VW Faces $17B Fine for Emissions Scam

These are after treatment measures that, if done honestly, can be relatively effective when the car is new. What happen as years go by...who knows, these measures are affecting performance, could be an incentive to get rid of them for many.
A combustion which does not require (or requires minimum) after treatment is the way to go.

 

For some people, they'll remove the emissions controls on anything for more performance - this includes tuning turbocharged gasoline engines for more power, at the expense of emissions compliance.

The bigger concern is equipment failure (or, with AdBlue systems, simply running expense). In jurisdictions with effective emissions testing, that's less of a problem... but there's plenty of areas with corrupt emissions testing, as well as areas with no emissions testing at all. And, these systems are expensive to install new, but they're also expensive to replace when they break.

And, like I said before, nowadays, the diesel premium should be able to get you a PHEV. (And, with a PHEV, you can then back some of the expense back out with tax credits...)

 

+1

Emission regulations in most parts of the country are like mattress tag laws.
Even states with fairly strict laws often apply them only "in certain counties" and while it's true that there are a lot of cars in 'certain areas' cars have three characteristics that make them hard to fully regulate throughout their life-cycle.

1. They're valuable.
2. They're durable.
3. They're portable. (That's the whole point of transportation, right?)

So......
What happens sometimes is that an affluent hypercommuter or a poor lawyer that wants to LOOK affluent will overpay for a diesel and drive it for a relatively short period until it either breaks one too many times or it fails emissions seriously enough to activate the 'change owner' light.
When THAT happens, the car is traded out and brought up to compliance for sale locally or sold downmarket.
The problem is, of course, that people in flyover country already have, or think that they have good air quality due to things like population densities and geography. They still share the same atmosphere with the folks in the cities, but it's harder to enact and enforce tough clean air regulations in more rural places.
Another large hurtle for tougher emissions laws is agriculture, which ironically enough actually RELIES on diesels for the one thing that they're actually GOOD at.....towing, hauling, etc.

So....all of those formerly "clean" diesel cars.....suddenly aren't.
Time passes.
Rings and valves wear.
DEF systems are bypassed, and then town folk people are subjected to watching 'diesels' being lauded as 'clean' by goofy city dwellers, while actually having to drive behind used Veedubs, Mercs and Volvos that smoke like John Wayne.

From my driver's seat the Vedub scandal is WONDERFUL!!!!
It opens the curtain to the complexities of being "clean" (actually or statistically) and it's a good revenue generator for dot.gov if you don't mind the thought of scavengers with bloated bellies.

Best theater since some of the things we talk about in the kindergarten section of the forum!

 

That $10k number is more than likely hogwash. In the early days of the gen2 and Escape hybrid, Ford had two diesel hybrid concepts; the Reflex and Mercury Meta-One. They met the SULEV of the time. When asked if a commercial model would come to market, Ford said they didn't think people would pay the $9000 premium for a diesel hybrid.

Emission controls for diesel will cost more than for gasoline, and they are playing catch up in terms of reliability, but I believe the inflated costs that get tossed around are including past R&D costs that would extend to multiple models.

Gasoline emission systems wear and get bypassed too. In the US, were diesel cars are a tiny portion of the personal fleet, out of spec gas cars are likely a bigger source of pollution. They just aren't as noticable as a smoking Jetta or pick up.

A Fuelly user deleted the EGR on his Civic VX in one of those exempt counties upwind from me The VX got great fuel economy through lean burn. Regulations now make lean burn on a gas car impossible without adopting diesel emission controls. Without the EGR it will emit even more NOx.

 

That is just a spin and not the first time used by Diesel fan-boys.
Are you recommending a potential buyer to buy a "clean diesel", clean based on the fact there are few of them around so "smaller source of pollution" as less will become off-specs?

 

It's not spin. An air quality station in London whose results are quoted by the anti-diesel side on why diesel is bad, also reports benzene levels in the air. Benzene ain't in diesel.

