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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."
Except they weren't impossible to meet given the current technology, were they?
You are welcome on my lawn.
People won't want to spend an extra hour per day commuting.
No, they don't.
At the heart of that you will locate an innate selfishness, a modern day tragedy of the commons. Most folks would rather we did things to the benefit of the environment, as long as their personal sacrifice is somewhere between minimal and nonexistent.
Where we live, there is an active market for the gear heads who trade in "delete kits" (after market parts that defeat the environmental controls).
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
It stinks that commercial vehicles don't have to have pollution controls. A couple of months every year we have smog days and the damage caused by pollutants to our health is just shameful.
I hope I'm alive to see the end of burning in order to create energy and power.
Whatchu talkin' 'bout Willis?
Commercial vehicles have emissions rules and pollution controls. They don't happen to be the same as your passenger car, because first, there are many less commercial vehicles than there are passenger vehicles so as a whole they're already polluting less than in-total for passenger vehicles, and second, the rules for commercial vehicles are based around what the vehicle is expected to move. This applies to both passenger commercial vehicles (ie, buses) and to vehicles that move cargo or raw materials. A Class-4 tow truck or short school bus chassis will have its emissions capped at a much lower amount than a Class-6 flatbed delivery truck, which will be lower than a Class-8 over-the-road tractor trailer, or full-sized school bus, or sixteen wheel heavy dump truck.
One could extrapolate that the amount of emissions allowed per unit of work is probably comparable to your passenger car, but these commercial vehicles are doing a lot more total work.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
If a truck is Class 3 or below (commonly referred to as a one-ton, 350, or 3500 truck) it's not a true commercial chassis.
That said, I agree with you; the nature of what the vehicle is used for, rather than its capability, starts to become important in vehicles that do not require any special class of license to operate. Vehicles 26,001 lb GCWR and above (if I am remembering correctly, I have not had a practical need to know this stuff) are generally required to have a commercial license of some kind to operate, and even when some states will tolerate private ownership and operation above 26,000 lb, to drive inter-state one must usually get a license as other states will not tolerate it. Class 2 and 3 trucks (three-quarter ton and one-ton) are far too often used as commuter/daily driver vehicles and those overpollute relative to the work that they do in-practice.
A big part of the SUV craze of the last fifteen years has been that automakers were able to use these chassis as means to avoid fuel economy standards and to thus provide gobs of power to the buying public, when more recent developments have proven that the passenger cars and Class 1 trucks can meet these fuel economy and emissions standards when the automakers choose to work to develop them. I haven't kept-up on it, but I think that there's increasing pressure to get automakers to have more fuel-efficient vehicles in these classes- the "lifestyle truck" has become much more of a Class 1 (half-ton) phenomenon, while the plush varieties of the Class 2 and 3 trucks have gotten so ridiculously expensive that they are not suited to being driven casually by too many owners compared to in the past.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Probably? It's 100 percent provable they use less fuel in real life, the only question is whether the carbon is converted to CO2 or carbon particulate.