The general assumption at the time when VW was put under a microscope for these issues is that everyone is cheating, VAG just got caught first.
What stinks seems to be the way the regulations are being implemented moreso than what sort of detours the manufacturers can take to avoid them.
I won't be surprised when we see more auto makers added to the list, however I wonder if anyone will criticize the regulations instead of shaming auto manufacturers.
Sure. Since the VW incident, many cars from several of the big automakers have been found to fail emissions tests.
> I wonder if anyone will criticize the regulations instead of shaming auto manufacturers.
It's telling that the automakers have chosen to cheat rather than call out the tests for being unrealistic -- or build a slightly less powerful car.
By doing so, they forfeit any possible sympathy from me. You don't get to cheat on a test, brag about how you passed, and then if you're discovered, claim that the test was too hard. Too late.
Seriously- the Jetta TDI made 11% less power[1] in compliance mode. This isn't about the regulations being hard to meet, it's about flagrantly disregarding the EPA. It's about how pathetically toothless the EPA is, that they didn't have the funding or reach to discover this and instead college students figured it out.
The year I bought my Jetta it was the most efficient midsize sedan by a wide margin. I bought it because my friends had Priuses and it was feeling pretty monochromatic at my house.
The skeptic in me should have known better. One manufacturer was blowing everyone else out of the water? German engineering? A seriously nifty gearbox? Are those enough to explain the difference? Apparently not.
It's not even like the test couldn't be met, VAG just wanted to skip the urea system. At the same time as they were cheating, they were selling other diesels with urea that met the regs just fine, no cheating.
The test could even be met without the urea system. But the car would have to run rich and flush out its NOx system more often, which uses fuel and lowers performance. The thing that was so marvelous about the Volkswagen TDI engine was how all of its performance numbers and fuel economy were better than what was advertised. Other manufacturers were racking their brains trying to figure out how they did it.
It seems a little hard to believe that other manufacturers had no idea how they did it. If it was so confounding it could quickly resolved by plugging in an analyzer and run a test cycle...
Maybe VW isn't the origin of this, they could have seen another manufacturer doing something similar, decided to join in and took it too far.
The DEF itself is pretty inexpensive (though not free, like $8/gal), but the system to keep it from freezing in wintertime is actually kind of a pain, since it freezes at -10C but decomposes around 60C so your heating element can't be too hot. The cost savings from not using it were rather substantial. Volkswagen TDIs were the cheapest performance diesel cars by a rather large margin.
It's an active expense that doesn't directly benefit the user, and disables your otherwise mechanically sound vehicle when it runs out; both of which tend to rub people the wrong way. Also I think there was something about german companies colluding over adblue tank size to force more refills, but don't quote me on that.
Also it's a user-maintenance thing. One more thing to refill on top of your windshield wiper fluid.
I forget if it was VW or Mercedes, but one of them branded theirs as "blue-tec" or something that doesn't sound like you're handling piss bottles. Let the mechanic worry about that.
In all fairness, the urea systems are really annoying. I was driving a rental vehicle and I got a warning that it was out of urea in the middle of nowhere. I stopped at a gas station which did not have any and the vehicle would not start until you put urea into it which I could not find in the middle of the desert.
I had a co-worker who had a similar horror story. Drove out into the Alaska outback in a modern truck (<3 years old), there was some issue with the emissions reduction system (DEF heater failed), the vehicle went into "limp" mode after 50 miles (40 MpH speed limited) and displayed a warning it would limit them to 20 MpH after another 50 miles.
There literally wasn't any dealer or provider that could do anything before it hit 20 MpH limit, and the truck wound up being flatbed-ed (luckily the manufacturer picked up the bill, but still).
This definitely makes diesel vehicles less reliable, more expensive to maintain, and likely reduces their lifespan. If I purchased a truck I'd go gas.
I imagine that this is when I would perform a hard reset (by disconnecting the battery or pulling the fuse) of the ECU.
Not sure if it would work on that vehicle, but it generally clears emissions codes and the like, even on fairly recent vehicles. Its possible it might have let the car drive another 50 miles or so.
