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VW Engineers Have Admitted Manipulating CO2 Emissions Data (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader writes: According to a report in German newspaper Bild am Sonntag several Volkswagen engineers have come forward and admitted manipulating carbon dioxide emissions data, blaming the overly ambitious goals set by former Chief Executive Martin Winterkorn. Reuters reports: "The paper said VW engineers tampered with tyre pressure and mixed diesel with their motor oil to make them use less fuel, a deception that began in 2013 and carried on until the spring of this year. 'Employees have indicated in an internal investigation that there were irregularities in ascertaining fuel consumption data. How this happened is subject to ongoing proceedings,' a Volkswagen spokesman said, declining to comment on the Bild report."
You should be worried about asset value
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/11/04/0447235/volkswagen-emissions-issues-spread-to-gasoline-cars
A SUV which weighs 2500 kg emits more CO2 than an VW sedan which weighs 1200 kg. It is clear to anyone who staudied physics and chemistry. No electronics or filters can change it, as the mass (weight) is present in the formula.
Of course your vehicle emits less CO2 and NOX than a goods lorry or a bus. However, it carries at most 5 occupants while a diesel lorry carries goods for 10s or 100s people, so your carbon footprint may not fare as well compared to a commercial vehicle as you seem to like to believe.
I own a 2015 Passat tdi. Frankly I am not worried about the nox or co2 output I make in my vehicle. Diesel trucks dump far more crap and haul less people. My carbon footprint per person is far lower than other diesel vehicles
If you live in California, it doesn't matter what you think. If the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and the state have their way, nobody who currently owns one of these vehicles will be able to re-register them with the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), which means that these vehicles are (or will be) no longer legal to drive in California on public roads. What is the value of a used VW that isn't street legal and cannot be made so? Probably somewhere near zero. The dealers in California already will not take them in trade and the prices on the used market right now, assuming that you can even find a buyer, are severely depressed.
"Accurate communication is possible only in a non-punishing situation."
The Chief Executive set unrealistic goals and planned punishments for anyone who failed. So, the engineers did what was rational, and now they're going to get the blame for the whole thing. The executives, as usual, will get off scot-free and even if fired, will come out smelling like roses.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I own a 2015 Passat tdi. Frankly I am not worried about the nox or co2 output I make in my vehicle.
So you are saying you don't give a crap about the environment. Fair enough. I appreciate your honesty.
Diesel trucks dump far more crap and haul less people.
So the reason you don't care is because other sources of pollution are worse? That's like saying it's ok for me to dump toxins in the stream because the factory down the street pollutes more. If we accept that logic then there would be no point in any rules prohibiting pollution. Just because we haven't solved some other problem doesn't mean we shouldn't deal with the pollution coming out of your car if we can.
My carbon footprint per person is far lower than other diesel vehicles
And yet it isn't as low as it could or should be.
Much of the emission goals have been focused on gasoline because far more vehicles burn that fuel. But then you factor in all the trucks, buses, and some auto's that burn diesel and that became a catalyst to demonize diesel as the bad fossil fuel. In the end the environmentalists ignored the fuel efficiency of diesel and simply set the bar too high in a way that engineers like VW's simply decided cheating was the only way to provide what customers wanted and still gave the impression they were meeting emission standards. This is not new, and big truck engine makers have struggled especially hard with similar issues. Mainly fuel economy, engine power, and drivability based on the needs of heavy freight haulers. In the end, some like Caterpillar simply moved away from heavy road truck engines and focused more on construction and farm markets. All these VW diesel whiners need to take note you can buy a decent MPG gasoline or hybrid vehicle that gets really good MPG. Heavy trucks are still in a development stage of alternatives. Just because they do not transport passengers does not make them less important. Not sure what" Passat TD"I owner is thinking?? How does he think his Passat got delivered to his dealer?? Or where his cloths, groceries and other products get to their stores? What an idiot, take a bus sometime and realize many still transport people by way of diesel engines.
