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Volkswagen Seeks To Repair Its Image By Focusing On Electric (wired.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The emissions scandal that's plagued Volkswagen over the past month will be tough to recover from. But they're trying. The company announced a number of changes they're making to their line of vehicles. First, they'll be revamping their flagship Phaeton vehicles to be all-electric. (If you live in the U.S. and haven't heard of these, don't be surprised — they aren't marketed there.) Second, they've announced their intention to install top-of-the-line environmental protection systems in their new diesel cars. (In other words, they'll actually do what they're required by law to do, but vehicle prices will jump significantly.) Their press release is difficult to decipher, given the density of buzzwords and vague promises, but they indicate a greater general focus on hybrids and electric vehicles in the future.
I'd say Volkswagon can count on the short term memory of the buying public.
Like a bad breakup, time will heal this, too.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
And shall be known as the Phaeton Torpedo
Er... The EU are looking into it too and they will be recalling cars from there just the same.
It's not an EU only issue, they're in for a world of hurt world-wide.
It isn't US only issue, they've messed things up in other countries as well.
3.6m european cars need hardware fix:
http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/v...
Before that, there was (mostly unnoticed) "oscar scandal" with ADAC rigging votes in favour of VW Golf:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/774a...
VW is rather "known" in German auto industry for having cars that perform on par (e.g. VW Sharan vs Ford S-Max) yet are regarded as way better cars by many journalists "for some reason".
well, your A/C would stop cooling. the fan would still run, but the compressor would stop.
Bullshit. They conned the entire fucking planet. Europe has far higher emission requirements than the US, and most countries require vehicles to be tested annually. Fail the test, your is rendered illegal for public roads. VW's aim was to mislead the public about the efficiency of their diesel engines, but the efficiency took a dive in clean running mode, so they switched it off only for testing conditions.
VW need to contribute to infrastructure in countries where they are sold. For example, in the UK most of the rapid charger network was paid for by Nissan, and a lesser number by Renault. Other EV and PHEV manufacturers like BMW, VW, Mitsubishi, Vauxhall, Toyota and the rest contributed next to nothing, and we badly need more infrastructure to support their vehicles.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
No reason the compressor could not be electrically powered; after all you don't need a piston engine to run a house AC...
I would go for the "electric up to 5MPH" solution used with buses for my car. I don't want petrol, thanks. I sometimes tow things.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
So VW decides to "fix" a problem that (technically) is a US only issue by greenwashing up a car they don't sell in the US.
It's not "only" a US issue. In fact, the numbers I've heard are somewhere between 500,000 and 650,000 cars affected in the US, but 11 million world-wide. There are a lot more of those cars in Europe than the US, and Europe has a lot more diesel cars on the road.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
While mostly true, the US has stricter requirements for NOx emissions than europe. I haven't reviewed the Euro 6 standards, but they don't go into effect until 2017.
And I live in New Orleans. We turn the A/C off three days a year.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I think that's silly. Regulations do need to be reasonable, but the industry reaction of "they'll kill our profits" is not borne out in practice. In fact, requiring industry to invest to improve their products in ways "not wanted by customers" spurs innovation -- and thus the economy.
Their design is a problem everywhere, but it's only(*) illegal in the US.
Yup. I'm in the UK, and I got a letter from VW yesterday onfirming my car will need a fix. No details except that the are working on it.
Oh no... it's the future.
And by that is due to fine print saying you must use our arbitration system and the courts will just say that.
Depends, the NOx limit in EU is much higher than the US. The CO2 limit in the EU is lower than the US. Different things to optimize or cheat for.
EU has higher requirements for CO and in general lower requirements for NOx, except maybe very latest EuroN test that raises a bar closer to few years old EPA test. NOx is what matters for smog. Paris at times is no better than Chinese cities and now they try to prevent diesels entering downtown. Maybe they should not have allowed them on the roads in the first place.
European annual road tests are BS in most countries except Germany, Switzerland and few others that take them seriously. Especially anywhere to the East of Western Europe. First, you don't need to pass new test with old vehicles. You need to meet only some old BS test. Then, you can just quickly tune the system to produce better results before the test at the expense of efficiency, and tune back as soon as you leave testing facility. Many older cares on the road have catalytic converters removed - they cost money to replace, but you can actually sell them for small money for precious metals inside.
There is no practical way to control all old car emissions on roads EU wide.
Electric technology is not hard. Infact, it is ridiculously easy compared to designing a low-emissions, direct injected, variable timing, variable geometry turbocharged combustion engine that needs to do 300,000 kms in a range of harsh conditions. Even Tesla uses a pretty compromised powertrain design (oversized induction motor without multi-speed gearbox) because is just doesn't really matter at this point (plus they get the ludicrous mode thing as a byproduct).
The only issue electric cars have now is the cost of the batteries. And the only way this will be solved is through building more and better battery factories.
