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Mitsubishi: We've Been Cheating On Fuel Tests For 25 years (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader cites an article on CNN:The situation at Mitsubishi Motors just went from bad to much, much worse. The Japanese automaker admitted Tuesday that it had falsified fuel efficiency tests for the past quarter century (warning: annoying autoplay videos, alternate source), the latest revelation in a scandal that has rocked the company. The automaker said last week that it had used improper fuel economy tests on hundreds of thousands of vehicles, including some sold to Nissan. Cars with inflated fuel efficiency ratings were sold only in Japan. Mitsubishi said it would ask lawyers from outside the company to investigate the tests.
What caused them to admit this now? I didn't find any mention of an enquiry or people noticing the difference. Consciousness?
my sig pwns your sig
What's happening is that you are getting an object lesson in the failure of government regulations. And the causes are not hard to understand: regulations and procedures are written based on lobbying by the corporations being regulated, and the people who implement the regulations have no economic interest in doing a good job and are easily corruptible. And there is no solution to this; what it means is that regulations will always be an inefficient and wasteful approach to solving problems. Sometimes they are necessary, often not.
For automobiles, limits on NOx have been useful in improving air quality and are probably worth it; limits on CO2 emissions from personal automobiles are not worth the trouble because they have a negligible impact on overall US greenhouse gas emissions. For CO2 emissions, a substantial tax increase would be a better mechanism if we wanted to reduce CO2 emissions from driving, but politicians know full well that they couldn't pass that. So, instead, they use CAFE, which amounts to the same thing, but whose economic effects are so obscure that people don't notice.
But couldn't a big part of the problem be that car companies were allowed to do their own fuel economy tests in the first place? Wouldn't it have been smarted to require use of a third-party testing organization, you know, the same way EVERYTHING ELSE is regulated? For example, RF interference, we don't just do the test ourselves, we have to take the equipment out to a certified testing lab. (They do take our word for it that the equipment we give them is essentially the same thing we will ship to customers.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Zero emissions horse shit! If in North America, you're powering that electric car with coal.
Wrong. 12 US states produce electricity with hydroelectric, solar, and wind.
Just Seattle alone has 100 percent green electricity.
Wake up and smell the 2016 calendar, grandpa, it's not 1976 anymore.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The two rogue engineers should definitely get a sternly worded reprimand letter put in the permanent files now...
No different than claims of mileage, battery duration, acceleration abilities at start vs. 5 years out, or any of a host of other claims made by the electric industry... All figures may vary depending on where you live, how you drive, how you maintain, blah, blah, blah. Don't trust any of them. About the best you can do is compare values put out by the same manufacturer (and even there they may be fudging a particular model's info to try to get its sales up a bit).