...instead of making up regulations and playing "Gotcha!", why not just beef up and extend public transport infrastructure, make it more affordable, while at the same time reduce the multi-billion dollar subsidies to the oil industry, thereby making private car use more expensive and encouraging more people to use public transport. It'd also make more sense to give priority to people from poorer communities who may be paying a substantial proportion of their income on cars or having to rely on weak, unreliable public transport to get to work. This should result in higher productivity through fewer missed work days and greater availability of workers for jobs. Also, spending less on getting to work means more purchasing power for those people and therefore more economic activity/growth. Everybody wins.
The Chief Executive set unrealistic goals and planned punishments for anyone who failed. So, the engineers did what was rational, and now they're going to get the blame for the whole thing.
If the engineers did something that they knew was wrong then they deserve to be blamed and punished for what they did. If someone asks you to commit a crime the answer should be an unequivocal "NO". This was not a complicated ethical situation. This is kindergarten stuff. Just because someone told you to commit a crime doesn't make it acceptable for you to go ahead and actually do it.
Nobody at VW involved in this fiasco was under any illusions that what they were doing was legal or even in a gray area. Any engineers who were involved in this fraud should be taken to court and punished in a manner commensurate with their crime. Same with any management that was in charge. They knew or should have known what was going on and deserve to be punished for this crime.
And let's not pretend that the executives didn't know what was happening. This is a company that is renowned for their centralized control and micro-managing. Any pretense that the management was not aware of this fraud is almost certainly untrue. It might not go all the way to the top but I can't imaging how some folks pretty high up the food chain didn't authorize this.
It stinks that commercial vehicles don't have to have pollution controls.
I would very much agree with that and we should work to fix that problem. What I think stinks more is that companies will fight fixing the problem every step of the way.
I hope I'm alive to see the end of burning in order to create energy and power.
Nice sentiment but it almost certainly won't happen in the lifetime of anyone reading this. Only way I can see a big dent being made is if there is are huge breakthroughs in fusion and battery technologies. Right now that is sort of wishful thinking...
Take their money a and give it to people who don't blatantly break the law. I persist in not calling for jail sentences, but this has gone well past ridiculous. If the rule of law is to be of any effect, surely we have to enforce it when everybody's watching and everybody knows the criminal's guilty as sin. Some things I don't fucking care about include:
- who did it or knew about it at VW
- what other companies are doing the same thing
- why
- consequences for the employees and Germany
Time VW had its schnitzels fried.
People won't want to spend an extra hour per day commuting.
Are Volkswagen engineers going to confess to the murder of Jimmy Hoffa???
So just one week or so after the CO2 emissions scandal came to light we already have rank-and-file employees admitting fault. Contrast that with their NOx emissions scandal that has dragged on for over a month with no hints from VW about the perpetrators - that should tell you the blame there lies with executives.
Some of those things, particularly the oil mixture, remind me of some of the sneaky stuff pro drag racers have used over the years. Only difference is they wanted oxidizers in the oil to burn more fuel.
Does this mean that EVEN MORE CO2 than we believed has been released into the environment and yet there has been no warming for 18 years 9 months? This is unprecedented, worse than we thought and an Inconvenient Truth.
At least read the summary. They also cheated on the mpg ratings.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Seriously some if these new things sound like the stuff pro drag racers have used over the years. Have we checked the test models for hidden nitrous bottles yet? Hint: check the oil pan.
The governments set CO2 emissions requirements for vehicles that, it seems, were impossible to meet given the current technology.
The emissions targets are demonstrably possible. There are cars driving on the road today which substantially exceed the CO2 emissions requirements under CAFE and similar legislation. Car companies might have to stop selling the ones that don't but that is a Good Thing.
After expending a large effort and resources on improving the technology, it was still impossible.
WRONG. The technology required for VW to meet emissions standards already exists and was available to them. They made a purely economic decision to not implement that technology in order to save money while fraudulently claiming that they had solved the problem. This was fraud in pursuit of money. Nothing more.
Increasing tire pressure and thinning engine oil is an analog but totally different method than software that detects a specific use case and alters engine parameters specifically to fool a test.