I imagine this is why existing car companies are so reluctant to jump into the electric market. All of them will realise that at some point battery prices will cause them to have to write off billions in sunk investment costs, but what CEO would want to spend money to bring that day forward.
Well, they're not actually going to fix the problem. They're just going to have their computers report that it's fixed.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I did an obsessive amount of research on VW's clean diesel technology, and the engineering issues that motivated their decision to cheat. Going hybrid would solve all their problems. Well, the technical ones anyway.
The problem is that their patented "clean NOx trap" pollution control technology involves storing NOx pollution in a zeolite "molecular sponge". The sponge needs to be cleaned out periodically by changing the engine fuel-to-air ratio: when that happens (for a few seconds every minute or two), engine performance is drastically reduced. VW's engine computer tries to keep this from happening while the driver is accelerating, but apparently it wasn't good enough, so they programmed the computer to not bother with trap cleaning unless it's being tested in an EPA lab.
With a full hybrid system, the engine can run at optimum efficiency at all times, and can take a break to clean the NOx trap whenever it wants: the electric motor and batteries can take over.
However in a lot of other places these cars do not violate the local standards.
It's mostly a California issue with the standards violation. The fraud issue however is still fraud no matter whether the standards apply in a small area or large.
I think VW are playing the odds and see being caught at fraud as just a business expense that will cost less than if they hadn't done the fraud in the first place. GM came out ahead when they were caught doing something almost identical in 1996 after all (the wikipedia entry on GM gives some info).
I think Volkswagen should really pursue the Cross Blue concept they unveiled years ago. This would be a seven passenger SUV with a diesel generator for the electric motor with plug-in-hybrid capabilities. This would be similar to the Mitsubishi vehicle which is selling so many they still have not been able to bring it to the US. They should move in this direction where they use the diesel engines as the generator instead of the direct drive model. I would think a diesel engine run at a specific RPM would be able to pass emissions testing as they could then run it specifically for lower emissions.
Because the EPA requirements are zealous, and makes producing a diesel vehicle unviable.
No it does not. Diesels can easily meet the emissions rules and there are plenty of vehicles that do it without cheating. VW cheated because they didn't want to install the expensive equipment necessary to make this happen such as a urea injection system. It has nothing to do with diesel technology and everything to do with profit motive. VW cheated to pad their bottom line.
The funny thing is electric cars are the real unviable vehicles, hydrogen powered vehicles are the best idea, only waste they produce from the combustion of hydrogen is water.
Umm, what? Hydrogen powered cars are clearly a non-starter at this time. Basically zero fuel infrastructure unless you use derivatives of hydrocarbons which basically ends up with the same sort of emissions problems we currently face. They've got high emissions intensity because our primary source of hydrogen is from natural gas. They also have low performance (comparatively) and poor efficiency (comparatively) with PHEVs. While conceptually hydrogen power has some attractive features, in practice it isn't superior to existing alternatives and there is no evidence to suggest that will change in the near future.
Since you think (wrongly IMO) that electric cars are "unviable", I'm not going to waste time trying to convince you otherwise but so far the evidence does not appear to be agreeing with you. Electric and hybrid electric vehicles are pretty clearly the next evolution in automobiles and that only happens if they are a viable technology.
So VW decides to "fix" a problem that (technically) is a US only issue by greenwashing up a car they don't sell in the US.
The irony...
From the press release:
It was decided to switch over to installing only diesel drives with SCR and AdBlue technology in Europe and North America as soon as possible. Diesel vehicles will only be equipped with exhaust emissions systems that use the best environmental technology.
They are fixing the problem by putting in the exhaust cleaning diesel technologies that they had previously not put on their diesels (in the apparently mistaken belief that they would by able to solve the emissions problem without them.)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The Phaeton was sold in the US when it was introduced. However, the sales of the $70K VW were not good so they decided to withdraw it from the US Market.
The phaeton was Ferdinand Piëch's pet project, who was VW AGs CEO at the time, and was part of an effort to take VW upscale as the currency conversion of Euros to Dollars (paying Euros to make cars sold for Dollars) was making it difficult to make a profit on mass market cars
But, it's a miserable vehicle. Good luck if you can find a used one as they all literally broke down after time and became unusable. In less than 5 years or something absurd.
Because the EPA requirements are zealous, and makes producing a diesel vehicle unviable. The funny thing is electric cars are the real unviable vehicles, hydrogen powered vehicles are the best idea, only waste they produce from the combustion of hydrogen is water.
If you believe Hydrogen powered vehicles are the future then you should really be pushing for electric vehicles. Why because hydrogen powered vehicles will produce electricity and not be burned like current gas vehicles. This means any findings we have with electric vehicles will directly apply to hydrogen vehicles.
In fact when Chevy started building the first Volt they borrowed a lot of information that was produced by the team working on a hydrogen vehicle and used that to help build the Volt.
Rules and Regulations dictated from on high by some collection of bureaucrats—whose greatest achievement was to convince even dumber people to cast "votes" for their election to office—are always going to be a fantasy.
