The Dirty Truth About 'Clean Diesel' (nytimes.com) 496
HughPickens.com writes: Volkswagen persuaded consumers it had created a new generation of so-called clean diesel cars — until investigators discovered that phony testing concealed that its vehicles emitted up to 40 times the permitted levels of pollutants during regular use. Now Taras Grescoe writes in the NY Times public outrage over the fraud obscures the much larger issue: "clean diesel" is causing a precipitous decline in air quality for millions of city-dwellers. Monitoring sites in European cities like London, Stuttgart, Munich, Paris, Milan and Rome have reported high levels of the nitrogen oxides and particulate matter, or soot, that help to create menacing smogs. Although automakers worked hard to convince consumers that a new generation of "clean diesel" cars were far less polluting, diesel has a fatal flaw. It tends to burn dirty, particularly at low speeds and temperatures. In cities, where so much driving is stop and start, incomplete diesel combustion produces pollution that is devastating for human health.
Fortunately, Volkswagen sold only half a million of its "clean diesel" cars to the American public before the emissions scandal broke. Today, fewer than 1 percent of the passenger vehicles sold in the U.S. run on diesel fuel. Europe is now scrambling to undo the damage. In London, Mayor Boris Johnson last year called for a national program to pay some drivers to scrap their diesel vehicles. In Paris, Mayor Anne Hidalgo has gained broad support for a proposed ban on diesel cars. "Last month, the signatories of the climate deal in Paris agreed that the world has to begin a long-term shift from fossil fuels to more sustainable forms of energy," concludes Grescoe. "Recognizing "clean diesel" for the oxymoron it is would be a good place to start."
Fortunately, Volkswagen sold only half a million of its "clean diesel" cars to the American public before the emissions scandal broke. Today, fewer than 1 percent of the passenger vehicles sold in the U.S. run on diesel fuel. Europe is now scrambling to undo the damage. In London, Mayor Boris Johnson last year called for a national program to pay some drivers to scrap their diesel vehicles. In Paris, Mayor Anne Hidalgo has gained broad support for a proposed ban on diesel cars. "Last month, the signatories of the climate deal in Paris agreed that the world has to begin a long-term shift from fossil fuels to more sustainable forms of energy," concludes Grescoe. "Recognizing "clean diesel" for the oxymoron it is would be a good place to start."
My nose (Score:3, Insightful)
My own nose is able to tell that diesel isn't particularly clean burning.
Re:My nose (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:My nose (Score:5, Insightful)
And as soon as we got rail tracks to every grocery store this actually means something.
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Re:My nose (Score:4, Informative)
Why would grocery stores want rail tracks as long as trucks are so heavily subsidized [jsonline.com] that rail doesn't make financial sense?
And why can't electric trucks transport goods the short distance from the tracks to the grocery store?
Re:My nose (Score:5, Insightful)
And as soon as we got rail tracks to every grocery store this actually means something.
Where I live (Los Altos, CA), there were rail tracks adjacent to every grocery store. They were ripped out to make the Foothill Expressway. http://www.abandonedrails.com/... [abandonedrails.com]
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You are forgetting that even a petroleum-fired generating station will get more energy out of an equal volume of petroleum than a car will, because it can always run at optimal temperature and RPM.
There would actually be a reduction in pollution if all mobile transport was electric, and all the amps generated to do that came from petroleum-based generation.
Re:My nose (Score:4, Insightful)
The pollution from a gallon of diesel used to move a million tons of goods injures my lungs just as much as the pollution from a gallon of diesel used to move an ounce of goods. The real question is how does the damage caused by the pollution from moving a ton of goods with diesel compare to the damage caused by moving a ton of goods using other energy sources.
My guess, that given the current product mixes that are being move, simply the manufacturing of a "ton" of those products is causing the most pollution, not the transportation. By simply not making most of the products in the first place (and thus obviating the need to transport them anywhere), is the true winning strategy.
Unfortunately in our consumer driven society, I don't see that happening any time soon.
The brief puff of black soot... (Score:5, Interesting)
... that comes out of the back of even new diesel vehicles on hard acceleration tells you all you need to know about how clean diesel really is. Yes, it emits less CO2 per mile than petrol/gasoline for the equivalent power output but thats where its enviromental credentials end.