Cars and gasoline are not a big part of an American household's budget; you can increase the cost of driving substantially and people will still drive just as much and instead cut down on something else.
In the short run people will still have to drive. In the long run they would find alternative transportation options. You can reduce car usage by slowly ramping up the cost of fuel. Eventually people will either drive more efficient cars or alternative transportation means become economically viable like passenger rail.
To substantially change automobile usage in the US, you'd have to tax people so much that everybody becomes a lot poorer. That would work, but it probably wouldn't be popular. And what would be the point?
FALSE. You are correct that to reduce auto use you would have to tax fuel more and that it wouldn't be popular. But you are wrong that everybody becomes poorer. Europe taxes gasoline much much more than the US does and yet their standard of living is pretty similar. In response they utilize rail more and tend to drive smaller more fuel efficient cars. The point would be that the single best thing you could possibly do for the environment in the short to medium term would be to tax gasoline. Higher fuel costs force people to be more frugal with their use of it. That is a Good Thing. Now I don't think it is going to happen in the US in my lifetime but there is a point to it and the point is a good one.
Long term we have to find a way to hugely reduce our use of fossil fuels. We are literally and figuratively playing with fire by burning them for power.
In addition, "multi-billion dollar subsidies to the oil industry" are a drop in the bucket compared to the enormous subsidies "green" energy and public transportation already receive in the US.
I call bullshit on that one. 20 Seconds on Google would provide you the evidence that your statement is wrong. Fossil fuel subsidies roughly equal or even exceed renewables subsidies despite there being little economic justification for subsidizing fossil fuels.
Sounds like, if one wants a fairly nice car as far as its interior and amenities are concerned, but doesn't care about performance, it might not be a bad time to pick up someone's VW diesel for a song.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
So the ICE companies are lying to us? What a shocker!
They've known for years they've all been cheating emission tests.
The subsidies the oil industry gets amount to about 1 cent per gallon of gas. It's far, far outweighed by the fuel taxes imposed by the Federal and state governments (about 15 cents/gal each). Those fuel taxes pay for maintenance and construction of roads. If you shift road use from private vehicles to public transportation, that drop in fuel tax revenue would have to be made up by the remaining vehicles. And public transportation would in fact become more expensive.
In other words, public transportation is already "made more affordable" - by taxes paid by private vehicles.
There is no single solution to transportation. Public transportation works better in certain circumstances, private transportation works better in others. If you try to design your transportation system around the mantra that one is always better than the other (what happened in Los Angeles in the 1940s when public transportation was dismantled in favor of freeways for private cars), you will seriously screw up the transportation system for a long, long time.
Those people run their tires up around 80 to 100 PSI. Lets see how much CO2 they produce if we deflate them to 35 pounds.
Have gnu, will travel.
You can relatively easily prosecute the engineers because well... they were the ones to implement it and would know what impact things would have.
They cannot easily prosecute the engineers if they never commit the crime in the first place. All the engineers had to do was refuse to commit fraud and both the company and the engineers would be better off for it. If the engineers knew what they were doing was a crime (and they almost certainly did) then they could easily have refused to do it. These are not people without options. The worst the company could do to them is fire them and then they find a job elsewhere. Much better than being hauled into court.
Look at it this way. Is it better to A) lose your job refusing to do something illegal or B) face prosecution for facilitating a fraud? Speaking for myself I'll take A every day of the week.
If you live in California, it doesn't matter what you think. If the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and the state have their way, nobody who currently owns one of these vehicles will be able to re-register them with the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), which means that these vehicles are (or will be) no longer legal to drive in California on public roads.
I guess business opportunity would be to start a company in a neighboring state, "buy and register" them in the other state and then let the original owner rent them for a nominal fee. (Not sure if there's a law stopping something like that but if there isn't by the time there was a law the company could have made a bit of money.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I'm sorry to hear that you paid the price - and that's the reality that the VW engineers may have been facing, with the added problem that they might well struggle to get a new job in the industry if 'whispers' went round. We like to think that whistle blowers are protected - but it usually takes a long time to gain recompense if you are kicked by the big boys.