Diesels can be as clean as gasoline engined cars, and more efficient than them. They can return the same or better fuel economy to comparable hybrids in usage cycles that some people regularly have in the US. At this point, diesels are better performers at some tasks than hybrids. I don't need BS reasons to recommend them to someone asking my opinion.

Might well be diesel fuel will be the easist to replace with renewables in the future. Simply banning the cars now will just halt emission control development for personal use, and likely increase the cost of it for commercial vehicles.

 

It is as a person buying a new gasoline car is not buying the whole fleet of them.

So, diesels are bad for London and good for the US? Or, good for London as well as they do not contain Benzene?

I doubt it.

So, let's have lot of them which means lots to replace...

 

According to the EPA press release, the undeclared AECDs issue with FCA was discovered during the extensive additional testing that diesel vehicles in the U.S. are now subject to since the VW scandal.

At least this should ensure that any diesel vehicle certified since the VW scandal truly meets the regulatory emission requirements in "commonly-encountered" driving scenarios and ambient conditions.

Since several diesel vehicles have been officially certified in the U.S. since the VW scandal, including the BMW diesels, it should be clear that the official certified data is representative. The U.S.-spec 328d is as clean as the cleanest gasoline vehicles currently available.

	Emission (g/mi)	2017 BMW 328d	2017 Prius Eco (AT-PZEV)
1	NMOG+NOx (Composite*)	0.008	0.0147
2	CO (Composite*)	0.05	0.14
3	PM (FTP)	0.0002**	0.0004

*weighted average of FTP/US06/SC03 emissions @ UL

**per EPA cert (T3B125)

 

Diesel CAN be as clean as gas.

well instead of doubting it - you can assure yourself by simply looking at the data. The reason Volkswagen was cheating in the 1st place was to falsely make diesel fuel cars look higher in mileage per gallon. There ARE ~ more btu's per gallon in diesel, but by default it needs to rob more energy to overcome losses necessary to scrub its pollution. Similarly, CO2 emission % per gallon are higher with diesel, which gets offset somewhat again via its higher btu's.
Diesel (being appropriately scrubed) may not burn CLEANER than gas - but it's at least as close to being 'less-dirty' as scrubbed gasolune exhaust. Diesel just takes a efficiency hit, to get that clean. From prior discussions on PC, we see diesel 'advantages' get much murky-er when one looks at diesel vs gas/hybrid maintenance costs.
.

 

The common reasons to circumvent the emission controls is for performance or because the cost to repair is too high. The likely hood of a person doing so doesn't depend on whether it is a gas or diesel car. The same with with increased emissions from component wear.

All cars have emission concerns in cities, even EVs. Research is going on to reduce the particulates from brake, tire, and road wear. Which is most numerous does play a factor in which technology causing the most problems.

@wxman already posted the numbers. BMW choose to certify to lower bin, likely to allow for the fact that the emission controls for diesels is newer technology, and to keep warranty costs down. The 328d is in a cleaner bin than my Sonic though.

Or we simply enforce the emission regulations on all, and punish the companies and individuals that break them.

 

Of course the EVs, plug-ins, and hybrids use regenerative braking which means "brake" wear plays no part. I can not comment on "tire, and road wear" . . . yet.

Since there is no accident data supporting hybrid as being accident prone, it suggests that "tire, and road wear" are not appreciably different from ICE-only cars.

Bob Wilson

 

@Trollbait @wxman @hill
OK you have convinced me, a Diesel passenger car that is as clean as a modern gasoline one can be built.
IMO with the current technology of post-combustion measures needed to achieve this, it will be too expensive to be viable for mainstream.
I also think these measures (or part of them) will have too short of effective life.
P.S. There is a difference between deliberately hacking the system (sometimes with costs involved) for achieving a goal, and sitting doing nothing when a system fails to deliver (especially if one can see a benefit in the mal-function).

 

i do recall the absolutely horrible oem tires on the GenII pri. GoodYear interrity's ... we prayed for 19,000 miles, but barely got 18,000 out of those hopelessly horrible treads. May they all burn in hell.

Yea - low rolling resistance doesn't have to mean low durability. The Michelin Hydroedge proved that - with a warranty of 90,000 miles - they went well beyond 100,000 miles. No WONDER they stopped making them ...