I like to breathe. It's something I do every day. I'd like to breathe clean air, thank you. If you want to pollute, don't do it in my air
Volkswagen's problem was not that there wasn't technology available to clean the NOx out of the diesel emissions. Their problem was after deciding to license the clean diesel technology ("BlueTec") from Daimler, the CEO got pushed out and replaced by a new CEO who cancelled the deal and made a deliberate decision not to license BlueTec. This was because their engineers claimed that they could solve the problem using their own technology, turbocharged direct injection (TDI). http://www.wsj.com/articles/vw...
They were wrong.
So, the answer is that the technology was there, but Volkswagen had made a decision not to use it.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Try making reliable electronic systems. I know of no one who's bought a VW made in the last 10 years who hasn't fought with electronic engine control system gremlins.
10 years? Hell I owned a series of VWs from 1985-2003. (Scirocco, Golf, GTI, Jetta) My father owned several (3 Sciroccos, 2 Jettas, a Golf and a Passat plus Audi 5000) from 1977 to this year. My sister has owned several (Fox, Golf, Audi A3). EVERY single one of them save three, had electrical problems at one time or another. Usually something minor but sooner or later something electrical would break well before it should have been expected to break.
VWs in my experience will last a long time but you can absolutely count on having them in the shop for one thing or another routinely. Electrical gremlins are routine and problem the most common problem I've run into. VW vehicles are durable but not especially reliable in my experience.
So would I buy an electrical car from VW? HELL NO!
> Phaeton
Right. So what they're going to do is make yet another "Tesla killer" that sells to a few thousand rich people, and leave all the people that bought a Jetta in the cold. The net effect of this on overall emissions will be basically zero.
Perhaps they would be better off spending this on making a diesel hybrid PEH drivetrain that could equip 80% of the cars they sell? This is a move that takes far less development, would cost less in real dollar terms, and would *drastically* reduce overall real-world emissions.
Rather than have diesel hybrid cars it would be better to have diesel electric cars.
Volkswagen's fix will reduce the mileage on the cars that it's applied to. I wonder if VW owners are really going to line up at the garage to have the fix applied. Or will mandatory emissions testing force them to allow VW to apply the fix?
First, because that's not actually what he said, and second, because this is a news site, and that is not news, it's just repeating what he said in 2007.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
VW's proposed fix has not been announced yet. All that's been announced is that it will require hardware changes (which the people saying it would reduce milage were assuming it would not).
People lived in New Orleans for years before Air Conditioning was ever invented. Perhaps not people like you, however.
Inch for inch a Golf. 85 mile range. Down to USD$28K ($21K after the tax credit). For $500 Bosch comes and installs a fast charger in your garage. What's not to like?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Silly, I am talking about hydrogen powered combustion engines, they produce more power than a gasoline engine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Maybe I'm reading this wrong but it appears the Wiki shows the Hydrogen version made less power by almost 50% when compared to running on gas (80kW on hydrogen vs 154kW on gas).
> Europe has far higher emission requirements than the US
European regulation crusades against high tail-pipe emissions of CO2 (global climate change arch-enemy) and PM10 (tiny soot particles eventually causing cancer and systematic heart failure after decades of accumulation in the lungs). PM10 is a big-big issue for diesels, necessitating particulate filters to meet Euro 4/5/6 norms. Another trick is "AdBlue" tech that uses acid refined from urination to wash tailpipe exhausts clean.
In contrast, as far as I understand, US regulations are much focused on the various nitrogen-oxides, which cause the classic "smog" effect. Generally speaking Europe receives more rain, so NOx is less of an issue for the old continent. (But France and especially its capital Paris is an exception to this generalization.) It should noted as well that Europe uses a lot of methane (~ Russia's piped natural gas) for heating and electric power generation, so their coal/wood burning emissions are lesser, helping to alleviate the NOx problem. (Poland is an exception in Europe, they are crazy about poor quality "brown" coal, have no reactor and afraid to buy much gas from Putin.) Meanwhile USA is a big consumer of coal and mineral oil.
I am talking about hydrogen powered combustion engines, they produce more power than a gasoline engine.
Did you actually read the article you linked to?
Power: Hydrogen 80kW vs Gasoline 154kW
Torque: Hydrogen 140Nm vs Gasoline 222Nm
Range: Hydrogen 100 km vs Gasoline 550km
When powered by hydrogen it is worse in each and every relevant measure. A LOT worse.
Channel reality series? Oh, wait, that was done already - and ABC called it "Lost"
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I think you failed to realize that he was speaking of fuel-cell electric propulsion vehicles, when mentioning hydrogen power. The kind of equipment that blew up in Apollo 13, but much perfected ever since. Toyota now sells a series produced fuel-cell engined car called Mirai, but it has a very ugly body. Rumor says they are working on a re-body, codenamed Miku that has acceptable looks for the euro-atlantic market. On the other hand, battery-electric powered vehicles are really silly. The whole Earth would need to be mined into Moon or Mars to obtain enough material for a large-scale conversion from internal combustion to batteries. In contrast, the Mirai's fuel cell only needs a few kilos of steel and some 2oz of platinum, which is very little (albeit very expensive).