"...a deception that began in 2013 and carried on until the spring of this year..."
So it began in 1983, and continues today.
-Styopa
"Ulrich Hackenberg, Audi’s chief engineer, and Wolfgang Hatz .. were put in charge of research and development at the Volkswagen group shortly after Martin Winterkorn became chief executive in January 2007."
You make it sound like CARB is the problem. Understand something: VW's fraud is the problem. Sue them for fraud if you have a problem with it.
Any system that relies on the super-morality of people is bound to fail. History can attest to that.
And any system that doesn't have separation of duties and other internal controls is also bound to fail. As a group it doesn't shock me that some of them behaved badly but then they should expect no sympathy after the fact. If there weren't adequate internal controls then that is the fault of management but it doesn't excuse the engineers from what they did.
If these engineers were complicit in committing this fraud then they deserve whatever punishment awaits them. I have little sympathy for people who could easily have chosen to do the right thing and chose to do the easy thing instead.
Of course not. You should be worried about the VW in front of you.
For this idiot we protest against smoking.
The problem isn't the emissions levels. The problem is engineers actively cheating on these regulatory requirements. Are they also cheating on safety tests? Or reliability tests? It would suck if your wheels came off when you were on the freeway then your airbags didn't work.
Look it it up. "... about 70-75% is rejected as heat without being turned into useful work, i.e. turning the crankshaft..."
It is not a very efficient way to convert a liquid fuel into motion. Combustion chambers must be kept cool to prevent lubrication failure. The heated combustion gas is entering the atmosphere and forever lost. Liquid spray of hydrocarbon fuel into, or near, combustion chamber has insufficient time to convert liquid into a gas and mix with air for a complete combustion. Hence the catalytic converter, where heat is not recovered. This would have been the external combustion engine.
Gasoline engines are cheap and convenient, at least until global warming robs us of a place of existence.
Check out how much electricity is generated by hydrocarbon fuel. It should be much more efficient. Electric motors have high efficiency and regenerative braking will recover some energy.
Electrical storage is the main obstacle, and is mostly a question of manufacturing and economics. The technologies of batteries are fairly well developed, good enough to be useful, like the LiFePO4 batteries. An all hands on deck approach to solve manufacturing issues could solve this, with a political impetus, but the entrenched interests in the status quo are very powerful, and in fact the only real obstacle.
http://www.brighthubengineering.com/power-plants/72369-compare-the-efficiency-of-different-power-plants/
http://geospatial.blogs.com/geospatial/2010/01/energy-efficiency-of-fossil-fuel-power-generation.html
But instead of sending the heat up the stack, in Denmark it is used for district heating. Combined heat and power (CHP) plants are responsible for 81% of district heating in Denmark. The most efficient of Denmark's CHP plants claim 90% fuel efficiency.
I wonder.
If you purchased the vehicle in good faith and the state says you can't use it anymore, is that an illegal taking, requiring compensation? What if a fridge or AC manufacturer did something similar? Can the State force you to purchase a new fridge or new AC for your home? What if the manufacturer is no longer in business or is bankrupted so you can't get compensated from them?
Is it tough shit for you? Is that how you treat people who probably paid, on average, to get cleaner burning car? Does CA get to say "Fuck you, go spend another $60?"
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
No. Your only recompense is to sue the manufacturer that fraudulently claimed the product met the required standards.
However carb is the problem. They had a problem with math and grossly overstated the emissions of diesel vehicles in California which is why they made the regulations in the first place.
VW engineers say they were only following orders. Where have I heard that before.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Thumbing your nose at burdensome regulations is all very nice until your car is impounded for not being registered, something you may not be able to do in the future if you don't get your car fixed.
Those emissions regulatory requirements are safety tests - for everyone with asthma, COPD, CV problems, etc.
Does CA get to say "Fuck you, go spend another $60?"
I assume that was rhetorical. They government can always change their mind and generally you get the short end of the stick.
