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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
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?
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
The CO2 emissions can affect the way the car is taxed/licensed.
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?
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.
Are you serious? How on earth can environmentalism occur naturally if just raping the earth is economically advantageous rather than doing things a bit more sanely? ...?
How will doing the environmental thing ever be better if we don't impose such regulations, restrictions, laws,
How will properly handling your waste ever be more economical than just dumping it somewhere and not care about it anymore? How will having your cars be economical ever be better than just making wasteful car that is far less complex?
I do agree that not every environmental attempt that is made is the biggest success, and that there often is too much wishful thinking, but waiting until it occurs naturally doesn't seem the way to go either...
You do have one point i guess, killing elephants for their tusks will occur naturally once there aren't any left... as will air polution once it's so terribly polluted that it becomes such a big health risk that noone can ignore it. But i do prefer people trying to stop things before that point, by trying to manipulate the economics of such acts via laws, regulations, ...
I am not sure how anyone currently on the right can accuse environmentalists of being "ideologues" with a straight face at the moment.
Forget about NOX and CO2, emission testing and all the BS. Just tax fuel, because that taxes real world mileage. Make the gallon about $7.50-9 and everyone will be driving cars that convert all the energy in the fuel into movement and spew almost no pollutants
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.
Catalytic converter burns off unburnt hydrocarbons. SOx is handled by not putting sulfur in the fuel. Burning the fuel colder reduces NOx, but increases CO; burning it hotter reduces CO and unburnt hydrocarbons, but increases NOx. NOx has a really short half-life and a high toxic dose (it's like 12ppb in the air right now and the NIH gets iffy if it hits 1200ppb; health problems start around 1500ppb), but we're panicing more over NOx right now.
People call NOx "pollution", which is a hot button word. NOx is an emission, but not polluting at the elevated levels VW's cars put out. On the other hand, your standard school bus emits lung-irritating particulate and *high* amounts of extremely-toxic CO because it would emit unacceptable (but not harmful) levels of NOx if it burned the fuel hotter, like a VW. I've seen poorly-tuned diesel cars spit out black smoke clouds, and I've been behind a gasoline car that was tuned properly and had a fouled cat--inhaling vaporized hydrocarbons in that concentration made me nauseated; it was like huffing off a jar of high-octane fuel.
That's pollution. That stuff clogs the air and, if every car burned that way, would start wrecking the environment and destroying people's health; NOx emissions like VW as a standard would not fit the government's numbers, but also would not damage the environment. We've been higher before, in the 70s, after catalytic converters became EPA requirements. NOx has a shorter half-life at higher atmospheric concentrations, so doubling the NOx output doesn't really double the amount of NOx in the atmosphere. We'd have less unburnt gasoline and less carbon monoxide in the atmosphere as a trade-off.
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The CO2 emissions can affect the way the car is taxed/licensed.
True, but since CO2 basically is the product of complete combustion, CO2 emissions then would correlate directly with mileage. The more fuel economic, the lower the CO2 emissions. Or am I mistaken?
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
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 ^_^
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!
Good to know! I was under the impression that a catalytic converter removed SOx, but the high temp in it created NOx. I see now that sulfur does get removed, but it destroys the converter in very short order. Thanks for learnin' me a thing or two!
I think you are underestimating the damage NOx does when it reacts away in the air or ocean though. Or your lungs. It becomes extremely acidic in contact with H2O. Anyway, thanks again for the catalytic converter info.
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?
That was one of the most convincing parodies I have seen on Slashdot in a while. Where it fell apart for me was when you suggested the EPA engineer or fund the technologies rather than fund a standard that engineers in the capitalist economy had to achieve. Nobody could be *that* stupid. If you had left it out, you would have made a pretty convincing crank.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Governments don't really care how fuel economic your car is. That's your problem. You do not get taxed more because your car in inefficient (other than through fuel taxes).
But they do care how much CO2 it's producing. So many offer incentives for cars that emit less.
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)
They care how much CO2 it's producing "per X number of km". Which is directly related to how much fuel it is burning per km. So, yes, governments are definitely taxing based on how fuel efficient cars are. That's what they're measuring through CO2 emissions.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
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.
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.
You say that like economics and technology are "natural" phenomena. They are not. I know people think Capitalism is some natural law, but it's not either. It is a man-made system. Environmentalism is concerned with our economic system working in a sustainable way. What you seem to actually be saying is that people want to do what people want to do (e.g. making money in the cheapest way possible) and the Environmentalists are getting in their way by pointing out that they are polluting the atmosphere by what they are doing.
The Earth doesn't care about your economic feasibility. If we destabilize it, it will find a new equilibrium whether we like it or not.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Forget about NOX and CO2, emission testing and all the BS. Just tax fuel, because that taxes real world mileage. Make the gallon about $7.50-9 and everyone will be driving cars that convert all the energy in the fuel into movement and spew almost no pollutants
I'm just going to assume that you posted AC because you can't bear to put your name to this sophistry.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
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.
