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Germany Detects Emissions Cheat Software In Audi Models (reuters.com)
The German government has accused Audi of cheating emissions tests with its top-end models, marking the first time the company has been accused of such wrongdoing in its home country. Reuters reports: The German Transport Ministry said it has asked Volkswagen's (VOWG_p.DE) luxury division to recall around 24,000 A7 and A8 models built between 2009 and 2013, about half of which were sold in Germany. The affected Audi models with so-called Euro-5 emission standards emit about twice the legal limit of nitrogen oxides when the steering wheel is turned more than 15 degrees, the ministry said. It is also the first time that Audi's top-of-the-line A8 saloon has been implicated in emissions cheating. VW has said to date that the emissions-control software found in its rigged EA 189 diesel engine does not violate European law. The 80,000 3.0-liter vehicles affected by VW's emissions cheating scandal in the United States included Audi A6, A7 and Q7 models as well as Porsche and VW brand cars. The ministry said it has issued a June 12 deadline for Audi to come up with a comprehensive plan to refit the cars. Ingolstadt-based Audi issued a recall for the 24,000 affected models late on Thursday, some 14,000 of which are registered in Germany, and said software updates will start in July. It will continue to cooperate with Germany's KBA motor vehicle authority, Audi said.
If only regulators would mandate Open Source firmware for any vehicles traveling on public roads. We could catch emission cheats and self-driving flaws. Puts me out of work, but whatever, it's probably the right thing to do.
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The trigger for the violation was when the steering wheel was turned more than 15 degrees. That seems an odd trigger. It's not like the position of the steering wheel should affect the combustion in any way, nor would it be something a reasonable person would use to start a secret 'less pollution for the testing mode'.
It seems more like a major coding flaw rather than an intentional cheat. Like someone assumed that a set of values would be inside a range but when the wheel was turned, it gave an out of range reading that confused a computer, resulting in poor pollution control.
Very different than a 'test mode', that VW clearly used just to intentionally fool government agencies.
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as they say on Top Gear.
But to be fair, we know that everybody does it.
What's the name of the car where they just push fresh air into the exhaust to lower the numbers? Think it's an American one. I forget.
Chrysler had Pulse Air, but the overarching names are Secondary Air Injection, PUMP Air or Smog Pump.
Several USA Auto Mfg did this, including Chevy and Ford.
must as I love open source doing this would expose tons of trade secrets wouldn't it? I suppose patents might render that moot. But then again in a lot of countries software isn't patent-able.
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Electric cars. They have no emissions.
Not what a smog pump does.
It supplies O2 to the cats to burnoff unburnt hydrocarbons. Tiny volume of gas compared to the engine.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Actually pretty much every engine manufactured since the late 90s has a secondary air injection pump for the first minute of operation. It's intended purpose is to increase the o2 level in the exhaust gases in order to get the catalytic converter up to temperature faster, and thus reduce emissions faster. After 45 seconds or so, the SAI turns off.
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_air_injection
Its disabled for the whole driving session once the wheel is turned once.
Almost all driving is done with the wheel nearly straight.
And all dynamometer testing. Maybe they actually knew what they were doing.
Perhaps turning the wheel turns off the test mode for 30 minutes or so?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Yeah, because it's super hard to implement a routine like "wheel turned past 15 degrees within two minutes of engine start = disable emissions until engine off"
You know many people with a mile long driveway that points right at their garage, who drive Audi? That simple logic above would work just fine for detecting a test scenario versus real world driving.
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Electric cars, for the most part. If you fill them up at work or home using solar or wind, they have zero emissions. If you fill them up from a commercial source that includes coal, they are still slightly better than fossil fuel cars, due to the actual operation of the vehicles themselves. Which is part of why electric cars, in general, require half the expense for repairs and maintenance.
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It doesn't switch back and forth between modes. It starts in their low-emissions mode and then switches to high-emissions mode once they detect that the wheel has turned more than 15 degrees. A car in normal driving conditions would thus trigger the high-emissions mode almost immediately, given that almost every drive begins with having to either get out of a parking space, turn onto a road, or change lanes to rejoin the flow of traffic. But a car that's just spinning its wheels in place so that it can be checked for emissions under controlled conditions? It'll never trigger high-emissions mode.
As for why they weren't smart enough to make it work like you thought? They couldn't. The low-emissions mode achieves its lower emissions by sacrificing performance. If they sacrificed performance every time they started going in a straight line, people would notice pretty quickly that something was up.
Going forward all emissions testing should be done with the car at maximum weight rating, driving up a steep mountain road. I'm sure they can make these devices small enough to put in a trunk. They could also do a lightweight test with just a driver.
That can and has been done. The drawback is that the testing won't be done in a controlled environment, so the results may not be repeatable.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Emissions regulations in the US are set in g/hp-hr. Basically the mass of emissions is regulated with a compensation for the power of the vehicle. Diluting the exhaust wouldn't change the mass, just the concentration.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
You misread the summary.
