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Volkswagen Admits To Testing Diesel Fumes On Monkeys (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: In what seems like a John Henry versus the steam shovel-style competition to dig diesel's grave, Volkswagen has admitted to funding (and subsequently cheating on) animal testing to prove the relative safety of diesel exhaust fumes, according to findings by the New York Times. The tests, which were undertaken at the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute in Albuquerque in 2014, involved as many as 10 monkeys and had them sitting in airtight containers as they breathed exhaust fumes from a diesel-powered Volkswagen Beetle while they watched cartoons for entertainment. The tests went on for 4 hours. "We apologize for the misconduct and the lack of judgment of individuals," said a Volkswagen representative in a statement. "We're convinced the scientific methods chosen then were wrong. It would have been better to do without such a study in the first place." The Volkswagen Beetle used in the test was equipped with the same compromised emissions software that could detect when the car was being tested in a lab environment so it was running as cleanly as it could, which I guess proves that Volkswagen will waste no opportunity to be hoisted by its own oil-burning petard.
I fail to see what the problem is. Would it have been better to test it on humans in some third-world shithole?
Must REALLY hate monkeys.
While LRRI is in Albuquerque, the tests themselves were likely conducted a few miles south, out on Kirtland/SNL (at the AF's "Inhalation Toxicology Research Institute"). Surreal place.
That way the monkeys got a much smaller does of carbon monoxide, as in much less than us human's got from the thousands of VW cars on the road.
They did test it on 25 humans in university clinic of Aachen https://www.theguardian.com/bu...
Also the usual /. headline is as usual: crap. EUGT did all this, which is a lobby organisation by BMW, Mercedes and VW. They all are responsible, not just VW alone.
People are going to be really hacked off when they find out the rest of the industry has been testing their fumes on great apes worldwide!
Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_research_ban
And what's with this penchant for exposing living things to gas?
VW condemned for testing diesel fumes on humans and monkeys
That's what the preview button is there for...
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
I guess they were out of baby seals.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
If this kind of test has to be done, it would be nice if it could be done by some kind of international organization so that it has to only be done once, not for every car company. They companies could just use instruments to check say 400 parts per million, yes that's bad or no it's not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
optics could not be worse for a german automaker.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Nothing in TFS or TFA tells us who authorized the experiment, or how high up that person was. It also doesn't tell us what happened to whoever it was, or what upper management's reaction was when the fact of the experiment was discovered. Let's not start blaming everybody in the company before we find out just who's responsible for this.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Good VW
They did some progress since tests in 1940 in Poland
I mean, this is like an onion article.
My interest is not in the fact that they tested on monkeys but rather why were they testing on animals in the first place? They had their emissions targets, so if they are testing on animals I can only conclude that the test was to see if they could get away with cheating those emissions targets without bringing attention to themselves.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The most shocking part isn't that they tested it on monkeys, its that they originally wanted to run the test on humans. They did still go ahead and do a test where they exposed humans to Nitrogen Dioxide though. The optics of a German company wanting to do gas chamber tests on humans is hilariously bad and one of the top people involved even admitted to it on video.
Yep we used test monkeys at a couple of places where I worked on games. Both cafeteria looked like the bar scene from Star Wars. Oh wait, Disney did buy Lucus, didn't they. Never mind.
What, not *that* type of test monkeys, never, never mind.
The monkeys wrote three new Avengers movies while they were in the chamber, and Michael Bay just hired them to write a new Transformers sequel.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
emphasis added by me. We're all talking about the poor monkeys and I haven't seen one headline with "Volkswagen cheated on diesel safety tests". Seriously, Monkeys are cute and all, but shouldn't the bigger story be that they falsified research showing diesel fumes were safe?
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have the fumes skip testing on a close human model and just kill or harm millions of humans and monkeys out in the wild?
Umm, anyone else seeing irony in this?
....I have zee SIGNED AUTHORIZATION for zis testing.
Vhat?
Sure - see? Signed in ink. Dated 5/13/44.
-Styopa
...but this is sorta sickening. In the market for a new (to me) car, atm. VW's out.
I get it; it sucks. But, until there is cheaper viable alternative then it's a necessary evil.
Should do the next test on Volkswagen CEOs. Without the cheat software.
than what American manufacturers do? Did you know American automanufacturers performed crash-tests with live animals for over 5 decades into the 90's? Why aren't we talking about this?
I'm sitting here wondering why the New York Times didn't state that they lifted the entire article from the Netflix documentary series "Dirty Money", which has an entire episode dedicated to "Dieselgate"...
The only two countries that still gassed people recently are North Korea and the United States of America.
das Tortur.
Also, das Lügen.
I know it's highly unlikely, but I hope their utter bankruptcy in the moral sense translates into financial bankruptcy because of their wilful cruelty, lying, and cheating. At times like this I wish I subscribed to some form of magic sky-daddyism so I could comfort myself with thoughts of those bastards rotting in hell for all eternity.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
What is a Gazen Wage? A car made of Gaze?
Marketing Director: We've got to stop testing our products on animals. It is bad for PR.
CEO: Other companies test their products on animals, why shouldn't we?
Marketing Director: Because we make hammers.
Preliminary results show that diesel exhaust not quite as effective as Zyklon-B.
Not a steam shovel, listen to the song. And JH won, but it did him in. Steam powered tools have been blamed for global warming ever since.
Germans have long tradition of sticking smoking exhaust pipe into closed container with living beings inside. I know, I know - Americans did this on American soil... Yankees simply know how to make a buck. Check IBM's and Ford's activity in pre-WWII Nazi Germany.
I remember my dad telling the story of some guy he knew who had a cat that had just given birth to unwanted kittens.
The guy placed the kittens in a plastic bag, which he tied around the exhaust of his car with a few rubber bands, and poked a few holes in the bag so it wouldn't just inflate and pop off. He then let his car run for 20+ minutes.
Then he was pissed because not a single one of them had died--they were soaken wet from the heat, but none of them was asphyxiated. Apparently this is something he did plenty of times back in the 60s and 70s (his "humane way" of putting them down, I guess). I first heard my dad tell that story in the mid-80s. 30 years later, cars are still a *lot* more efficient and burn fuel much more cleanly than even the mid-80s.
I never asked my dad how the guy finally got rid of them, since apparently "cars nowadays are so clean they can't even asphyxiate some hours-old kittens breathing nothing but exhaust fumes".