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SOx are not added to the fossil fuels, they are the remains of the sulphates use by the plants that became your fuel. Heavy fuels, like diesel fuel tend to have more sulphur in them and diesel engine injectors and fuel pumps were designed to take advantage of the sulphur’s lubricity, now that ultra-low sulphur diesel is the norm, people with older diesels either have to use biodiesel or add an injector lubricant.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Yeah. Removing it from the fuel is not exactly the same thing as not adding; sulfur in diesel is not the same thing as lead in gasoline.
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... 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.
It appears that 1500 ppb is an insane level.
From here
(high levels of NO will convert to nitrogen dioxide in a short period)
The legal limit for air quality over a long period is 53 ppb, and 100 pbb over shorter periods. Children show an increase in asthma even at these levels.
NOx is a serious pollutant. It is a cause of acid rain, asthma, bronchitis and cancer.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
And the 'Godwin point goes to .... AC.
aaaaaaa
1500 ppb is 1.5 ppm.
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Not sure what you think capitalism actually is, but I would bet a lot of anything that if I spent a few hours making a shovel, I could shovel a heap more shite in the next week than you could with your bare hands.
You might find it worth paying me to shovel your shite, or buy a shovel from me.
You and your mates might, over a period of years, be happy to support me while a build a power shovel, and shovel a load of other stuff too - maybe dig a ditch or two to save the village from flooding when it rains?
Perhaps you are a capitalist after all?
Or do you have another definition of capitalism in mind? - like it is when anyone can buy anything if they can pay for it, regardless of race, sex, or criminal record? Yep, Apartheid and Naziism are not capitalism.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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."
Isn't harmful until you get a couple million cars running in the same location with low wind. As someone who saw in LA in the 80s and remembers orange/brown skies in Riverside I understand why these limits exist. Residents of WY may not understand and feel a bit resentful.
Perhaps a bigger problem than brown skies, was ground level ozone. Although the smog was brown in color due to NOx, the major reduction of smog problems in the LA basin had more to do with the reduction in volatile hydrocarbons (and improved gas efficiency).
It's a bit complicated, but by itself, NOx like O2 is mostly neutral to ozone production. Ozone is mostly produced by sunlight O2+uv->2O, O2+O->O3, but it is generally in an equilibrium with the O3->O2+O reaction. Like the O3->O2+O reaction, there is similarly a NO2+uv->NO+O reaction, and there is of course a corresponding ozone destruction reaction O3+NO->NO2+O2 reaction. However, the presence of volatile hydrocarbons can capture some of the NO which will reduce the NO available for the ozone destruction reaction. This can greatly increase the lifetime of ozone in the air.
At high volatile hydrocarbons to NOx ratios, ozone lifetime is limited by the amount of NOx, so reducing NOx helps to reduce ozone. Strangely, if you reduce volatile hydrocarbons to a level that it limits ozone formation, further reductions in NOx can actually increase ozone concentrations by slowing the rate of ozone destruction reaction via O3+NO->NO2+O2 path and simultaneously speeding up the reaction that volatile hydrocarbons use to capture NO which increases the lifetime of ozone in the air.
So in the current regime, it is generally more important to limit volatile hydrocarbon emissions than to squeeze out the last drop of NOx emissions. That might make the air a little more brownish that we would like, but it's better for the ozone concentration which is probably the worse health risk.
Since when does the potentially guilty party get to investigate itself?
Make gasoline $7.50/gal through taxation and the primary result will be increased corruption among government officials who siphon off the money.
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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.
Please! I'd be surprised if it made more than a 0.01% dent in sales.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Hey look, a case in point.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
My motorbike consumes 1 liter of gas per 1 km. My 18 wheeler 40 tonne truck also consumes 1 liter of gas per 1 km.
They therefore produce the same amount of CO2 per km.
Are they equally fuel efficient? Or, bearing in mind that it is a tiny fraction of the weight, is my motorbike not ridiculously inefficient?
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??
You don't understand, yes, you're quite right. The premise of the whole emissions thing is wrong. CO2 is not a problem and neither are Nx gasses. Now unburnt fuel is a real problem, but that can be dealt with, it is being dealt with, in most modern cars.
The fact that VW cheated the system is cause for concern, but the ridiculous unscientific assumptions that the regulations are based on, they are real cause for concern! . Say No to COP21!
You're assuming that most people believe that CO2 is a poison and is going to fry us alive! On the contrary, by far the most of us know that this is a politically motived and threat-and-rewards-enabled charade, so we don't care one bit about this whole circus. EPA circus. IPCC circus. AGW circus.
Yawn.
Yes, we *could* measure fuel efficiency in liters per 100km per kg, but we don't.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
That's easy. They'll tax electric charging, miles driven, or just a flat x% tax per annum on the value of the car. The gravy train will never end, it's just way too easy to come up with new ways to make gravy.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
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."
Around here, where people used to replace the catalitic converter with a piece of pipe*, VW is probably a Hero.
*By the way, don't do that, these days it messes up the engine operation.
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.