I did not fail to realize this what I'm saying is that if you believe hydrogen power is the way via Fuel Cell then having electric vehicles now would help the auto industry move toward electrifying cars which will help as then you have electric components ready to go for when/if hydrogen becomes capable.
I own an electric vehicle and realize they are not for everyone but saying we are going to jump from gas to hydrogen is ridiculous as the big issues with hydrogen are storage, infrastructure, and creation. I believe these can be overcome but electric vehicles are a stop gap until that happens and will also help develop better internals for electric vehicles no matter how they are powered.
A french magazine for consumers wrote an interesting article about long-term reliability of the various cars.
Volkswagen has a generally good quality, but still a lot of problems.
Here are a few ones:
- fouling and breakage of the turbo diesel 4 cylinder
- failure of injectors and water/oil leakage on the 1.6 TDI
etc.
The recommended models are : Up!, Polo (except diesel until 2014), current Golf Jetta and Passat, New Beetle, Sharan since 2013 and current Touareg.
If you are interested, I can translate some of their recommendations.
The only issue electric cars have now is the cost of the batteries.
That is not the only problem though it is an important one. And that problem will be solved with scaled up production as you mention.
The biggest problem electric vehicles have is refueling time and as a byproduct of that, range. They're making excellent progress on this but aren't quite there yet. I figure they either need to get the range up to 700+ miles with an under 1 hour recharge time or they need to get the recharge time to under 15 minutes with a 250 mile range. I think that is doable but it will be a few years before we're really there.
Diesel hybrid is a nonsense.
Really? Every locomotive in use today is a diesel electric hybrid. Frankly I think a diesel hybrid would make a lot of sense for many applications, particularly large trucks. Electric motors are great for around town stop/start traffic where diesels aren't so hot and diesels are great for steady state long distance driving (like highways) where electric motors aren't so hot. Their strengths are very complimentary.
I know they exist, but still the whole hybrid jazz is about overcoming problems of petrol engine the diesel just does not have.
Diesel engines are not *that* much different from gasoline engines.
The Phaeton was sold in the US when it was introduced. However, the sales of the $70K VW were not good so they decided to withdraw it from the US Market.
That's because they sold it under the wrong brand. It should have been an Audi vehicle here in the US. NOBODY thinks of VW as a luxury brand. The Phaeton was a darn good car but VW flunked marketing 101 in selling it. The badge on the front matters when it comes to luxury vehicles. That's the same reason Toyota, Honda and Nissan sell their luxury stuff under Lexus, Acura and Infiniti brands here in the US.
There's an old UK automotive joke: Why do the British drink warm beer? Because they keep it in Lucas refrigerators!"
Exactly what sort of fix are you envisioning that wouldn't reduce mileage? Do you really think they're going to find room to install an AdBlue system in your car?
Unless you're talking about adding a post-treatment system, reducing emissions = lowering some combination of the combustion temperature or compression ratio = lower mileage and less power.
The War of 1812... the good 'ol days when the federal government actually tried to save New Orleans.
As for petrol/diesel, they differ a lot.
Disagree. There are some important differences but the basic principles of operation are little different. Suck, squish, bang, blow. They mostly differ in what sort of operation they are optimal within. Little different than an Atkinson cycle engine versus an Otto cycle engine.
Enough to make a 20-40% difference in overall car efficiency.
40%? Show me one real world example of a car with a diesel getting 40% better fuel economy than a gasoline engine of similar horsepower in the same chassis. In the real world the fuel economy advantage tends to be 10-20% for any given power output. Diesel does have some advantages but let's not overstate it.
First of all, diesel engine is much more efficient at partial or near-idle load. Idle consumption of the same car is about 1.1l/h gasoline or 0.4l/h diesel.
Diesel is generally better at any steady state than most gasoline engines, not just idle. But much driving is not in steady state so the real world advantage is often less clear for many use cases.
Diesel has better torque distribution. Adding the mass of the battery to a diesel car generally has more effect than optimizing the engine load.
And electrics have still better torque distribution than diesel. Basically full torque immediately from a dead stop. Plus the electric motor provides additional power to deal with the battery weight.
Let me put it to you this way. There is a reason the newest supercars are coming as hybrids. It allows them to optimize performance in ways that are not possible with gasoline or electric alone. It is very reasonable to suppose that there will be use cases where a diesel hybrid will make sense for exactly the same reasons.
Electricity is generated in coal power plants, or in nuclear power plants. Those pollute.
Also, recycling batteries is hard, and it pollutes. The sum of pollution over the lifecycle of an electric car may well be a lot worse than that of a gasoline car.
no, I don't have a sig
I live in Iceland. In our drivers' ed books there was a section that said something to the effect of, "For a while car manufacturers experimented with adding air conditioning systems into vehicles. This generally proved to not be worth the cost and posed maintenance issues, so few do this anymore."