Re:The brief puff of black soot... (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't that the crux of the problem? We have spent the past 40 years tweaking car technology to convert noxious tailpipe gases to clean, non-toxic CO2. Now that isn't good enough. Time to choose our poison.
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Well, in addition to choices of poison you have to weight your alternative options for paying the piper. You can pay the piper now by tuning your diesel engine to produce either (a) soot or (b) NOx and then add the appropriate emissions equipment, or you can pay it later in terms of adapting to climate changes.
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Re:The brief puff of black soot... (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny, I've never seen ANY kind of visible smoke coming out of my new diesel sedan, even under hard revving. Not a VW though. Modern diesels come with filters that capture soot particles and urea exhaust treatment systems to neutralize NOx emissions. Barring cheating, a well built modern diesel vehicle is as clean as its gasoline counterpart.
Re:The brief puff of black soot... (Score:5, Funny)
"Funny, I've never seen ANY kind of visible smoke coming out of my new diesel sedan, even under hard revving"
Thats because you're at the front driving it.
It's about size (Score:5, Insightful)
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...except that doesn't happen with many diesel vehicles, our BMW X5d included.
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No, see, NOxs are degraded by sunlight. They're not a problem for our great grandchildren. However, the CO2 coming out of your gasoline car and the refinery cracking diesel oil into gasoline is a major problem for our grandchildren and great grandchildren. Transportation is a huge source of CO2. Diesel is, over the lifecycle, so much better for the environment that gasoline engines should be fined.
Are you serious? Yes, NoX is affected by sunlight - it creates ozone. Very unhealthy.
I cannot agree with you on this, and Europeans no longer do, either. Diesel engines create real pollution, and you seem to be saying it's okay to kill more people with that today than deal with some extra CO2, which is simply a part of the naturally occurring cycle of life (respiration/photosynthesis) on Earth. The marginal reduction in CO2 emissions is simply not worth the very high cost of damaging pollution - there i
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The OP's point is not that NOx isn't noxious, it's that it isn't persistent. The ozone created by sunlight on NOX is unstable and breaks down quickly. If we stopped pumping NOx into the atmosphere, it and its byproducts would all be gone in a matter of weeks. The same can't be said of CO2.
Re:The brief puff of black soot... (Score:5, Insightful)
The OP's point is not that NOx isn't noxious, it's that it isn't persistent. The ozone created by sunlight on NOX is unstable and breaks down quickly. If we stopped pumping NOx into the atmosphere, it and its byproducts would all be gone in a matter of weeks. The same can't be said of CO2.
As well as the fact that all of humanity pays for the problems of CO2, whereas NOx just affects the rich nations pumping out all the crap in the first place.
Personally, I think there should be more emphasis on plug-in hybrids with Diesel based range extenders. Then the battery can be used around town (where the NOx is a problem), and the Diesel can be used on longer journeys where country roads don't have a NOx problem.
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Well, except for the part where we're destroying huge swaths of forests /rain forests and that acidification of the ocean is killing off huge amours of the algae that would normally yum up some extra CO2
S, yes, as a matter of fact, CO2 IS a problem
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Why would acidification hurt algae?
Re:The brief puff of black soot... (Score:4, Informative)
Further [wikipedia.org] reading [europa.eu] if desired. [google.com] (those are the first 4 links in my search [5th link] - I didn't know why it would hurt either, so I Google'd it.).
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They thrive, but they feel really guilty about it.
Re:The brief puff of black soot... (Score:5, Informative)
Plants need water too, that doesn't mean you can plant a cactus in a marsh or a rosebush in a koi pond. Different plants have different needs for/tolerances for water in the soil, so if the level of dampness changes at a site the population of plants will change.
This is true for any nutrient -- including CO2. That means things aren't as simple as "More nutrients == Better"; it depends where and what the nutrient is. Applying fertilizer to your lawn will help your bluegrass compete with the hardier crab grasses, which is good. When enough of that fertilizer drains into rivers and lakes those waters will become choked with aquatic weeds and algae, which is bad. So change is neither good nor bad, it's often good in some places and bad in others.
