Slashdot Mirror
Musk, Others Want Volkswagen To Go Electric Instead of Fixing Diesels (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Volkswagen has put itself in a tough spot. After cheating emissions standards, the company faces billions in fines and repair costs to bring those vehicles into spec and make peace with regulators. But a group of business owners, investors, and environmentalists has a different suggestion. The group, headlined by Elon Musk, sent an open letter to the California Air Resources Board outlining their solution. They want Volkswagen to be released from its obligation to fix cars already on the road, and instead require that the company substantially accelerate its rollout of zero-emission vehicles.
They want Volkswagen's money to go into manufacturing plants and R&D for zero-emission technology rather than to government-mandated fines. (Note that these investments would give Musk, in particular, another direct competitor.) The letter says, "In contrast to the punishments and recalls being considered, this proposal would be a real win for California emissions, a big win for California jobs, and a historic action to help derail climate change. The bottleneck to the greater availability of zero emissions vehicles is the availability of batteries. There is an urgent need to build more battery factories to increase battery supply, and this proposal would ensure that large battery plant and related investments, with their ensuing local jobs, would be made in the U.S. by VW."
They want Volkswagen's money to go into manufacturing plants and R&D for zero-emission technology rather than to government-mandated fines. (Note that these investments would give Musk, in particular, another direct competitor.) The letter says, "In contrast to the punishments and recalls being considered, this proposal would be a real win for California emissions, a big win for California jobs, and a historic action to help derail climate change. The bottleneck to the greater availability of zero emissions vehicles is the availability of batteries. There is an urgent need to build more battery factories to increase battery supply, and this proposal would ensure that large battery plant and related investments, with their ensuing local jobs, would be made in the U.S. by VW."
Even with all the lying and dishonesty from VW, I'd still expect them to do a better job at making something useful out of that money then our government.
Greater acceptance and availability of electric vehicles and the growth of electric vehicle market segment would benefit Musk, and it also adds to hi good guy image. It is quite possible Musk appears to be a good guy is because he *is* actually a good guy.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Musk is smart. The more competition he has in electric car manufacturers, the less is his share in the infrastructure of recharging stations, battery building, and the research and tech behind it all. The more companies that jump on the electric car path, the easier it is for him to sell cars (though he seems a little more high minded than that which is why I like him).
Can California's electric grid hold up if VW really did replace all those vehicles with electric cars? Electric cars aren't actually zero emissions - they just don't emit anything at the point of use. There's still plenty of emissions (or other environmental concerns) from the site where the power for them is generated, which is why CA has tried very hard to push most of their generating capacity out of state. Even hydro capacity has decreased, as more dams are broken than built because they apparently bother the fishies. So a massive surge in electrical demand from plug-in vehicles may genuinely hammer the local grid, a grid that is already prone to widespread brownouts. It's great to suggest that everyone go electric with their vehicles, but someone somewhere must actually generate the electricity first. It's like pushing the benefits of dairy products while banning anyone in the state from raising stinky cows.
You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
Musk must be nuts. Many of these VW diesels can be fixed just by software update, or minor hardware changes. Now we should leave these smog & cancer machines on the road just because Musk wants to create market for his battery factory? Oh, yes, it is all "for greater good", so it must be ok. He would better invent a quick way to fix electric grid from reliance on dispatchable power sources like natural gas from fracking and coal.
Everyone talks about how dishonest VW was. But strictly speaking, they followed the letter of the law as it was written.
Well, no. They violated the letter of the law as it was written by introducing a "defeat device", which is a device which alters the behavior specifically for the purpose of defeating the test, or software which fulfills the same purpose. This is expressly prohibited.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Most of US electricity is produced from coal and gas, zero emissions my ass. 67% coal/gas/petroleum. 19% is nuclear, technically zero emissions apart from the waste.
I think they first need to get the generation of electricity cleaned up before pretending the electric cars are zero emissions.
