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Volkswagen Emissions Issues Spread To Gasoline Cars (bloomberg.com)
schwit1 writes: Just a day after news broke that Volkswagen's emissions scandal had expanded to its Porsche unit and Audi SUVs, the company has disclosed yet another problem, this time affecting carbon dioxide levels emitted by their cars. "Volkswagen said an internal probe showed 800,000 cars had "unexplained inconsistencies" concerning their carbon-dioxide output. Previously, the automaker estimated it would need to recall 11 million vehicles worldwide — more than Volkswagen sold last year." This batch of cars includes a small number of gasoline engines. Until now, only diesel engines were part of the problem.
Or its mpg for that matter, simply because the lab tests whether EU, US or elsewhere don't match real world conditions. Whether VW is refering to its lab results - in which case well duh - or real world driving - TFA doesn't say - it really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Personally I'd be looking VERY closely at the figures for hybrids because the real world driving test mpg & CO2 is frequently so far removed from the lab results that it might as well be for an entirely different vehicle.
Carbon dioxide is simply the product of combustion. It is not the result of incomplete combustion or anything. Nitrous/Nitric oxides are due to unintended combustion of nitrogen, carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons are due to incomplete combustion, but carbon dioxide ??? What is going on there?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Who cares about how much CO2 a car is emitting? I'm more worried about pollutants, like CO and NOx. And SOx too, but I think the catalytic converter has that puppy whipped.
AFAIK the amount of CO2 produced is directly related to the amount of gasoline used. Car manufacturers - all car manufacturers - lie about mileage the same way all laptop and phone manufacturers lie about battery usage.
We all know this, we've all known this for a long time. How is this suddenly news?
Clearly it is the engineers who are running VW. Those assholes are driving a great company into the ground. Time for the suits to wrestle control back from the kids and set things right.
Volkswagen was created by Hitler!
HITLER!
There! Enough said!
The most important lesson we can learn from all of this is that environmentalism can't just be forced because some ivory tower academics or pandering politicians want it to just happen.
Environmentalism must happen, no pun intended, naturally. There must be real desire for it to happen among the participants directly involved. There must be economic feasibility. There must be technological feasibility.
A bunch of leftist ideologues can't just get together and set arbitrary limits on carbon dioxide emissions, write some laws, and expect it all to work fine in the real world.
Environmentalists need to get with the real world. They need to get with it when it comes to economics. They need to get with it when it comes to technology. They need to unchain themselves from trees, and do something useful for a change.
If they put even half of the effort they put into crafting bullshit carbon dioxide emission legislation into instead providing more funding for advanced technological research, then we'd likely see actual improvements, rather than these workarounds to bypass unrealistic legislation!
It's just another example of leftists causing more harm than good through their misguided, economically-detached and reality-detached academic snobbery.
In other news, if your retirement portfolio still contains Volkswagen stock, you might be a slow learner.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I was under the impression that MP4 took over a decade ago.
Fight for your bitcoins!
Better put your boots on......It's getting deep and sticky in here.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
There was a point raised on another board that the main reason VW is singled out in the US... is because it is a German company, and either #1 or #2 in sales.
It was mentioned that the whole VW/Audi thing seemed to the people writing about it, a xenophobic pogrom to appease the proles, similar to "bash the Jap cars" which was done in the 1990s after the US populace switched to those.
If there was not an election coming up, this issue wouldn't have ever happened. This is just jingoism rearing its ugly head.
is choking on their own Fahrvergnügen... pity, to be sure.
As an engineer working for a company that rhymes with bored, this is a disaster of biblical proportions for VW. Ive already heard people calling them smokeswagons and having a hard time reselling, but its important to remeber that this could have happened to any automotive manufacturer with a lapse in conscience.