CO2 is a trace element in the atmosphere (about 0.04%), which means that some plants in any ecosystem are bound to be limited by it. An increase in CO2 will cause some plants which are minor components of a plant community to emerge as major weeds.
In agriculture, where you actively control which species is growing, crops will grow faster in a high CO2 atmosphere. However that additional growth will be in the form of carbohydrate; the protein density of crops will drop, because the synthesis of proteins is nitrogen limited (proteins are composed of amino acids, which are carboxylic acids with an NH2 group). Where crops are grown in close proximity to their wild relatives (e.g. rice) there will be increased hybridization resulting in lower food yields despite higher biomass. Overall these are changes we can adapt to, but it's not as simple as "faster growth == cheaper food".
So CO2 as pollution is far from bullshit. "CO2 == plant food" may be true in a limited sense but the whole argument that this makes rising CO2 a good thing is nonsense.
Diesel Hybrids (Score:4, Insightful)
If diesels pollute mostly at low speeds and temperatures, why not make diesel hybrids, which would allow the diesel to run at peak efficiency and/or cleanliness?
Re:Diesel Hybrids (Score:5, Insightful)
Diesel engines are more expensive than gasoline engines (because they have to be built stronger, and have a turbocharger). Hybrids are also more expensive than gasoline engines (because they have an extra battery and electric motor, or at least an oversized alternator, depending on design). Diesel hybrids would be more expensive twice.
That said, I'd love to have one.
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Better off with a gas-electric hybrid. Electric motor has even more low-end torque than diesel.
Applications for diesel hybrids (Score:4, Insightful)
Better off with a gas-electric hybrid. Electric motor has even more low-end torque than diesel.
Depends on the application. Diesels-electrics are used in locomotives and I think they would probably work fairly well in similar applications like in large cargo hauling trucks. I think it wouldn't make sense for a small city runabout or a family sedan but for big trucks I'm kind of surprised we haven't seen it worked on already. Diesels are actually best in steady state applications which is why they are great for trucks. Yes they are torquey but their fuel efficiency is their primary draw and that comes from operating at (relatively) constant speeds.
Re:Applications for diesel hybrids (Score:5, Informative)
Diesel electric trains are popular because mechanically coupling wheels to a 3000 horsepower engine is not trivial :)
It also lets the locomotive run on electrified rails if available - though in practice this has been abandoned for freight since the early 80s.
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Would a diesel hybrid need a turbocharger?
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The only recycling of exhaust that a turbocharger does, is that it uses the pressure of exhaust gasses to spin a turbine to compress the intake air. No exhaust gas is ever re-introduced into the intake, as that would completely coat the charge pipe in soot, ruin any O2 sensors, coat the inside of any intercooler that is present and decrease it's operating efficiency, and deprive the engine of oxygen for combustion per unit volume.
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One of the big advantages diesels have over gasoline engines is that they don't have a throttle plate restricting airflow at sub-optimal speeds. When used in a generator, both the gasoline and diesel engines would be run at their peak efficiency and so this throttle restriction would disappear. Now you are left with only the compression advantage of diesel. That advantage gets reduced by the higher complexity, cost, and weight of the diesel engine.
In short, it's probably not worth the 5% or so increase in e
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That's not true: you should just treat it as more of a Chevy Volt-style hybrid system, where the ECU is designed to let the battery discharge to the point that the engine will run long enough that it spends a good proportion of it at normal operating temperature. (Plus, if you do that then you can size the engine for average output instead of peak output, i.e., smaller, which means it'll come up to temp even faster.)
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Toyota style Hybrids have been doing that from the start. I've got an 06 Highlander Hybrid, when it decides to fire the motor up for the first time it'll extend the run to make sure the catalytic converted and coolant come up to temp. This actually results in a noticeable dip in MPG in the winter...
This is such a tree hugger article (Score:3, Insightful)
This makes a great story:
But nobody ever mentions the actual level - which is pretty damn important because 40 times 1 part per thousand is a lot more significant than 40 times 1 part per trillion.
Yes VW cheated - but lets not forget that the "Clean Diesel" TDIs are MUCH cleaner than the previous generation diesel cars (TDIs included) that were on the market. Anyone who has owned both can tell you, the clean diesel TDIs don't smell, never emit black smoke and the tail pipe stays clean and doesn't fill with soot the way the old cars did.