Here air conditioning, whether in the home or in a car, means "opening a window". Or more often just "turning down your heater" or "taking off your wool sweater". ;) Large buildings sometimes have "loftræsing", but that usually just means a blower to circulate air, no chilling unit involved. The hottest it's ever been recorded anywhere in the country was 30,5C (87F); the record in Reykjavík is 26,2C (79F) A typical July day in Reykjavík has a high of 15C (59F), and people complain about the heat once you start getting close to 20C (68F).
Diesel costs $7 per UK gallon ($5.80 per US gallon). Gasoline is marginally more expensive.
I'd go with all electric. Of course, our city is trying to force everyone to bike by spending vast sums of money to rip out parking and turn 4 lane roads int A)o 2-lane with needlessly large sidewalks or B) alternating left/right turn lanes (so you have to keep switching) and packing them with stop lights for every little intersection, all for the specific design purpose of slowing down traffic to encourage people to bike instead. Oh how I wish I was kidding...
The War of 1812... the good 'ol days when the federal government actually tried to save New Orleans.
That's what the original Prius was - only low speed electric. But as the AC pointed out below, if you're going to add an electric motor, you might as well add a good one, it doesn't make much of a weight difference.
The War of 1812... the good 'ol days when the federal government actually tried to save New Orleans.
The cheat may not actually be necessary to comply with EU regulations, in which case the fix would just mean removing it. The VW exec that was questioned by parliament here recently stated that the fix would not reduce performance or fuel economy, so if they lied about that too, then VW are storing up even more trouble for themselves. But I'm for sure going to wait for confirmation before I let them "fix" my car.
Oh no... it's the future.
The sane way to use hydrogen, assuming it can be produced in large enough quantity and without enough pollution to compromise its other advantages, is to create it adjacent to, and then use to it drive, large power plants, which then pass the resulting energy along to vehicles as electricity. Electric vehicles offer something hydrogen vehicles cannot: they are energy agnostic, because you can make electricity in quite a few ways, none of which the electric vehicle even needs to know about, and from there, it's almost trivial to get the energy to most vehicles. Making hydrogen with a coal plant? That has to be most unfortunately indirect, and it just won't ever be practical. But an electric vehicle, today can run from a coal plant today, a nuke tomorrow, tidal when you go to the coast, and solar when you're in the south. Geothermal when you're cruising around Iceland. Etc. And hydrogen, if you build a hydrogen power plant.
Transport and storage for hydrogen are severely problematic, there is no established infrastructure. The infrastructure for electric cars is already mostly in place. They can be plugged in at night when most generating facilities have considerable excess capacity available, and they'll be good to go for the mast majority of use cases, which will be short to moderate range. Furthermore, if the charging station is built with local storage, it can be accumulating energy when the vehicle isn't present and deliver it to the vehicle later, which will smooth the peak grid load out even further.
Batteries are unlikely to be the long term energy storage of choice in vehicles, but for now, they're a cost-effective technology, and there's not much reason not to (continue to) go there. We can hope for ultracaps -- there are numerous signs of progress, but they're just not there yet -- but batteries will certainly do for now.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Their design is a problem everywhere
No it isn't. It is only a problem in urban areas with frequent inversions or poor wind flow. So it is a problem in Los Angeles and Denver. It is NOT a problem in rural areas, or even many urban areas. In those areas, the additional NOx is likely better than the environmental effect of the alternative higher fuel consumption and higher CO2 emissions.
Instead of removing the "test-mode", they should instead tie it into the GPS and link it to weather reports. So if you are in Los Angeles on a calm day, the engine would automatically reduce NOx at the expense of burning more fuel. But if you are on I-80 in rural Nebraska, it would sip fuel and generate some extra NOx to fertilize the wheat fields.
Given that Iceland has nearly unlimited geothermal and hydroelectric power, electric vehicles seem like an obvious choice.
I would bet heavily that the solution is indeed that they'll find room to install an AdBlue system.
Don't be so certain that Europe has higher standards or that they even enforce them. They're just as corrupt as we are:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09...
I'd be surprised, it takes up a good bit of real estate in the vehicle...
The War of 1812... the good 'ol days when the federal government actually tried to save New Orleans.
We're so awash in electric resources that we ship in aluminum ore, refine it here with local power, then ship out the aluminum ;) And despite being a ridiculously windy country we only recently built our first wind turbines. There's just been no need. Heck, I'd like to see them build more if only to act as windbreaks ;) Last winter my land got hit by 60m/s (134mph) winds in the strongest of the windstorms - windstorms that hit once every 2-3 days for the whole winter.
That said, I do wish they'd stop trying to dam up every river they can get their hands on. I'm all down with geo but I'm not a big hydro fan.
The War of 1812... the good 'ol days when the federal government actually tried to save New Orleans.