Most German cars are frequently in the shop. The German manufacturers have cultivated this myth about their engineering but in reality the cars they make are actually on the very low end of the reliability ratings. I inherited a Golf, it was a fun car to drive, very nice interior, but the power steering went out at 50k miles and it was a $1200 repair. This along with a long line of mechanical problems.
I won't ever buy a VW because of that experience. They are overpriced junk that even Chevy beats in reliability.
Already VW and other companies are planning to go way into electric vehicles. And why wouldn't they want to? It's an easier and cheaper way of passing the EPA buck onto someone else. Instead of having to try to meet every stringent reg they can let someone else entirely (power companies) deal with that issue. And will they be able to deal with the issue either? Doubtful.
That would be a management issue, rather than a technical issue.
For decades now there are off-the-shelf gas scrubbers and other technologies that can very thoroughly clean up the exhaust of a power plant, including coal fired ones. It's not cheap or so of course, but there is nothing technical in the way. Add to a small number of sites, all of which are permanent managed, this is the best scenario possible for limiting pollution. Even CO2 can be dealt with this way, but that's getting a lot harder of course.
For cars it's much harder to manage. Many, many small units, often poorly maintained (yearly checkups or less). The sheer number of units makes it impossible to install scrubbers, and catalytic converters go only that far. It's technically very hard to get car exhaust as clean as power plant exhaust, and cars are often spilling their pollution right inside densely populated areas.
For your argument about trucks: well, sure, for now they won't be able to go electric. But that's not an argument to stop electric in vehicles, and even should be an argument to improve electric cars as improving technology there may just make electric trucks a reality, possibly via the hybrid diesel/electric stage where pollution can be kept out of the cities (running electric in the stop-and-go traffic of cities where diesel has a hard time, diesel on the motorways where it can shine). There are already electric and hybrid buses out there, so trucks don't seem to be too far off, either.
My dad's BMW fuel pump died... when he was about to get on a bridge.
Then it died again in his vacation, 700km from home.
Then the oxygen sensor died.
Now an air conditioner gas (!) hose broke and coolant leaked.
The alarm, for some reason, beeps every time he opens the door (he has to leave it unlocked).
Now some ABS light is turning on, though that may be related to driving on a flooded street.
The car is a 1998 model, yes. But it's been a lot of trouble really. Nothing major, but still annoying.
Electric vehicles are zero emissions... Electricity in an area may get produced by waste-causing means, but the vehicles themselves do not produce any emissions. The term is entirely accurate. It is only misleading to say that consuming electricity in general does not cause greenhouse gasses, but the operation of the devices themselves do not pollute at all.
Further, electricity does not necessarily have to be produced by burning products that pollute the environment, and this is certainly the case in many areas.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The government will hit them with damages and fines. Give the damages to the car owners and use the fines to build out the electric car charging infrastructure.
Make whole? I've got an '06 TDI (so well before this whole thing), but have friends who have the affected models. None of them are upset with VW over this, and all are enjoying their good mileage, decent performance, and decent build quality. Neither of my two friends are interested in the recall should it seriously affect performance and/or mileage. The NOx issues are because the engine burns too efficiently (ie hot flame front); in order to reduce the NOx, you have to deliberately de-tune the engine.
I predict that after this, the #1 modification will be to re-tune the engine.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
What a crap a you talking about, "so tight". Do you have a slightest idea how diesel engine works? SUV or not SUV just increase engine size by 30-50% or so, compression is still low and all that cancerous stuff from high compression diesel engines is emitted only by diesels that skip on these limits. No, limits are not tight, they are too loose and too loosely enforced. Especially on older diesels, and all cars inevitably get older with time.
According to Consumer Reports, you are lying through your teeth.
http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/storyimage/CA/20151020/OEM01/151029991/V2/0/V2-151029991.jpg&MaxW=700&cci_ts=20151021060832
But we shouldn't let facts get in the way of your opinions.
The term is entirely misleading. Zero tailpipe emissions would be accurate.