VW broke the law and should be punished, but this isn't the BP oil spill.
Re: This is such a tree hugger article (Score:2)
The fact of the matter is that the government regulators are keeping the overall level of emissions higher than the market is trying to provide. [ericpetersautos.com]
They're the enemy of the environment, not its friend. But you have to be willing to follo
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The fact of the matter is that the government regulators are keeping the overall level of emissions higher than the market is trying to provide. [ericpetersautos.com]
I suppose that's one possible spin to put on matters, but it's not Mazda's spin. They claim that the introduction of the new engines has been delayed because of new, more stringent testing procedures put into place by the EPA in the wake of the Volkswagen scandal.
So, either (a) you are right and the government is deliberately trying to increase the pollution to higher levels by preventing consumers from buying clean engines; or (b) you are wrong and the government is actually trying to reduce pollution by
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Re:This is such a tree hugger article (Score:5, Informative)
But nobody ever mentions the actual level - which is pretty damn important because 40 times 1 part per thousand is a lot more significant than 40 times 1 part per trillion.
The actual levels are posted here [wikipedia.org].
Here's the long and short of it:
Jetta (LNT system):
EPA Limit: 0.043 g/km
EPA Dyno Test (cheat number): 0.022 g/km
WVU Test (actual number): 0.61-1.5 g/km
Passat (SCR/Urea-based system):
EPA Limit: 0.043 g/km
EPA Dyno Test (cheat number): 0.016 g/km
WVU Test (actual number): 0.34-0.67 g/km
These emissions levels are in g/km, which is pollutants over distance (which can probably be converted to time, if you dig around the actual study [theicct.org] to find average speeds attained, but I'm supposed to be working right now...so you can try to dig that up on your own :). However, I do not believe that these numbers can be converted into actual pollutant volume (e.g. PPM/PPB/PPT). Perhaps you can scavenge that from the WVU study's raw data. I'd be interested in what you find.
I am also interested in finding is a trend in the NOx regulation in the US. I've dug around a bit, but have not yet found it. E.g. - did the actual NOx levels meet previous standards? Are the current standards that VW had to cheat to get around unrealistic? Beyond this, the wiki article does cite some projections regarding the number of deaths that have been/will be caused by the cheat, but I'd like to have a better perspective than that.
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Because supertankers and beef ranches are operating out in t he middle of nowhere. Cars are operating right in the middle of the cities where almost everyone lives.
I am not saying we should not be looking at these other industries; but if we want to improve air quality where people live, we need to stop driving so many cars and trucks make the ones we do drive cleaner. The second of those two options is much easier to regulate and implement.
Ah, cry me a protectionist river (Score:3, Informative)
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Highway only mileage
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It's not anecdotal. Gas engines can last quite awhile, particularly under good maintenance. I know many people who have bought the more reliable Japanese cars who drive them into the ground and all of those people have gasoline engines in their vehicles.
While it is probably true that given identical quality of maintenance that diesels will last longer, in reality it's less about the type of engine, and more about how it is used and maintained.
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Which car are you referring to that needs 3 month oil changes? 1.4 TSI VW engine standard oil change interval is 10k miles. In the low tune version you get, achievable 40mpg, 122bhp, 148lbft. 60mph with no traffic, you get ~50mpg. No soot at all, exhaust clean as a whistle after 40k. Nicer to drive, and quieter than the equivalent diesel. Lower performance than that 2.0TDI, but quicker than the 1.6.
Does it matter that the engine lasts 600k miles when the car is typically scrapped well before that?
Re:Ah, cry me a protectionist river (Score:4, Informative)
Service intervals:
Juke 1.6 Petrol - 12mths / 18,000m
Juke 1.6 Petrol Turbo - 12mths / 12,500m
Juke 1.5 Diesel - 12mths / 18,000m
You know, lying just to try and make a point which is false just paints you as very very stupid.
You obviously know nothing about small engines, or modern turbocharger systems.
Oh, while you are at it, its spent *soot*, and no, modern small turbcharged engines dont produce it.
Go troll somewhere else please.
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Why haven't you killed yourself yet, then, if that's how you feel?