I'm pretty sure that 'trust' isn't a US only issue.
Car manufacturers makes sales based on trust. If I don't trust that this $30k+ thing I'm about to buy is going to do what it's supposed to, safely, and for a long time if maintained, I'm not going to buy it and I'll go across the street to that Honda dealer to buy a car that does essentially the same stuff, but is built by a company I do trust.
That's the problem VW will ultimately deal with.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Yeah, this scandal is going to make VW rethink its plans to sell the new VW Smug, which was which was to be powered entirely by the driver's condescending attitude.
That's an interesting idea, but there's something wrong with your post.
I-80 is lined with 300+ miles of corn through Nebraska, not wheat. That's ethanol country. =)
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
My guess is that all the carmakers are involved (more here: http://geekcrumbs.com/2015/10/...). Wouldn't it be ironic if they all ended up guilty, and that was what finally provoked a massive shift to electric?
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
For legibility purposes, due to 'higher' being vague, I'd suggest using words like 'stricter' and 'looser'. A strict standard would require less of what's bad, and more of what's good. A 'Higher' standard for something like NOx could mean more is allowed to be emitted, ie the level allowed is higher, or that less is allowed, because the standard itself is 'higher'.
Which is higher: 60mg/km, or 20mg/mile of NOx?
US has, currently, stricter standards for NOx, especially given that the latest US revision dropped them by an order of magnitude. the 60 and 20 were pulled from memory.
I don't read AC A human right
Well, usually the AC compressor is belt-driven right off the mechanical spinning bits of the engine. You'd have to redesign the mechanical clutch that already exists for on / off to also take input from your electrical motor optionally, in addition to adding the electric motor and the increased battery capacity to run the thing, knowing that you're not always going to have a brand new battery under the hood. Complexity also means initial expense and more expensive repairs over time.
It's never as simple as it seems.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
You seem to be quite sure of this... I would question as to why?
Several reasons.
1) PHEVs require minimal to no infrastructure investment to be viable. No other alternative can make that claim.
2) Fuel economy standards. PHEVs are a proven solution to the problem and the solution with the least compromise of performance.
3) Prices of batteries continues to fall and performance continues to rise. As that happens the the price of hybrid vehicles will continue to improve.
4) Performance and luxury cars already are beginning the conversion to hybrid. (See McClaren, Ferrari, BMW, Porsche, Lamborghini, etc)
5) Internal combustion engines aren't going to get much better than they already are. We are well into diminishing returns on their performance.
6) There are basically no other market-ready alternatives to improve performance. Not hydrogen, not natural gas, not pure-electric. Not yet.
Well, they DO get a lot of press... but sales? Plug in EVs of all types were less than 1% of the total light car and truck sales in the US in 2014 (it was 0.7% to be exact).
Find me another alternative fuel vehicle type that has even close to the market uptake that hybrids have. Hybrids are still relatively pricey so it's not surprising that they will take some time to gather market share but they ARE gaining market share. And they are selling. In Japan the Toyota Prius is currently the #2 selling vehicle and has been near the top for years. They're not going to take over the market tomorrow but they will become very commonplace over the next 10-15 years.
That is a rounding error, not the "coming replacement of ICE cars".
That's like saying in 1978 that personal computers are a rounding error in computer sales. It's true but it misses the point of what will happen next. Hybrids are still new and fairly expensive. But car companies will HAVE to start pushing hybrids or they will have to greatly lower the power of the vehicles they sell to meet fuel economy standards. I think the former is far more likely than the later. There is no other market ready alternative available to them. You're particularly going to see hybrids becoming standard equipment on luxury cars first and then working down the food chain into mass market cars as costs fall. It will take some years but I don't see any credible scenario where hybrids don't grab big market share.
Nonsense. Most visible smoke is larger particles than PM10, and is not fully respirable. The cilia trap most of it before it gets to the alveoli. PM10 is relatively coarse particulates. PM2.5 is fine particulates, and below this there are superfine particulates too, and these are the more dangerous. PM2.5 and superfine particulates are a problem in gasoline engines as well, particularly the newer direct injection designs. Hysteria has just not centered on this yet.
I-80 is lined with 300+ miles of corn through Nebraska, not wheat. That's ethanol country. =)
From Omaha to the Wyoming border, I-80 is in Nebraska for 455 miles. In eastern Nebraska it is mostly lined with cornfields. But as you go west into the drier regions, you will begin to see more wheat and less corn. By the time you reach the Wyoming border, it will be mostly wheat or pasture. But NOx emissions will help any crop. Even nitrogen fixing legumes like soybeans will benefit.
To be fair, European-market Volkswagens tend to be built a lot better than their North-American market counterparts.
I've owned plenty of VWs that were built in Europe and I stand by my statement that their reliability isn't good. I don't think the boat ride reduces reliability so I'm unconvinced that VWs quality problems are anything but engineering and occasionally build defects in most cases. I've seen no evidence that VWs built on this side of the pond are less reliable than those build in Germany. Honda and Toyota and BMW and others manage to build very reliable cars here in North America so VW doesn't have any excuse.