"The affected Audi models with so-called Euro-5 emission standards emit about twice the legal limit of nitrogen oxides when the steering wheel is turned more than 15 degrees, the ministry said."
When the wheel is turned, the emission controls are turned off, and it pollutes more.
When the wheel is straight, it pretends to be less polluting.
So long as there are no economic incentives to make cars emissions' cleaner (coming from consumers preferably) and there are only negative economic incentives to meet the emission regulations (lots of design $$ spent up front to make a truly more efficient engine, but then perceived as 'under powered' by the consumers when you go to market) this problem will continue to happen.
honestly, instead of using the heavy hand of government to force motor companies to meet higher and higher emission standards, why not just offer tax incentives/cuts/deductibles to consumers for buying the most 'clean' cars. That way you incentivize consumers to reward companies for buying greener vehicles, and companies feel the need to compete and build the best product.
German schools are obviously so bad that cheaters did a really bad job here. I work in Germany for 20y now and I can only confirm that Germans cannot count properly and only move stuff from place to place. This seems to be a common practice at least in SW domain.OC some Germans can count. These run away because of taxes and other disastrous policies of their government. These are not the only feats of engineering Germany can be proud of. I was driving over Rhine recently and was surprised to see a set of signs and special traffic arrangements to remove heavy lorries from bridge traffic. I investigated this a bit and found out that the bridge was in a such a bad shape that the heavy vehicles could not be safely allowed on it. Instead of fixing it the highway on the bridge got (sophisticated) weight restrictions. Few years back an archive of old manuscripts was ruined in Cologne because subway works were messed up and caused collapse of many buildings - something that did not happen decades before when other line of subway were built. A street in front of my house has a section farther away that is closed for ore than a year because its surface fell apart - this happened after they tried to fix it 3 times in a row. Now they gave up. I suspect the roads that Romans built 2kya were a little bit more robust. The art of engineering went up and down and up again since. Now we observe significant decline and in many different areas. But we have soft science to hold us right and state run media to tell us the truths here. Why do you think I am not surprised at all about these developments? Because I had an occasion to see the schools and their pupils at work. There are good ones everywhere but as one can see - not that many of them anymore...
Non-diesels.
They don't need to. It's much easier to make a compliant petrol car than a diesel one.
It's the shit in burning diesel that's the problem, which is why these engines aren't just "slightly over in one particular model" but the entire diesel engine industry are seeing things like FORTY TIMES over the limits when used in normal driving.
When I was a kid, my dad used to work as a mechanic. He explained the pluses and minuses of diesel vs petrol. And, pretty much, a "performance diesel" was unheard of that the time. When I started buying cars, suddenly I heard of people with diesels that were out-performing everyone and I couldn't understand why. I didn't really pay much attention, as even petrol cars had come so far in the intervening years too.
But now it's starting to make sense - the performance diesels came about at least partially because, basically, manufacturing are fucking over the limits. As the petrol engines started to be regulated (and relatively easy to do so with catalytic convertors, engine management, etc., but affected performance somewhat), the car manufacturers moved to diesel and suddenly found all that missing performance just floating somewhere.
Then the limits on diesel were tightened and, it turns out, they were able to continue that trend by cheating the limits.
What you'll see now is everyone having their diesels taken back and the diesel engine prices soar, and we'll move back to petrol or even on to electric engines, and there'll be a focus on something else... gadgets and technology in the car is the current distraction from raw performance.
It's incredibly ironic, because what makes modern cars dangerous is the sheer amount of power they have. Your little run-around could out-perform a Formula 1 car from the 1960's most likely. A Lotus 18 from that era is out-horsepowered by a Ford Focus nowadays, for example. I question why that's necessary at all. Sure, the safety features and tech, I get that, but why are we all running things that beat car that were - in the 60's - the fastest racecars on Earth? So we can run the kids to school and then pop home for lunch? Why do road-legal cars even HAVE a speedometer that goes past 80, or an engine capable of doing so?
But manufacturers are still appealing to that metric above all others, even in huge diesel-guzzling SUV's that mums are buying to run the little darlings to their nativity play, to the point of breaking the law (in spirit, even if not the letter) to do so.
And Volvo - just one of the many manufacturers affected by all the diesel emissions scandals - were historically regarded as the "safest" of all cars. Not only are they slowly killing us with fumes, but they're also doing so to enable you go to faster in case you complain that you can't go fast enough.
The car market is going to be radically different in ten years time. I see an even more heavy focus on "safety" and little runarounds with tiny engines coming, rather than sporty-looking things.
Speak for yourself you god damn law abider.
My car has a compliant ECU once every two years, for just long enough to get it smogged. Then the ECU gets flashed and the cats get put away for safekeeping.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
A diesel in a drag race?