What do you call 100,000 mass execution proponents performing mass suicide? A good start.
Clean diesel is like clean coal... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Actually it's messier. Take into account the calories used for that hike and what fossil fuels had to be burned to get whatever you ate to be able to invest those calories and you'll start to weep.
Someone has to foot that carbon bill.
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It's a hell of a lot less than driving a car the same distance.
Including all the costs (including the CO2 cost of making the bicycle, its consumables such as innertubes and tyres) plus the energy burn of the bike rider (including the CO2 cost in making the food), the result is about 21g CO2 per km travelled.
Making the same calculation for a typical passenger car will show the total to be for a car to be about 160g CO2 per km travelled.
The only motorised transport that comes close to the cyclist is the Frenc
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Won't somebody think of the ants!? All they got is a center for ants who can't read good and wanna learn to do other stuff good too.
BlueTEC? (Score:2)
The article centers on problems with Volkswagen's system, but how well does Daimler's BlueTEC system perform?
"Devastating for human health..." (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow...hyperbole much?
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Wow...hyperbole much?
Oh Never! Why do you ask?
This is a standard environmentalist tactic, using over stated affects to imply something, then making an emotional argument out of it.
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I think the word devastating is quite apt. Air pollution from road transportation causes early death of some 53000/yr in US [1]. Diesel pollution probably supplies some disproportionate contribution.
1. http://news.mit.edu/2013/study... [mit.edu]
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Aren't most passenger diesels turbocharged these days? They still seem to get crazy good MPG figures, and the marketing and car reviews seem to praise their torque for real-world acceleration (what's the old saw -- you buy HP, but drive torque?)
I thought that antigel additives got added at the refinery for winter states like Minnesota so adding additives wasn't really necessary. My dad owned a truck parts business and they used to hawk an additive, but I don't know we ever sold much if any of it. I also
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Re:the diesel car has always confounded me. (Score:5, Interesting)
A full urea tank on our BMX X5d lasts at least 3-4 years (we've had to have it refilled once), so it's no where near "30 days". The idiot light is pretty good, too; the car warns you for 1000 miles (counting down) that it won't start when the tank is empty. Now that might not work for a long-haul trucker, but is acceptable for a family SUV.
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Ditto. Just filled my 2 year old Citreon GP with 10L of AdBlue just as it's clock turned 30,000Km.
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outside of a few concept sports cars, diesel isnt about speed but torque.
It's about low-end power, not torque.
Unfortunately, in the US the diesel engines that exist there are there out of necessity because no one could shove a gasoline engine in. The economics and consumption are just too obvious. Beyond that, very little investment, if any, has been made in diesel in the US. A European car diesel takes a surprisingly short amount of time to warm up. Certainly in the 90s, you only used a diesel car if you were on the road permanently as a rep or something. Lack of enthusiasm
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Taxes
In Europe, gasoline is taxed more than diesel fuel. The goal was to tax cars more than trucks, the diesel car is basically a tax exploit.
Diesel is also more efficient, which is, again, a significant advantage when taxes make fuel expensive.
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Advantages of diesel:
1. Fuel economy. Thanks to high fuel prices in Europe, fuel is a major component in the TCO of a car. Switching to a car that uses half the fuel is a no-brainer (depending on 3.).
2. Drivability. Thanks to 1. everybody drives compact cars with small engines. Small unturbocharged petrol engines have little torque, so in mountainous areas they're crap to drive and everyone switches to a compact turbodiesel. Same for people who need to tow anything.
3. In Europe, governments use taxation of
Bollocks (Score:3)
We're likely to hear more anti-diesel rhetoric in the future. With the ever falling oil price and no floor to it in sight petrol/gasoline is simply going to be uneconomical to produce at some point. The only thing to do is to then try and ban the cheaper alternative through laws and regulations. There's a bit of distortion going on at the moment.
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Actually, this is just the opposite. The car industry in Europe is heavily leveraged towards diesel. European politicians don't want to put their domestic car makers out of work. They are addressing this problem DESPITE their vested interests, because it's gotten THAT BAD. You have all those historic landmarks covered in soot and requiring tremendous maintenance from the damage from the air, alone.