They have made it so it illegal to resell things from drop side crib to semi-automatic weapons. Generally you cannot legally sell recalled products even if the original manufacturer goes out of business. As for things that you don't intend to sell, but need a license for, they can do that too. There are examples of governments changing zoning on real property so current tenant cannot continue renting. They can change zoning so that existing businesses are no longer legal. Forced product recalls have triggered bankruptcy filings for companies throughout history.
However even bankrupt automobile companies have had the resources to pay for a recall. Just last year, Suzuki was forced to recall their Kisashi model for safety fixes even though they were bankrupt and weren't selling cars in the US anymore. When Kia went bankrupt, Hyundai assumed liability for all recalls as part of asset purchases. Of course, VW isn't about to go bankrupt any time soon so they would have to do this, but even if they did go bankrupt, they would be liable for at least some amount (to be determined by the bankruptcy judge relative to the other creditors and judgments that it faced).
But at the end of the day, the government isn't responsible for a dime. This is clearly illustrated by the FTS/Hangzhou tire recall case. Although FTS was not ultimately bankrupted by the recall (far fewer tires, about 5%, were returned than were estimated to be eligible), the NHTSA made it perfectly clear that it wasn't going to pitch in.
The problem (with the NOx) is not that the cars are emitting any more NOx than other cars (they aren't - emissions are about average for diesel cars of that period), but that they adapt the way they run during emission tests, which so far other cars haven't been proven to do. But there is, on average, no significant difference between what comes out of the back of a 2.0L VW TDI versus a Renault, Opel, Fiat Ford, Volvo, etc. They're all in the same ball park.
The only difference is that VW has admitted that tricks are being employed during testing, but it seems other manufacturers are also using tricks (perhaps even the same), since the difference between emission test output and real-world output is comparable.
That being said, I wouldn't be to worried about NOx emissions in the first place. Levels are low enough not te be significant to human health almost everywhere. Particulate matter and volatile organic compounds are more of a problem. As far as I am aware, there is no indication yet that any car is emitting more of those than it should.
As are all other manufacturers, so that does not really affect resale value. The alternative for a buyer would be another car with MPG values that have also been artificially lowered.
The VW brands are usually among the few that keep on scoring well after EuroNCAP tests are updated, so I am not to worried about that. However, I do agree that it doesn't paint a great picture if things like the current emission scandal can happen for years without management even knowing about it. I am really interested what the current investigations in other companies will uncover.
VW did not commit fraud. Fraud requires intent, which requires knowledge. The engineers who commissioned and developed the cheating code committed fraud. The company did not.
You must have missed the news that VW is going to recall each and every affected vehicle at their own cost. All affected cars will be retrofitted with whatever hardware is needed to meet NOx emission standards under all circumstances without significantly affecting fuel economy or power output, free of charge. There is no risk for the owners and I would expect that resale value will return to normal as soon as the media attention passes.
Engineers don't make economic decisions in a large company.
Engineers make economic decisions on a daily basis. Costing is a fundamental part of engineering. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never been an engineer in the real world. Engineers determine what is possible and specify the parts. Those parts have a cost attached so the engineers very much make economic decisions in companies of any size.
VW didn't commit fraud. A few engineers did. Fraud is, by definition, intentional.
... and if you did a little homework for yourself, you'd soon see that "carbon-footprint" is a big old load of BS with no meaning whatsoever except to the poor sod that will be forced to fork out extra money in taxes etc to prevent the earth from "going up in flames" due to global warming hysteria (probably caused by the hot air spewed forth by the IPCC and it's henchmen and -women).
Happy driving!
Basically, this means that there is no stop to the global warming, as basically all cars are continuing to be on the roads with much higher CO2 output than assumed in all calculations so far. Well done.
Is the problem that deisel engine's high compresssion result in nitrous compounds that create smog in UV ? Hence Urea to restore N2 and O2 ?
Big deal i don't care that they did it, not like they are killing people, some community service and be done with it. The whole manufactured hysteria over global warming and evidently the requirement that everyone must be thrown into the poor house one standard at a time will come to an end once the price of compliance is indistinguishable from utter tyranny.