Slashdot Mirror
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.
...will be committing sudoku over this.
Mitsubishi execs later clarified that they tried to sell said cars in the U.S, but no one bought any.
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
Are all car companies trying to look worst than their competitors? "Oh, you think they're bad? Check out what we did!"
I'm just waiting for a car company to come up with a ~$10K electric car now.
Good question, and I think this is because VW management has essentially escaped without criminal charges, now it's a manner of the the CxOs in the car companies getting approval from the board to take the financial hit and put this behind them.
I asked at this earlier, but I think (ie, agree with other /.ers who replied to me) - it's a case where pretty much everyone is complicit - now is a showcase of how and when all the car manufacturers come forward.
Just wish governments would simply mandate remediation as the sale of more electrics or other zero-emissions vehicles (as Elon Musk requested).
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
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.
Dear assholes,
thanks a lot for waiting until we had to pay a crap ton of money to confess that everyone has been doing the same type of things more or less forever.
yours truly,
Volkswagen.
It's not a failure of government regulations. It's a failure of government to *fund* the agencies who are in charge of enforcing the regulations. People who like to claim that the government is incompetent are also the ones that cause it to be that way by not giving agencies enough resources to do their jobs.
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! --
Ontario has also gone completely coal free. They still have a few gas plants, but we're on the path to getting rid of those as well.
The breakdown is as follows
57.4% Nuclear
27.4% Hydro Electric
8.1% Gas
5.1% Wind
1.3% Biofuel
0.7% Solar
Values on that page are apparently updated in real time based on current load on the system.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The two rogue engineers should definitely get a sternly worded reprimand letter put in the permanent files now...
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.
Citation please... There may be greater sources of CO2 than personal automobiles but I very much doubt that their contribution is negligible.
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.
Agreed. Probably the best thing we could do with economic policy to help the environment would be to tax fossil fuels at a higher rate. It would drive economic behavior in reasonable time frames to more sensible alternatives for transportation and industrial fuel use. Sadly you are correct that it wouldn't have a prayer of passing the current Congress in the US.
The '93 would have either had a K-engine (2.2/2.5) or a Mitsubishi 3.0L V6.
The '97 would have had either a Powertech (2.4) or a a 3.3 or 3.8 V6.
the 2.4 had a real problem with head gaskets, the bean-counters wouldn't allow them to use the multi-layer steel gasket, and the cheaper gaskets failed, many were replaced under-recall. Unfortunately if the shop did a crap-job under recall (like in my Stratus) then the cooling system could act as a vent for exhaust gases under pressure.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Until someone is going to jail.
New Economic Perspectives
Are you kidding? Federal government spending is 25% of GDP, total government spending is nearly 40% of GDP; these numbers have been going up for many decades. At what point do you consider government spending to be "enough"?
To be fair, current federal spending is:
* 68% mailing checks to the old and the poor
* 15% military
* 6% interest
* 11% everything else
We can reduce spending greatly while doubling spending on infrastructure, education, NASA, even enforcing regulations. We'd just have to be willing to mail less money to people. Sadly, those people are now a majority of voters, so it won't happen. (State and local spending is even more dominated by pension plans and related check-mailing.)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Rather than the EPA pay to test every model vehicle released every year, it has the car companies test it themselves. Then the EPA tests a random sample to make sure the car companies were being honest. If a car company decides to cheat, they might get away with it for a few years, but probability says the longer they continue to cheat, the less likely they are to continue to get away with it. If Mitsubishi has been doing this for 25 years and never gotten caught, the Japanese government has apparently never bothered checking automakers' claims.
This practice of sampling is used widely in industry as well. Instead of testing every bottle of Coke to make sure it has the right mix of ingredients, you only test about one in 10,000. If a sample turns up out of spec, it costs less to stop production to fix the problem and discard the bad product between the bad sample and the previous good (in-spec) sample, than it would cost to test every single bottle.
The same misconception - that the best solution is to test everything thoroughly - is driving up auto costs in California. Requiring every car to get a smog inspection every year made sense when a lot of cars were failing. But if the inspection cost is $30 and the cost of letting a polluting car operate for an extra year is (say) $900 of environmental damage, then once the pass rate exceeds 97%, the inspections actually become more expensive than the pollution cost. The solution is more expensive than the problem. The government has reduced inspections to once every 2 years in response, but smog inspection has become a multi-billion dollar business so the gas stations and mechanics lobby to keep requiring them more frequently than they're actually needed.
The problem is far different than VWs because it is so easy to verify. Fill car with gas. Drive. Refill. Divide miles driven by gallons used. My Nissan never gets the mileage it says it should, nor what it claims to be getting with inboard electronics. BFD. It's like almost not cheating when it's that easy to check. Consumer Reports will even check for me. But they don't check emissions.
Might as well face it I'm addicted to data.
* 68% mailing checks to the old and the poor
Not sure if intellectually dishonest, or you just don't know...
Expenditures from FICA-filled trusts aren't really fair to include in the list with the others. Even if we didn't send those checks, the government would not have more general money to spend on anything not funded by FICA taxes.
Unless you're proposing spending FICA withheld taxes on infrastructure?
* 68% mailing checks to the old and the poor
That is very disingenuous, when you consider That of that 68%, more than half is money that people either earned by way of a pension, or already paid in in the form of social security. You have no right to "stop the handouts" when those moneys are in fact owed every bit as much as (if not more) than our vast public debt.
If you want an obvious way to deal with the budget in a rational way, cut the military spending back to a sane level, and tell any politician that wants to get us involved in *any* military conflict to be the first man in and the last man out... We have already demonstrated repeatedly and publicly that the entirety of the military budget is being spent on bullshit that provides virtually zero protection from the real dangers of our world. Its time to tell the military, to forget about Jets, bombs, missiles, guns and troops and start talking about weapons that will allow us to stop a dirty bomb or backpack nuke. We've all seen how effective the military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq have been. Time to cut their budgets since they seem unable to spend it wisely.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Yes, that is always the problem. And the only way to reduce pork spending substantially is to reduce spending.
Good!