Nitrogen Oxides aren't Green House Gases (Score:2)
So how is reducing them going to help meet the Paris climate deal?
It should also be noted that standard gasoline cars also emit much more than tests indicate, and as any driver knows seldom match the stated mpg claims.
They do run 'cleaner' when they're not sabotaged (Score:3)
The testing methodology for emissions is a shambles and has been cheated by every car manufacturer for decades now to varying degrees. If we're serious about fixing the emissions problems then this is the first place that needs attention. I believe you can make diesels cleaner, but it costs money. Fix the tests to force these emission standards to be applied in normal driving and then let the consumer decide if the added cost is worth owning a diesel. In fact we need to fix the tests regardless, if only to get a proper look at the real state of emissions across the board.
But seriously, the talk is well worth watching.
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I haven't watched the talk yet. I've been to busy watching other 32C3 talks. :-)
But I do know that just after Dieselgate came out, some of the news in the Netherlands was that the testing lab in our country (which does this for otherEuropean countries too) had already figured this out at least a year earlier.
Their report showed that out of 16 models tested 14 failed a slightly more realistic test. So they were already busy helping to change the rules at the European level to get proper realistic testing.
Her
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I thought while one of Volkswagen's Cxx people was busy throwing its software engineers under the bus that this indicated:
* either VW had absolutely terrible, terrible software auditing, and the executive was effectively unwittingly condemning his own company for such shoddy practises.
* or he was lying.
There is absolutely no way that a "rogue engineer" as the guy put it could do this kind of thing and get away with it, even if VW's software auditing is indeed terrible. It would have taken at least the collu
It's the money (Score:2)
Yes, diesel engines cost more than regular ones, but that difference has declined sharply in the past decade and what's left of the price difference of maybe 10% is easily offset by the cost of operation. Getting 50 miles per gallon of diesel is far from impossible and with a price of about 80% of regular fuel it gets even cheaper.
As long as this is the case people will reach for diesel as long as there is no compelling reason not to. It's simply as that.
I love my TDI... (Score:2)
I love my TDI and you can suck my dick to determine the level of pollution that it kicks out. I never had it tested but I am pretty sure the new generation of TDI engines is much cleaner than any previous diesel engines before them.
An Open Letter to California Air Resources Board (Score:2)
tl;dr Instead of burdening VW with the huge cost of fixing the problems and fines, mandate that they invest the same money in Electric Vehicles and plant (ie economic development and jobs) in the affected states (in this case CA).
kthxbye (Score:2)
Years of listening to europhiles prattle on and on about the wonders of diesel cars, and stoopid 'muricans with their cowboy gasoline hotrods.
So much for that noise. Let us know when you get your fleet fixed and burning gas.
Clean Coal (Score:2)
If they can make Clean Coal, why can't they make Clean Diesel?
Not only no but hell no (Score:2)
You can have my 2008 ML320 CDI turbodiesel when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
Where are the diesel *hybrids*? (Score:2)
Come on, why haven't we seen one diesel hybrid car? Then there's zero issues about start, stop, and low-speed. Even with the price-gouging of the gas companies, that would really give you a high milage/gallon.
And don't tell me that would be "new" technology. Go down to the railroad tracks, and watch all the ->diesel-electric- locomotives, which have worked this way since the thirties....
mark
Diesel-Electric (Score:2)
The way to go for minimizing the emissions is to build diesel-electric hybrids, where the engine only turns a generator that charges batteries. The reason is that the engine can be optimized for one RPM and load, and the catalysts can run closer to a steady state. Where the emissions spike are during transitions of power output, especially when accelerating after a period of very low output that lets the cats cool down.
Re:Cars (Score:5, Insightful)
True, but let's not forget that the USA is generally HUGE compared to most European countries and the USA has an overall population density which is pretty low. This is why we spend so much time in our cars, it's a long way to work and Grandma's house.
Let's also not forget that automobiles have vastly improved their emission standards and efficiency over the last few decades. I remember the yellow-brown haze which blanked LA nearly continuously in the 80's and have noticed that it's not nearly as bad anymore. So all is not lost.
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USA is generally HUGE compared to most European countries
Irrelevant given that vast majorities of both populations live within an urban sprawl. You can't average your population over your land mass as if you're equally divided across it.