I don't have any evidence on hand, but I distinctly remember most of the auto makers complaining every step of the way about most emissions regulations.
Granted, it tends to get a "boy who cried wolf" feel to it as they've always done it, but they absolutely raised a stink about the constantly rising regulations.
Referring to American car manufacturers' anti-CAFE wishlist being adopted by Scott Pruitt's EPA. The wishlist was submitted as a sort of bargaining piece, the idea being that industry demand something extreme expecting the incoming administration to meet them halfway. Except Pruitt just accepted it without reservation[1], and the industry was caught flat-footed. So now they're actually _repudiating_ some of their arguments.
The dirty little secret of the car industry is that efficiency and safety regulations help drive the upgrade cycle. When every car from this year has feature X, then all used cars instantly become out-dated and even unsafe in the minds of consumers. And the timelines set out by the regulators help to coordinate competition in a way that would be illegal otherwise. For example, if a new efficiency or safety standard is still 5 years out, then everybody knows to a high degree of certainty how each competitor will time and stage their rollout (not too early, not too late). The benefits may not exceed the overall costs of the regulation, but the industry is built around the system and pulling the rug out creates chaos.
[1] I guess this was a case of the Trump administration taking industry's rhetoric literally and not seriously.
Like you said, everyone is going to cry when their burden is increased in any way, even if it's a completely reasonable increase. Companies complain if their employees request cost of living raises, and people complain when prices rise due to rising cost of living. At some point, it drowns out any legitimate complaints. If you've been saying the regulations are too high yet have been meeting it every time, then a new regulation comes out that is actually too high and you can't meet it, people will take you less seriously.
If you then pretend to meet those requirements even though they were too high, you get zero points.
"It's telling that the automakers have chosen to cheat rather than call out the tests for being unrealistic"
They do that, too. You can probably imagine the response the HN crowd would give, which is pretty much the same response the news media would spin it with... money-grubbing rich companies trying to escape from beneficent, unambiguously good laws so they can make more dirty, polluting money. It doesn't play well, so they don't make this argument in public. But if you live in Michigan, you can find plenty of engineers who grouse about the standards in various ways, and not just "they're hard". (Believe it or not, engineers have families too, and like them and their families to not die in the cars they quite likely drive themselves.)
Between the media's drive to drum up antipathy towards the automotive companies for both their own ideological reasons and simply because stories about big corrupt companies sell, and the ever-present and unavoidable politics (of all kinds) involved in any sort of standards setting, there's so much noise that on those occasions where literally impossible regulations are created, the system is not very good at dealing with it. I am speaking neutrally here, because in the real world, balancing between costs and benefits of regulations is a very hard problem and I'm not really yelling at any particular party here for not getting it perfect. It's a systemic problem.
I rather strongly suspect that if we could get a perfect judge that the current set of regulations is probably already impossible to comply with at all; failing that it probably can't be complied with economically. I seriously doubt emissions are the only problems, they're just the ones people are motivated to test. I bet if Consumer's Reports or a similar organization set up a full legal compliance suite they couldn't buy a single car from a dealership lot that complied completely with everything. I think they'd be close on most measurements. But I bet every vehicle would fail something, and there'd be a non-trivial number of rather substantial failures.
(For an example of the latter, noise regulations on how loud cars can be as they pass you at various speeds are really easy to fail on a specific car. A particular bit of trim that came loose during shipping or something can fail you out very easily. Now, this one is less important in the grand scheme of things than emissions, but it's an example of a regulation that could pass at the test site but fail on many or even most cars in the field.)
Considering that, in recent years, cars got larger, more powerful, have better mileage, and pollute less: I think the regulations are extremely realistic.
It's not like that late 1970s and early 1980s when cars became smaller and had anemic engines in order to meet with new regulations.
"Considering that, in recent years, cars got larger, more powerful, have better mileage, and pollute less: I think the regulations are extremely realistic."
You are assuming away the very question I'm asking, though; are those cars actually in compliance? If not, you don't have a point. (I don't mean "you are wrong"; I mean, you literally wouldn't have a point to your post.)