No, you can't produce clean electricity in practical way that can be used to charge cars (typically after sunset). Hydro is limited by geography and doesn't work so well in dry years. Solar is reaching its peak and daytime demand is going closer to zero in California due to too many solar installations. Demand peak starts at sunset. Google "duck" and "California grid". Solar/wind relies on new gas plants that can be turned on/off on demand. Most older ones can't, so you just run them whole day. Basically you can only use intermittent renewables under condition that your neighbors (or neighboring states) are not using them much and are ready to back you up with power of fracking product. Electricity storage is way too expensive, more expensive than peak wholesale rates for now. Seasonal power demand fluctuations are entirely hopeless matter for solar/wind without (whatever) gas that can be stored for seasons.
Lifecycle analysis shows that electric cars produce 25% less emission than plug-in hybrids that use a drive train similar to the kind you are advocating for.
Environmentalists have always been for more efficient cars but pure gasoline powered cars just aren't necessary. And there are a TON of engineering benefits to an electric car: the center of mass is super low, you double the storage capacity, you get rid of the vast majority of the maintenance cost, and the performance is really phenomenal.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
For years the EPA and other interested parties have deluded the public into thinking we can have our cake and eat it too. We can drive cars as much as we want. And it's clean! In fact cars always will be about trade-offs. Risk and benefits. And nevermind net CO2, which isn't even part of this.
This is not precisely what happened.
The emissions requirements on vehicles are strongly tied to what we are and are not able to easily and economically test. If it's hard to test something, it doesn't get tested, it gets ignored. What happened is that we became better able to test diesel emissions to a high granularity, and so we tested them to that granularity.
This same thing happens in reactive software testing. You build a product iteratively, and as you discover bugs, you write tests for those bugs, and then you verify that the software passes that test as a result of some bug fix, and as long as it keeps passing that test on each iteration, you declare it good software. The theory being that you can arrive at (or asymptotically approach) some ideal that approximates the set of tests you would have arrived at had you written your tests from the design document in the first place.
When we became better able to test diesel emissions, CARB started ratcheting down the emissions diesels were allowed to have based on their ability to test; this is the "less is better" theory, without providing a correlation to visible emissions or health effects from emissions, visible or not (this is the "any emissions more than zero are bad" theory).
This was also not an issue until they started turning the ratchet; the rate at which they turned the ratchet was higher than the rate at which technology to reduce emissions was advancing.
Sure, there are a small minority of systems that are capable of keeping up with the ability to test these specific emissions; but this is not by design on the part of the vendors, this is based solely on luck: the emissions they have are not the emissions for which we are able to test easily and economically. In other words, these other vendors don't actually have overall "cleaner" vehicles, what they have is a different set of emissions for which testing is currently difficult.
Time to follow the money...
Do we require freight haulers to meet these emissions standards? Specifically, do we require freight hauling trucks, and diesel electric trains to meet these emissions standards? No; doing so would cripple the economy.
OK...
Why passenger vehicles, but not these other vehicles? The answer is that passenger vehicles utilizing diesel fuel make less diesel fuel available for trains and trucks. The intent of these vehicles was to take advantage of the price differential in diesel vs. gasoline pricing, in order to cause cars to be cheaper to operate. In doing that, they create a scarcity market for diesel fuel, and drove the price up.
So in the end, we have that CARB really doesn't care about diesel emissions, they care about passenger cars, and they care about them in two ways: they would like fewer passenger cars, period, and they would like diesel to be cheap for the freight companies. So they would like to get passenger vehicles off of using diesel fuel entirely. In fact, California had a ban, which did not stand up to legal challenge, as it violated the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution, on importation of diesel passenger cars to California; so it's not like we can't see the hand they are playing.
Comparatively speaking, we also have the "phase-in", which on the face of it looks reasonable, but which in practice disadvantages passenger vehicles compared to other vehicles, since it doesn't apply to other vehicles, and for which there are not real, measurable justifications.
So Volkswagen hacked the law, by meeting its letter, and defeating its spirit.
Lest you think this is evil, this is precisely what H&R Block do for you, personally, when you have them do your t
This just in: T. Boone Pickens thinks they should be required to spend the money on natural gas vehicles and wind harvesting technologies.
