is news? People are shocked by this? There has to be a long drawn out discussion? You're telling me you are going to make a passionate argument about one side or the other being evil? This entire system is something we humans setup, and perpetuate. It's all our faults it has come to this.
The saddest thing about all of this is that less than 5% of the buying population actually wants a car that is safe, good for the environment, or gets great gas mileage. The other 95% think everyone else should own cars for these reasons, but not them.
Murphy was an optimist