And when the regulation fails to regulate for a long period of time, such that all eventually meet the regulation with either a loophole or a crime, it does not make the system any fairer when the axe falls.
If the reg's were never put into effect, and companies never given citations, it is institutional failure. And very unfair to all entities who are suddenly scolded at not meeting the criteria.
VW presumably started it. Other companies eventually competed. And all of a sudden everyone is now in violation.
It is like cheating on a test. One kid starts it. Teacher does not care. Kid does not get scolded. Competition gets intense. Rest of kids start cheating too. The axe falls, sometimes on the dull, slow kid, and then everyone falls in line. But then teacher goes back and sees who else cheated in the past, and the entire class is outed. How is this fair again?
Murder and emissions fraud are like apples to oranges. Emissions fraud are a corporate practice, while murder is a one-off event. Coming clear on the latter improves all industry.
For the record, there have been cases where criminals have come forward for crimes after statute of limitations expired. I am not sure it if was in particular to murder though.
I think you get my point, though. Amnesty for rule violations does not discourage future violations. "Everyone's cheating on emissions testing and there's no penalty" isn't going to dissuade anyone from cheating on emissions testing.
You can compare it to "you are allowed to murder anyone you want, as long as you confess afterwards" and see that that's not the best public policy if your goal is to reduce murders.
> however I wonder if anyone will criticize the regulations instead of shaming auto manufacturers.
What's wrong with the regulations? It seems that they're designed to prevent cars from spewing toxic shit into the atmosphere, something that seems to be an admirable goal.
This mindset is exactly the problem: you’ve judged the regulations on their goal, rather than their effectiveness and how they interact with the industry’s incentives.
Well what do you suggest then? I mean, the current regulations seem to have caught a number of car manufacturers faking test data and presumably they will be punished.
I think we can agree that the goal is to reduce dangerous emissions, but if we're not going to have regulations that state a limit and perhaps a penalty for abuse, then how?
The worry is that they start to become impossible (or at least impossible without massively increasing the cost and complexity of the system).
So "cheating" starts to look more and more worth the risk.
Granted, I don't think we are quite at that point yet, and don't take this to be implying that we should not have environmental regulations here, just that we need real information about what's possible and how, and there needs to be a 2 way conversation with the manufacturers to evolve the regs with what's possible.
> The worry is that they start to become impossible (or at least impossible without massively increasing the cost and complexity of the system).
That's not really a worry. Governments are well aware that people need cars that they can afford. Governments are ultimately elected by the people, and messing around with transport makes you unpopular (the recent backlash at the possibility that fuel duty will be unfrozen in the UK is an example).
Governments don't care about people having affordable cars. Governments care about votes. Look at the cost of safety features that have been implemented in cars the last 10 years; some for marginal benefit (rear-view cameras). These features increase the cost, making it hard for lower income people to afford the cars.
> Governments don't care about people having affordable cars. Governments care about votes.
These things are related. If the people think that they can't get the car they need because of the government this will turn in to loss of votes. See fuel duty example again.
> Look at the cost of safety features that have been implemented in cars the last 10 years; some for marginal benefit (rear-view cameras).
Regulations are rarely perfect. It seems from my searched that backup cameras are net better (~300 people killed, 18,000 injured in backup incidents) and that cameras will help drop some of those figures, but not by a huge amount. I guess we'll just have to wait and see how the figures play out in the future.
However, some regulations have had a significant effect, for example seatbelts.
> These features increase the cost, making it hard for lower income people to afford the cars.
The tech will come down in price, and the car companies still want to sell cars to lower income families and so will at worst absorb some or all of the cost at the price of a slightly lower profit.
And as someone else pointed out in a different thread, emissions from cars has a significant negative effect on people's health, particularly in urban and inner city areas where these lower income people are more likely to live.
>I think we can agree that the goal is to reduce dangerous emissions,
we can reduce the emissions to zero by banning all cars, would you support that regulation?
>then how?
Improvements to technology the lessen the dependency on those energy sources.