It does happen, you put propane and nitrous on a turbo diesel and woot, good times.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
They have no tailpipe emissions, but they still have tyre wear, which is the predominant source of pollution in modern cars.
Thank you for polluting our common planet more than necessary.
"So steering input can be a good indicator for when a driver is about to do with the throttle. "
Both throttle changes you just described occur *before* the associated steering changes. So no, the steering input is not a good (leading) indicator.
If they sacrificed performance every time they started going in a straight line, people would notice pretty quickly that something was up.
Especially in Germany. My colleague's biggest complain about his A6 is that the cruise control can't be set above 200km/h
If Greece is a country that is highly corrupt on practically all levels of society and government, and the statistical department of Greece has been repeatedly accused of faking statistics, which among other things made it possible for Greece to join the EU...
Whereas Germany is for the most part a highly uncorrupt, transparent country that would generate a shitstorm of epic proportions in society if the government was caught faking statistics...
How is Germany's criticism towards Greece hypocritical and frivolous?
If they could make the hardware small enough to be fitted to random consumer's vehicles they could gather results from the real world and set a maximum average emission level over the fleet. Tests could be done over a year with automatic fines for exceeding the limits.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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A diesel in a drag race?
It does happen, you put propane and nitrous on a turbo diesel and woot, good times.
OK, if you need to put NOS and a modified engine in a diesel to go as fast as a stock petrol car... why not just get the petrol car. I mean to go as fasts as a mildly warm hatchback a diesel needs a 4L triple turbo engine with an 18 speed dual clutch transmission. I'll just stick with my petrol for performance as it's lighter, faster and cheaper (and lightness is worth more than power in racing).
Diesel is even starting to lose at LeMans, endurance racing was pretty much the only form of Motorsports that diesels even existed in.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I question why that's necessary at all. Sure, the safety features and tech, I get that, but why are we all running things that beat car that were - in the 60's - the fastest racecars on Earth? So we can run the kids to school and then pop home for lunch? Why do road-legal cars even HAVE a speedometer that goes past 80, or an engine capable of doing so?
But manufacturers are still appealing to that metric above all others, even in huge diesel-guzzling SUV's that mums are buying to run the little darlings to their nativity play, to the point of breaking the law (in spirit, even if not the letter) to do so.
This guy is way too rational, he must be a robot, send him away! It never makes rational sense so not point in trying to see it rationally. Welcome to humanity. Where the only fact that matters is the fact that your stuff is better than the guy next to you! Don't even bother trolling these people either, they'll only look at you like you're the crazy one when you ask them if their corvette gets them to the grocery store faster lol. Those trend does have a habit of reversing itself whenever gasoline prices go up though. I am also optimistic though that this trend may finally be put to an end with the introduction of autonomous cars that abide by speed limits regardless of engine size. Only to be replaced with something else though.
What's the name of the car where they just push fresh air into the exhaust to lower the numbers
This was the predecessor to the catalytic converter. The principle is that fresh air is pumped into a special superheated exhaust chamber (aka thermal reactor) to burn any fuel that didn't get burned in the combustion chamber.
3/4 ton trucks run 11 second quarters with 'stock motor' plus, nitrous, propane and track tires. The full setup, more or less, quadruples power.
I don't think I've seen it done with post-smog diesels or cute little euro-diesels.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Your welcome.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The BBC and the New York Times, to name just a few reputable sources, disagree with your assessment that Greece used rules accepted at the time and were only changed 4 years later:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09...
Practically no country in Europe has maintained the 3% deficit rule all the time. But I think it is not hypocritical to demand this of new applicants, it's just common sense. After all, if you can't even follow the rules at the beginning at least, as a special effort in order to join the bloc, what does this spell for the future?
It's the same logic as a job interview. You will go nicely dressed, shaved with clean shoes and fresh breaths, this doesn't mean you will go like this to work every day, but at least upon joining you should be at your best, no?
Not to mention that Germany had to go through the extra effort of assimilating former east block GDR. Suddenly one third of Germany was a developing country. Greece didn't have this special circumstances.
About the forced WW2 loan. First of all, you are mixing topics, I guess in an effort to show how unfairly Greece is being treated, since this has nothing to do with corruption levels or faking of statistics. And second, I don't know where you got that argument about today's Germany not being united. The real reason for Germany refusing to pay that I'm aware of is explained in this BBC article:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
Berlin paid 115m Deutschmarks to Athens in 1960 in compensation. It was a fraction of the Greek demand but was made with the agreement there would be no more claims.
Every country has corruption in some way or form. This doesn't diminish the fact that Germany is one of the least corrupt countries in the world, place 10 with a score of 81/100. Vs Greece, place 69 with a score of 44/100.
But if you could easily est in a real environment, then you should be able to see major discrepency between testing and driving environment. If driving around a circular track doubles the readings compared to the testing environment, you can probably cry foul and investigate.