JIT, Kanban, and other modern manufacturing processes for cars start with a platform, and from that platform grows a number of different vehicles. Jaguar is mostly Cadillac and ford parts, Range Rover is also borne from many shared components of chevrolet and to a lesser extent GM. What the consumer is buying isnt quality anymore but the marketing auspices of a proud brand.
the same ECM can control hundreds of cars, and is programmed at the factory by line and tooling departments to meet the predetermined build demand. core components like emissions, if you wanted to skirt them, would be too hard to retool every time and would arouse suspicion. So making nefarious code a core of the software is a no-brainer. its also a killing stroke for a number of brands.
taking a step back, porsche owners dont care. BMW owners barely care. the majority of these owners dont maintain regular service, dont care about automotive emissions, and either sell the car or end their lease once the vehicle no longer suits them. the car is a status symbol and until emissions become a scarlet letter outside of the state of california its tricky to see how either brand is legitimately affected. what is affected is the continued ability of VW to sell their brands in the US and other, much stricter countries. You can expect delays in delivery, testing, and increased cost as the brand now has to prove to regulators and governments that its on the straight and narrow. This chicanery will haunt VW for no less than 25 years, or at worst it will follow the company like the quality issues of american manufacturers in the 80s until the restructuring of the company..
Good people go to bed earlier.
What a surprise--not.
Redistribute to individuals and localities affected by the fraud. Joe the formerly proud owner of one of these smokeswagons gets $X to buy a new car and have the old clunker towed to a scrap yard, and Small Town, USA gets $Y/affected owner in jurisdiction to invest towards cleaning up the environment and properly disposing of the old smokeswagons.
Enough's enough. Enough whining about how everybody cheats, enough whining about how the standards are unfair, enough whining about only liberals caring about the environment. The simple fact is that we have a huge multinational corporation that feels like it's above the law and got caught fucking the doughnuts in the break room. VW is not too big to fail. Let's prove it.
...And still... No one cares, and people keep buying those cars. In fact I'd wager people will buy even more of them just for shits and giggles.
1. Minimizing your opponent in an argument is an old, ineffective tactic that does not display any of the alleged merit in your argument.
2. This disclosure was in Europe, where the EPA has absolutely no jurisdiction.
Thanks for the post.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I wonder. The scandal is only getting worse, and I wonder if this old brand will be able to recover? Its reputation is no doubt tarnished for years to come, and I am sure that's already taking a big toll on sales.
Does Fahrvergnügen mean "Fuck the Earth!" or something?
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
Soon you'll see almost every car on the road is emitting more pollutants than the standard (flawed) smog test indicates.
I'm sorry to say, I figured things would go this way with Volkswagen and it's other brands.
Now what I'm waiting for, is for someone else to start thinking, '..hey, what about all the other auto manufacturers out there?', and start testing all of them for signs of emissions-test-evasion.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
With this level of recalls and penalties can VW survive? Will they have any funds left for research and product improvement? How many investors and former employees will take an economic blood bath over this?
I really hope you are trying to prove Poe's Law here. Because otherwise this is pretty stupid.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Probably the same guy that's been injecting absurd Republican bashing into every story. Just trollin'.
Those guys get around.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Pls help me to understand..
with so may issues..so much bullshit, why are these on the road?
Why are they allowed to still sell cars in the US or anywhere else?
Has there been regression testing to see which models are affected by year. ex: does a 2001 golf suffer the same issues as it bretheren today?
Does a 2004 porche 911 have the same issues as todays porches?
once uncovered, what sort of penalties should be levied?
personally i think they should be banned from being sold untill they are all tested, and propperly assessed.
The soot ends up in the soot filter, which is automatically cleaned every now and then by burning it into CO2. Hence, carbon emission = fuel consumption x conversion factor.
The reason they are talking about CO2 emissions is because in Europe, cars are typically taxed based on CO2 emissions, not on mpg or l/100 km. Fuel consumption values are too much apples and oranges between diesel, LPG, gasoline/petrol, and electric.
Note that CO2 values are a bit higher than you'd expect from chemistry; some of the energy use during production are accounted for as well.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Honestly, I read that meaning more that VW was once a proud part of the Third Reich and the joke is mostly a reminder of that fact.
Yes, it's insulting to jews, but I the way I understand it it's even more insulting to modern day VW.
... that the company that first popularized the use of the word "lemon" to specifically describe a problematic car (popularized in the 60's) is now having its very own name being used to describe an undesirable level of vehicular emissions?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
So what's it gonna take? VW has big expensive dealerships, fully staffed with commission-based personnel. It'd be easy to walk in, waste their time, and walk out.