 

I put Kevlar brake pads on a Vette that used to squeak. The squeak went away, they didn't tear up the rotors, brake dust was virtually nonexistent and when I sold it, the pads and rotors looked like new. Kevlar may help with lowering brake dust particulates.

 

Just rolling down the road releases fine particles from the road surface and tires. A bigger non-exhaust source of particles is the resuspension of the 'dust' that has settled on the road surface. These have been studied for traffic in general. Nothing directly measured to a hybrid or plug in, but simple modeling of available data shows that these non-exhaust sources from an EV can bring its total particle emission up to that of an ICE model. Mainly due to the increased weight.

Green Car Congress: Study finds total PM10 emissions from EVs equal to those of modern ICEVs; role of weight and non-exhaust PM

I think the resuspension estimate is too high, because that is mostly effected by the car's wake, and more aerodynamic models will have a smaller wake. Note the model does assume zero emissions from brake wear because of regen though.

The car companies said the same when they first had to put emission controls on gasoline cars.
While the emission regulations steadily got stricter on gasoline cars over the decades, the advancement of emission control technology kept pace. Over the same time period, the regulations on diesel remained relatively lax until recently. Then they had to catch up to the gasoline limits on emissions in a very short time.
The reduction in performance and higher incidence of malfunction seen on diesel exhaust systems now was also seen when gas cars first had to install them.

No disagreement there. Purposely bypassing emission controls on new diesels costs thousands here while doing so on a gas new car is just hundreds, maybe less. The better bypasses can be turned off to pass inspections.
We need to have universal standards when it comes to emission testing in order to get cars with failing emission systems repaired or off the road.

Sounds cheaper than a vacuum system.

 

They had time, many of them have elected to waste it on cheating the system instead of improving their measures.

 

The EPA proposed ULSD (15ppm) in 2000, and it went into effect in June 2006. Before that the sulfur level was 500ppm.

The EPA started regulating vehicle emissions for the 1968 model year, and the standards were reviewed every couple of years. Tier 1 was set in 1991 and first went into effect in 1994. It at NOx levels set at 0.4g/mile for gas cars and 1g/mile for diesels. Tier 2 was set in 1999 and started going into effect in 2004. It set NOx limits at 0.05g/mile for both.

Diesels had a bigger NOx emission level drop to meet over the same time as gasoline cars, and the solutions required ULSD that wouldn't get to public stations until after the Tier 2 phase in had started. The 3 way catalytic converters that gasoline cars were using for NOx reduction were first introduced in 1981, and so had over twenty years of steady improvement before Tier 2 was phased in. Diesels had 6 years or so to develop NOx controls of the same effectiveness which couldn't be extensively tested on public roads.

It was a hard problem that had Honda abandon the idea of bringing a diesel to North America, and VW think cheating was a better solution. BMW and GM brought diesels to market that met the regulations, but years after the regs went into effect, so they took more time to get the emission controls working.

 

PM10 as you described, but PM2.5 is predominantly from combustion, no?

 

"For PM2.5 emissions, EVs deliver only a negligible reduction in emissions, the team found. Compared to an average gasoline ICEV, the EV emits 3% less PM2.5; compared to an average diesel ICEV, the EV emits 1% less PM2.5. Therefore, Victor Timmers and Peter A.J. Achten conclude, the increased popularity of electric vehicles will likely not have a great effect on PM levels. Their paper is published in the journal Atmospheric Environment." - from the Green Car Congress link, it has a link to the paper

 

Ok, I see the chart lower on the first linked page. Interesting stuff.




Looks like EPA put out a similar paper some time ago:

Evaluating the Contribution of PM2.5 Precursor Gases and Re-entrained Road Emissions to Mobile Source PM2.5 Particulate Matter Emissions

Prepared by MACTEC Under Contract to the Federal Highway Administration Authors: William M. Hodan and William R. Barnard








https://www3.epa.gov/ttnchie1/conference/ei13/mobile/hodan.pdf