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Opel Dealers Accused of Modyfing the Software of Polluting Cars (deredactie.be)
An anonymous reader writes: Belgian public broadcasting station VRT has discovered that GM Opel dealerships in Belgium seem to be updating engine management code when Zafira cars equipped with the 1.6 litre CDTI diesel engine are brought in for service. After the software change, the nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions drop sharply, at the cost of reduced power output. Bern University of Applied Sciences and environmental lobby club DUH previously found this model to pass European emissions standards only when the rear wheels are not rotating. When the rear wheels are made to spin along, NOx emissions increase to several times the limit set by European regulations. General Motors denied using defeat devices as well as the update program that seems to be taking place. However, an anonymous mechanic at an Opel dealership states that GM started pushing updates shortly after the Dieselgate scandal broke.
I suspect that the majority of brands do the same thing more or less, so I'm not surprised.
It's back to the drawing board for those that sets up the conditions for tests and the emissions limits to get figures that better reflects reality. And this is not only diesels that are circumventing the regulations, I expect everyone of doing similar regardless of fuel type.
There's no surprise to customers that the fuel consumption figures provided by car manufacturers are almost impossible to achieve in reality, no matter what the gauges in the cars says.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
So if pretty much every manufacturer is doing this, how is this not equal to a kind of mass civic protest?
Money.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
If in reality car emissions are higher than overly ambitious standards, but still low enough that air quality is OK - should the cars be "fixed" (as in the pet related term, neutered) or instead should the regulations be brought to realistic levels based on what cars are actually emitting today?
Air quality is anything but okay. I can't speak for the US, but here in Europe, we have serious problems with it. In China it's so bad in some areas you can actually only register a new car if it's electric - that's actually an important reason why electric cars are getting more attention now.
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
"Overly ambitious" standards? In whose opinion, the car manufacturers or those who suffer the consequences?
This isn't some civic protest akin to Prohibition, these are regulations designed to avoid Tragedy of the Commons scenarios with real costs to society. In the UK alone, nitrogen dioxide emissions cause 23,500 extra deaths, costing around £13bn per year.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
My Volvo V40 D4 used 4.7l/100km for 30.000km strait. At the very first service interval, the ECU software was updated. Immediately the car started to use 5.3l/100km and no longers seems to deliver the same power. My driving habbits and usual routes have not changed. My shoes didn't get any heavier. How do you explain 15% more fuel usage other than trying to cover up software 'flaws'?
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
CO1 is inherently unstable and will bond with oxygen to form CO2 fairly rapidly. That's why we don't have a major CO1 air polution problem - CO1 is basically the past tense of CO2. It's also why carbon monoxide is more toxic than CO2. CO2 will choke you but at least it doesn't accelerate the process by absorbing the oxygen you breathed in with it before you can.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
CO is even worse than that - it binds to haemoglobin and doesn't let go which means the O2 in your lungs can't. Thats why it only takes a relatively small amount of CO to poison you.
They're new engine line up consists of ONE engine - a 2.0L 4 cyl in various stages of tune and turbocharging (presumably to save development costs). Good luck to them getting decent NOx figures out of that in the high power versions, not to mention longevity. There does seem to be an obsession with shriking engines below what is reasonable (3 cyl 1.0L in a Mondeo?? Hello Ford!) simply to meet CO2 emissions targets. Thats all well and good but you don't get something for nothing and high pressure small engines just don't last so you will probably find the car scrapped years earlier than otherwise and so completely negating any CO2 benefit accrued by the engine. Short term thinking at its finest.