There is one simple solution to all of this... Forget what the lying, cheating, scandalous, programmed-by-people OBD2 results are saying and stick the damn probe up the tail (at least someone should be having their tail probed over all of this).
Here's how it goes down...
1. Governments institute new regulations
2. Manufacturer's say, sh!t we cant meet those new regulations with our current platform, what do we do.
3. Exec's say, what would the shareholders want?
4. Over-priced Analyst says, they need profits to be up and costs down.
5. Product Manager says, we have to develop a new platform to meet these new regulations.
6. Execs say, new platform is not what our shareholders want, they want profits, new platform development is too costly.
7. Project Manager says to team, we need to "think outside the box" to get this year's line out the door on time and under budget.
8. Engineer says, I think I have an idea, let me make some tweaks to the ECM to see if we can get better results.
9. Project Manager, screams to the top, we have done it, look how I rallied the team to get this done, oh and we have a pretty good team too.
10. Execs, don't question a thing, promote the Project Manager, fire the dumb Product Manager (because clearly he was wrong) and tell the shareholders they have a viable platform for the next decade from which they can grow profits like never before.
11. Profit!
According to the linked article there was something funky going on with the CO2/mileage certification process.
Granted the certification figures for all vehicles are optimistic, but that doesn't make them useless. I've spent many years working with environmental and scientific data, and it's often the case that you can't know certain things precisely. Nonetheless it is still important to measure these things in a consistent manner so you can compare figures to each other.
So suppose car A's test say it emits 282 g / km of CO2 traveled -- about 20 miles/gallon -- car B's test say it emits 188 g/mile (i.e. gets 30 mpg). While both cars in fact emit *more* CO2 than the tests say, I can at least rank them, and even get a rough sense that car B isn't just slightly more efficient than A; it's a lot more efficient. What's more if I have a maximum standard for CO2/km some cars may in practice emit a bit more than that standard, but since I can at least rank cars I can keep the most polluting cars off the road.
If the tests are somehow cooked, all that goes out the window and VW gets a fraudulent advantage over its competitors. So it does matter, even if test results are consistently more optimistic than real-world performance.
Now your point about hybrids is well taken; comparing a hybrid to a pure ICE car is an apples-to-oranges comparison because if they test approximately the same which is ranked better will depend on the specific kind of driving you do. However even then the comparison is not totally useless; presumably they use a model which they think accurately represents how an average driver might use a hybrid. It's very likely that you as an individual consumer won't be very close to that "average" driver, but the figures may be reasonable when aggregated by all the cars of that model on the road.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I prefer the one from the time of the Challenger explosion.
Q: How many astronauts can you fit in a VW Bug?
A: 12. Two in the front, three in the back, and seven in the ashtray.
What's the last thing Christa McAuliffe (spelling?) said?
What's this big red button do?
I have more... I'll spare you. Those are my favorites, however. Well, favorites from that time.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Since when does the potentially guilty party get to investigate itself?
CO2 emissions of cars are pretty much irrelevant! CO, NO and NO2 are worse, but since they are heavier that air, they don't hang around for long either. It's their corrosive nature which may cause the only real problem in the long term, but that is hardly a big problem!
For 18 years the world has not warmed , yet CO2 has increased substantially. On the other hand, the amount of CO2 in the air is miniscule. Just understanding how little CO2 actually is in our atmosphere shows how totally ridiculous the claims of the catastrophic warmists are, but don't let logic and reason get in the way of a good witch hunt!
Just to stir the pot a little more: Say No to COP21! Think of the children! :-P How will they pay all the carbon tax their parents foisted on them??
What colour where Christa McAuliffe's eyes?
Blue: One blew that way the other blew that way.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Temperature has gone up 0.20C in the past 18 years.
How do we know she had dandruff? We found her Head and Shoulders!
I'll have good company in hell.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
That has always been allowed, as long as it does not interfere with any simultaneous investigations by the authorities.
Sorry, but if it's Republican bashing, it is likely not absurd.
Please provide proof.
Temperature has gone up 0.20C in the past 18 years.
So what, even if it did, it's conclusively proven that CO2 is not the cause of temperature fluctuations. The earth's temperature is essentially a function of pressure of the atmosphere due to gravity, plus a little influence of the sun, it seems.