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I don't know, our urban sprawl seems to be a bit less dense than say that of England.
I know it's changing some, but I was in Manchester a while back and generally you can get just about anywhere you want to go on rail/foot fairly quickly. Things are packed much closer there than here. The middle class home takes up much less space both in interior size and land foot print consumed than the same in the USA where I have a 3,000 square foot home on about 1/2 an acre in the suburbs. Heck, my back fence is 120
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But for 100+ years there has been few restrictions on movement and migration in the US. It is quite normal for families to live on opposite sides of the country. Whereas up until recently there were controlled borders throughout most of Europe. In the case of the Iron Curtian, very controlled borders.
With the expansion of the Schengen Area you might see more widely traveled and spread families. But even then, migration isn't as simple as it is in the USA.
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Yes, we also have a single language and have long had a single currency. We have hiring biases (e.g. gender, race, etc), but by and large not regional ones. These are good things, but they do encourage (or at least do not dissuade) movement.
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You can't pick a single US state and compare it to, say, Germany. Every other state in the union speaks the same language, for starters. A German has a huge disincentive to move to neighboring France, whereas a move from Pennsylvania to New Jersey is unlikely to impact an American's life in any meaningful way.
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They'll still kill more than 30,000 every year - whereas when public transit kills anyone at all it makes the news.
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... That energy isn't created out of thin air. ...
It pretty much is, thanks to the Sun filling that thin air with 1000Watts per square meter of light. That's why solar power is awesome.
Yes, we need to solve the energy /storage/ problem, but electric cars directly and indirectly solve that problem through battery technology and demand-based charging (and even vehicle-to-grid technology). When affordable electric cars (of 200+ mile range) are manufactured at scale, we'd effectively have solved the energy storage problem (by utilizing old batteries and exces
Re: Cars (Score:2)
WTF are you talking about? I cycle through Frankfurt am Main every working day. The air is not as good as in the mountains, but decent enough.
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Protip: I would have modded this up if you removed the first four words.
So many good posts end up at +1 because of hyperbole or bombast. Make a good point and it stands on its own.
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FUCK YOU! :) Curse words make my point stick better.
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Yes it does. Reader reactions are affected by emotions. If the first sentence is an insult it triggers an emotion which affects interpretation of the rest of the point, as will making a spelling or a grammar mistake.
If you must then be sure to play it safe and leave the crap posting to the end. Quite frankly I'm not entirely sure what his point even was given I typically stop reading when I get to "fuck you".
Re: (Score:2)
Poor people suffer a lot more from pollution than rich. Disallow cheats from writing off their fines.
Snarky solution (Score:2)
require that as of 2020 30% of all cars sold (by OEM) be Electric (or Hybrid with Electric as Primary mode)
oh and 15% of all trucks/SUVs same rules
this will prevent OEMs from doing the "we made an electric car and nobody bought it" trick
the fine should be 125% of the gross difference (so if they only hit 20% then the fine is 125% of 10% of their gross)
Re: (Score:2)
A steam engine?? Its one of the most inefficient engines types ever designed. You have to put a huge amount of energy in to get water up to boiling point before you can get any useful energy out and most of the rest of what you do put in is lost as heat before it can do any useful work anyway.
The steam engine was fine in an era with plentiful coal when no one cared about any kind of pollution , never mind greenhouse gases, but in the 21st century its a complete non starter.
Steam engines (Score:2)
A steam engine?? Its one of the most inefficient engines types ever designed.
Umm, you are aware that virtually all fossil fuel and nuclear power plants are types of steam engines right? A steam engine is just a heat engine that uses steam as its working fluid. Modern steam power plants have efficiency approaching 50% [wikipedia.org] in some cases. If you are talking about some particularly inefficient form of steam engine you need to me more specific.
Re: (Score:2)
That works fine for trains and boats, but here on roads we need to occasionally stop.
In cities we need to stop a lot, therefore the pollution from engines is worse. A steam or stirling engine isn't going to help much here when I need power right the heck now, not in five minutes when the engine heats up. Hybrid engines are more smooth on power use since you can divert energy into the batteries and get it back quick without taxing the gas engine. Even trains do this.
But in that case, you might as well go ful