Regulations will not solve the problem, no matter how draconian you desire to make them. Regulations will just increase the cost of goods furthering the economic divide and harming the people that can least afford the changes
> we can reduce the emissions to zero by banning all cars, would you support that regulation?
That's ridiculous, of course not.
> Improvements to technology the lessen the dependency on those energy sources.
>
> Regulations will not solve the problem, no matter how draconian you desire to make them. Regulations will just increase the cost of goods…
Regulations will drive technological solutions, and if it weren't for regulations around emissions then car manufacturers have proved that they will quite happily sacrifice the health of everyone in the search of profit.
> furthering the economic divide and harming the people that can least afford the changes
Oh please. Car manufacturers will always sell budget cars to people with small budgets, because there's a market for it.
I don't actually think you're interested in that list, but there is a whole theory with scholarly support describing how regulations inspire innovation. It's called the "Porter Hypothesis" (the Porter of Porter's Five Forces), and like all theories it has some evidence for and some evidence against.
> I think your definition of "budget cars" and mine are vastly different, Regulations have already priced new car ownership out of the hands of many people.
So buy second hand perhaps?
I bought my car for £5000 second hand (yes, I can afford a new car, but why bother, they depreciate so fast in the first few years it hardly seems worth it) and it's a nice car. It's way more than I could have paid for a perfectly serviceable second hand car. I checked, £700 was the cheapest of the same manufacturer as mine, and it's 5 years newer too.
>>> quite happily sacrifice the health of everyone in the search of profit.
> All yes, the evil for profit corporations...
Wait, so it's OK to pump shit into the atmosphere as long as you make a profit?
Is the bar really so low for communism that believing that we shouldn't be poisoning large amounts of the population gains you membership?
Corporations and companies are optimised for one thing, profit. They do this at the expense of the climate and the health of people. Hell, this is a comment on an article about how a car company cheated emissions tests so they could sell more cars. Emissions that kill people.
Do you really believe that we would have the current emissions levels if there was no regulation?
> Well comrade
Oh please drop this shit. Resorting to name calling just suggests that you don't know what you're talking about or have no real point.
> show me all the innovations that regulations directly have inspired. I would be interested in the that list.
If you lower emissions limits over time car manufacturers will have to innovate to meet those targets, right? I mean, car companies aren't going to do this themselves are they, see cheating on the emissions tests, again.
> I always forget how must support for communism there is here in HN circles...
In constant dollars, the average cost of a new car from the beginning of the emissions & safety-regulation era (say, 1970..) has about doubled. This is a nontrivial chunk of income. As a brit, you might live someplace where cars are optional. Many Americans have no such choice...
Likewise, the low-hanging fruit has already mostly been picked. A new 1964.5 Ford Mustang, with the engine turned off, sitting in a garage, releases more toxins than a modern car does while traveling at highway speeds. The 90/10 rule absolutely applies, as it does to safety. We're coming close to having to install catalytic converters inside the engine itself to minimize the lightoff time, which is about the only place you can find NOx/VOC emissions to clean up nowadays.
Not only were there upfront costs to recover for emissions & fuel economy, there were the knock-on effects on performance and reliability that took the better part of two decades to solve.
> I always forget how must support for communism there is here in HN circles...
I always forget how libertarians think that anyone who holds views that don't completely conform to their ideology is necessarily a communist (or "collectivist").
Have regulations not solved water potability, domestic child labor, lead in paint, water tables, airline safety, accessibility, and many more problems?
You will disagree, but largely no. Those things where solved by a variety of other factors and where on their way out long before the government came along to "regulate" them and take the credit for it.
Could you elaborate in some detail on those other factors? Preferably with some citations. I’m totally unfamiliar with this second narrative, while I am familiar with the likes of ‘The Jungle’.
> Regulations will just increase the cost of goods furthering the economic divide and harming the people that can least afford the changes
NOx gas emissions from cars cause and worsen respiratory diseases, especially in urban areas where it is especially concentrated, thus ALSO harming people that can least afford it.
I'd also note there are plenty of cheap vehicles that do meet these regulations.
> you’ve judged the regulations on their goal, rather than their effectiveness and how they interact with the industry’s incentives.
