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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?
I was under the impression that MP4 took over a decade ago.
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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.
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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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 ^_^
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)
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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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.
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