When they use energy produced by coal power plants the emissions are roughly equivalent to driving a regular gas powered car. In most places, they range somewhere between an efficient gasoline powered car and a hybrid. There are also emissions involved with the manufacturing and recycling of the car.
Actually when powered solely by coal, they are the same as, or in extreme cases worse than, a regular car. Places like India and China have terrible emissions per kWh and this translates to bad environmental impacts for electric cars. The USA has a decent mix of power and also emission standard but a large portion comes from fossil fuels like coal and natural gas. It really depends on your regional power grid, there isn't a one size fits all explanation.
In general the recycling isn't too much worse at all for today's cars that use lithium batteries as these are relatively non toxic. It's the NiMh packs that are the environmental disaster.
Do you have a slightest idea how diesel engine works?
Obviously better than you.
SUV or not SUV just increase engine size by 30-50% or so
And vehicle mass by 100% or so
compression is still low and all that cancerous stuff from high compression diesel engines is emitted only by diesels that skip on these limits
"All that cancerous stuff" that you are talking about is NOx, which is not cancerous. It is the primary component in acid rain, and it can lead to the formation of nitric acid which will damage lung tissue, but no part of it is cancerous. Gasoline vehicles produce more PM2.5 soot than do diesels, and they also emit more unburned hydrocarbons (until the catalyst heats up, they just spew fuel out the tailpipe) so they are actually more cancerous than are diesels.
No, limits are not tight, they are too loose and too loosely enforced. Especially on older diesels, and all cars inevitably get older with time.
We're talking specifically about the NOx limit here. The NOx limit for diesels was deliberately set to about an order of magnitude tighter than necessary (as measured by making them pollute no more than gasoline cars, measured in health and environmental impact) to continue the attack on the diesel engine, because American companies still have inferior diesels to European ones, whether you make them follow the smog laws or not.
Especially on older diesels, and all cars inevitably get older with time.
Gasoline vehicles are worse polluters than diesels, and gasoline cars get old too. Diesels run lean all the time, so when they get old they still don't release a lot of unburned hydrocarbons. But gasoline engines don't, and when they get old their catalyst wears out, and their emissions start to rise. It takes longer for the catalyst to function as it wears out, so the time they spend spewing HC at startup increases. Why don't you think gasoline cars wear out as the age, too?
Only the oldest diesels (pre-1996) are exempt from smog testing, like my 1982 300SD and my 1992 F250. They are a minuscule percentage of vehicles on the road, so they have minimal environmental impact. Most of the ones I see still running are being maintained well, because most of the ones that weren't have fallen apart already, and even some of the ones that were. My F250 died due to cavitation even though I was running a precharged coolant filter. Now I need to find it a 6.9 block. I'm just finishing up the engine work on my 1997 Audi A8 Quattro, though. That's definitely going to pollute more than my 300SD, because it has a 4.2 liter V8 and 400 more pounds to haul around. Happy yet?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The article notes that VW would become a new competitor to Musk. It also notes that the bottleneck for electric vehicles is availability of batteries. But Musk is currently building the largest battery factory in the world, in Nevada. So VW would also be a customer of the Musk batteries. So now we know why Musk is so excited about VW entering the electric market.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Average SUV doesn't consume 100% more fuel than typical sedan. Though you of course can do some extreme comparison between subcompact and largest SUV. You can always make such excuse, "my car pollutes less than Boeing 747, so who cares". It doesn't fly.
World Health Organization (WHO) has classified diesel engine exhaust as a carcinogen – a substance that causes cancer. It is scientific fact and you may as well argue that Earth is flat. It isn't just NOx but whole complex of substances.
Paris and London has hard time now due to diesel exhaust - they are victim of stupid earlier policy to promote diesels and need to suffer more smog as result. Now they try to put on all kinds of restrictions do not admit diesels to downtown and reverse the stupid policy, but it is a bit too late. The EPA (or whoever set emission limits) has done good job keeping this junk out of the US as much as possible.