They are generally considerd to be among the most reliable and durable brands and they depreciate very slowly because of this reputation.
I have never seen a single quality survey in the last 20 years where VW was not near the bottom of the heap. Durable I would agree with from personal experience. Reliable? No way. The data simply doesn't support that assertion.
Americans are prepared to pay less for a new car and have very different preferences.
VW overcharges for their vehicles. Why would I pay more for a vehicle from a company with a deservedly bad reputation for reliability? The Jetta is a decent enough car but it's not better than a half a dozen of its competitors. If VW cannot be bothered to listen to local preferences and cannot fix the reliability issues then it should surprise no one that their sales aren't going to be amazing.
VW has had trouble adjusting models to North-American tastes and requirements without losing too much of the original appeal of the car, but also with local production quality and continuity.
True but that's just arrogance on their part. I've owned a lot of VWs over the years and some of their design decisions are baffling. Other manufacturers manage the trick so what's VW's excuse?
My goodness VW. You got caught cheating, mad people are still mad... now just stop talking for a while. Nothing you say is going to be seen positively in the near future.
X
Don't forget their awesome TDI engines from before this mess that tended to shear crank shafts, destroying the valves and contaminating the entire engine with metal shards; and their flywheels that would crack and explode taking half the gearbox with it.
The VWs of the last decade are nowhere near the quality of those that came before.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
If it were MY car, I'd not take it in for the "fix" either just for that reason...reduction in performance and mileage.
Thankfully, not everyone lives in a state that requires an emissions test....or even auto inspections at ALL.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It is a world-wide problem. Granted that there are some nations that don't enforce pollution laws and likely some that don't even have any. But the EU, Canada and others are very interested in this.
The real irony is that after being caught in a huge lie about their diesel engines they think that they can focus on electric cars and the public will believe all the lies they tell about their electric cars.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Tests conducted by VW showed that their electric cars actually have negative emissions, leaving the air cleaner than it was before they drove through.
All your fossil fuel vehicles are belong to the 20th Century.
Wake up, it's the 21st.
Adapt or die.
Nobody cares about your excuses.
Batteries are cheap, solar is cheaper than coal, wind is cheap, stop whining grandpa!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Actually, biodiesel would be better in places like Wisconsin where most electricity comes from coal.
Without cheating electronics, that is.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Back then, if a heat wave came in and people died, tough.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Plenty of room in the passenger seat.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Because VW is the only company that makes diesel engines.
No, they are just the only ones that can't pass the CARB and EPA testing without cheating. Even if you just restrict to German manufacturers, BMW and Mercedes pass without issue, and without cheating.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
New cars sales are based on ego, not trust.
If they can convince you that a new VW will get you laid, you will buy one.
See also Ferrari. Terrible cars cynically sold to customers regarded as full idiots by the manufacturer. But they will get you laid.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Just take a V8 and replace the cam, intake and exhaust and you can have one bank of 4 cylinders acting like a compressor. That's how most tow around jackhammer compressors work.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Don't try to tell that to my German relatives.
One thing we always have to talk about, how terrible new VWs are, there or here.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Car advice from the frogs? Not just no, HELL NO!
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
VW made some fine air cooled cars.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
There might be situations where I do want someone else's battery.
But in those situations, you don't want mine.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
While this is true, have you ever been to Florida and seen how comical the results are? I've seen the great big swamp buggies, the platform type, going down 98 in PCB with a stack of students on the back drinking margaritas. They call it "FAG week" during Spring Break. FAG is Florida, Alabama, and Georgia. The results of these uninspected vehicles is quite comical - I've even seen a car with no driver's side door. Though, I think they can stop and take that off the road. They didn't. It was Florida, after all.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You must not have been looking at the same quality surveys then.. 6 out of the top 10 car models in this satisfaction survey from last year are VW or one of its brands (Skoda):
You right I wasn't. I was looking at ones that measure RELIABILITY like this which have VW firmly in the bottom half. Same deal with Consumer Reports and plenty of others. The survey you cited measures customer satisfaction, not reliability. Very different. (Plus how do you get 6 of the top 10 and still not manage to be the top brand?)
I own a brand new, bespoke even, BMW 640Li (yes, that one and yes it's nice) and no, no it does not do that. In fact, I have an absurd number of vehicles because I enjoy them and I've been growing my collection for years now. Not one does that. Of course most of them are all very specific model years and makes and not new but, still... I did have a buddy with some borderline moronic Ford Escape Hybrid (i laughed at him - it went to the junk yard, nobody would even buy it) and it does shut off when stopped and used electricity when going slow - sometimes. It was junk. For the up-thread posters - AC worked during the times it was on electric power and even when stopped at a stop light.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
the issue with hydrogen is compressing and cooling a tank to keep hydrogen liquid is very heavy, that is why storing hydrogen in Magnesium hydride is attractive,
Magnisium hydride is just 8% hydrogen by mass. You have to tote around a huge amount of heavy magnesium so you lose whatever advantage in specific energy you had with hydrogen. No, that will most certainly NOT be the solution because it isn't any better than existing batteries.
