Volkswagen Says Carbon Deviations Much Smaller Than Suspected (wsj.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Back in November, shortly after the Volkswagen emissions scandal broke, the company voluntarily disclosed the results of a quick internal probe which found that 800,000 more vehicles had inconsistencies with their CO2 output. After investigating the issue more fully, the company now says the vast majority of those cars — all but 36,000 — check out just fine. "Following extensive internal investigations and measurement checks, it is now clear that almost all of these model variants do correspond to the CO2 figures originally determine," they said. A report at the Wall Street Journal (paywalled) notes that this is good news, but reminds us that "Volkswagen has yet to clarify the much larger issue of how it came to outfit some 11 million diesel vehicles to cheat in emissions testing for nitrogen oxide."

Comments

What about the nitrogen oxides?

[grimmjeeper]

I thought the big deal was all the NOx they were releasing was way above normal.

Re:What about the nitrogen oxides?

[grimmjeeper]

To clarify my point, my understanding of the issue was that carbon wasn't the issue in the first place. Nitrogen oxides were the issue. So saying "our carbon emissions aren't bad" has nothing to do with what they were doing wrong.

Re:What about the nitrogen oxides?

[Anonymous Coward]

The NOx emissions is related to the diesel engines. The discrepancy (or "discrepancy") that VW found internally is related to gas engines, which is what this article is about.

Re:What about the nitrogen oxides?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not hard to understand. After the initial NOx scandal broke, they subsequently revealed that they had discovered discrepancies in CO2 emissions also; this was a secondary and much less significant issue than the NOx cheat device, but it would still have been a fairly big deal if they had found widespread, non-trivial CO2 discrepancies. Now it turns out that the CO2 discrepancies werenot significant after all.

Problem solved

[Yoda222]

• 1. get caught cheating on NOX
• 2. say that there is a problem with CO2 numbers
• 3. make a lot of noise to say that in fact THE PROBLEM* was not as large as announced. (* with CO2, small letters at the bottom of the page)
• ???
• profit

Engineers going to be fired over this

[JoeyRox]

For failing to cheat more on the CO2 emission systems. They're obviously not up to caliber of VW's NOx engineers.

Re:So says VW ...

[Anonymous Coward]

There needs to be independent testing of vehicles from all manufacturers followed by random, road testing with instrumented vehicles with the sample set taken from dealerships. And it needs to be an ongoing process.

FTFY

Re:Easter Eggs

[PRMan]

Don't you mean "if you don't turn on test mode during emissions testing, I'll fire you and find someone else who will!"

Engineers rarely get bonuses.

Re:Easter Eggs

[Lodlaiden]

If you, or your guys aren't getting bonuses, you need a different spokesman. Software engineers are an efficiency on the entire business model, when used appropriately and should be rewarded as such.