If you had all those problems with that brand, an expensive and extensive problem spanning multiple vehicles, then why did you keep buying that brand? I'm not sure we should accept your reasoning as you're clearly telling us that you're unreasonable. I do own a sort-of-rare VW. I have what is known as a Quantum 5 wagon and it's fun but I don't take it out as much as I should. I don't think it has been on the road in the past year. I kind of feel sorry for it - it needs to be driven.
The only issue I had was brakes, rear, and the parts were in short supply so it took some time for my mechanic to get it resolved.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
The phaeton was Ferdinand PiÃch's pet project, who was VW AGs CEO at the time,
The Phaeton was an idiotic thing to do. They re-invented the Audi D1 platform, but they didn't really make it any better, just prettier. Meanwhile, Audi brought out the D2 platform, which was better. And the rest is history... boring history with low sales volumes.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And where is your hydrogren coming from? And what are the energy losses to store it in an automobile compared to a chemical battery?
I don't know what's so bad about that. Sounds like it would remove morons from the gene pool.
The problem with driving un-roadworthy cars is that when your brakes fail and the wheels drop off, you are likely to involve someonw else in the ensuing accident.
It's one of those areas where libertarianism doesn't really work. If my family are killed by a driver of a dangerous vehicle, I really don't care that I can sue him. Prevention is better than cure, even if it does involve impinging on his freedom.
tl;dr you have the right to kill yourself, not other people
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
New cars sales are based on ego, not trust.
If they can convince you that a new VW will get you laid, you will buy one.
See also Ferrari. Terrible cars cynically sold to customers regarded as full idiots by the manufacturer. But they will get you laid.
If you see someone in a Ferrari, you can reasonably assume they have more money than sense. This will attract a certain sort of person, but in that case why not just buy a Fiat Panda and spend the money on high class prostitutes instead?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Back then, if a heat wave came in and people died, tough.
Ah yes, the good old days!
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I live in Iceland. In our drivers' ed books there was a section that said something to the effect of, "For a while car manufacturers experimented with adding air conditioning systems into vehicles. This generally proved to not be worth the cost and posed maintenance issues, so few do this anymore."
Do they actually remove the air conditioning system for vehicles imported to iceland then? Most non-basic cars (even in the UK) have AC as standard, even though it's barely needed here.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Virtually no one drives a car anything approaching 700 miles in a day.
Has nothing to do with driving 700 miles in a day. It has to do with time required to refuel. The longer it takes to refuel the longer the range on electric vehicles will have to be to make them practical for long distance travel. Don't get too wrapped up in the exact numbers - those are just guesses anyway. If it takes 2 hours to recharge your car, you're not going to want to do that daily if you are away from home. It's too inconvenient. If it is just 15 minutes your range can be less because the drive time to refuel time ratio is smaller. So you'll want enough range that you don't have to worry about it. Maybe that number is 500, maybe it is 800. Doesn't really matter. We're already seeing early prototypes of commercial EVs with over 400 mile ranges and Tesla has been talking about ranges long and more than that in the not distant future.
If you had all those problems with that brand, an expensive and extensive problem spanning multiple vehicles, then why did you keep buying that brand?
I didn't. The vehicles were mostly hand me down vehicles (or family deals) from family members who were VW enthusiasts. (my father particularly) I didn't have enough money at the time to be especially choosy. And to be fair they were generally pretty good vehicles aside from spending more time in the shop than I prefer. I have particularly fond memories of my 85 Scirocco which was a pretty fun car to drive. Of course once I had enough money to buy my own vehicles I haven't touched a VW since. My recent purchases were Honda, Nissan, Mercedes, Saturn, Ford. The only VWs that piqued my interest at all were (ironically) the diesels and that was mostly for the engine rather than the rest of the car.
I do own a sort-of-rare VW. I have what is known as a Quantum 5 wagon and it's fun but I don't take it out as much as I should
That's just another badge for an early version of the second gen Passat. Was badged the Quantum in North America but it was a Passat or a Santana in other markets. I kept my Scirocco far longer than I should have for similar reasons. Eventually the brakes froze like they will with any vehicles that sits too long and I sold it.
Not only that, but the range is only 100km (62 miles).
And the 0-100km/hr time is 10 seconds. A Honda Civic with the crappy CVT will do that.
So now that the NOx requirement creates a demand for emissions-reducing technology, shouldn't the market supply ever cheaper and better emissions-reducing equipment? Isn't that how the market works---finding better ways to fulfill a demand?
Just because it is expensive now does not mean that it will always be expensive.
Meanwhile, climate change is happening now, and the effects will be worse the longer we wait to address it.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.