The regulations were ineffective because the EPA is unable to do its job. They test cars on a dyno in a climate controlled room instead of in the real world. They are embarrassingly vulnerable to defeat devices because they don't actually try to find defeat devices. Shitty nominees, corporate lobbying, and frivolous lawsuits have neutered the EPA from the inside and outside.
Care to explain how they're ineffective instead of repeating libertarian platitudes? Is your argument that they are ineffective because manufacturers are cheating on the tests? Seems like the ineffective part here is not the regulation but the enforcement. These regulations are expected to be misaligned with industry incentives. That's why regulation is necessitated.
There are no more coral snake antivenom manufacturers anymore because the regulations became more stringent and the company that made the only antivenom that was grandfathered in under the old rules decided it wasn't worth it anymore.
Realistic regulations are good because they prevent resource rich companies from externalizing their failures onto others.
Unrealistic regulations cause industries to give up on things that our population needs to survive.
For example, in the past if you got bit by a coral snake you could get antivenom. In the present, over ambitious regulation says that you die when you get bit by a coral snake. Because the alternative to death (using under regulated antivenom) is apparently worse?
If you want to you could regulate that cars run off of happiness and that their exhaust contains no pollutants. But the result would be that either everyone cheats on the tests OR that there would be no more cars. Including the trucks that bring us food and other useful products.
I mean, we're not talking about all regulations here, we're talking about the emissions regulations. Emissions that kill people.
So I don't really see the point of the coral snake thing, interesting though it is.
> If you want to you could regulate that cars run off of happiness and that their exhaust contains no pollutants. But the result would be that either everyone cheats on the tests OR that there would be no more cars. Including the trucks that bring us food and other useful products.
Well, I'm not suggesting that at all so again, not really relevant.
I'm suggesting that the emissions regulations that we have are fine. Cars can and do pass these without cheating so they're clearly not unrealistic.
I think the implication is that the regulations were poorly implemented and didn't test true emissions. I don't see how anyone can view these stories as an indication that emission regulations are a bad idea or somehow aren't needed.
Some people have tried to argue that the cheating is definitive proof the regulations were too hard, and so obviously emissions regulations should all be scrapped.
I really don't understand how one can make this argument. No one argues that we should do away with taxes completely just because some people cheat and pay less than they should.
If anything, widespread cheating shows the importance of regulations. It shows that companies are willing to lie to both regulators and the public. For something that is extremely difficult for the consumer to test themselves like emissions, it shows that an independent regulator is required to keep companies honest.
As far as I can tell, it's pretty simple- they've always been ideologically opposed to emissions regulations, so every headline is bent to accommodate that perspective.
VAG deliberately programmed around the tests (a defeat device). It's not that VAG sent a car to the test but the test just didn't test regular driving VAG deliberately changed the results for cars under test.
I meant "true" as in "what actually happens in the real world" and not "the opposite of fake". You are certainly right that the emissions themselves weren't faked, just that the car behaved differently in the tests compared to what happens in the real world.
Do they even look at the ECU on a car after 2009? California trusts the ECU on most cars after 2001, but they do plug into it. Seems kind of BS to me, at least there should be some randomized real testing, and if those don't look good, some models get blacklisted from ODB-II testing.
The state emissions tests are only meant to catch cars polluting above something like circa-1980 emissions limits. Even flagrantly cheating, a modern car is no where near dirty enough to fail the tailpipe check.
The regulations don't take into account market reality. People don't want to buy cars because they're low-emission, they want to buy cars because they're fast, big, and safe. They need to be bigger, faster, and safer in order to compete. But lowering emissions makes that much more difficult. So of course you're going to lie on emissions. If you don't, your competitor will, and then you lose market share.
What would regulations look like that took market reality into account?
The whole point of regulations is to go against what the market will buy without them. If people bought low emission cars without any outside forces then you wouldn’t need any regulations. Of course, in reality that path leads you to smog-choked cities and lots of dead people.
The "Big Cars" part of your comment is really US-centric. In Europe, Japan, and other places, many people want small cars.
Some people want faster but most people don't care because there are speed limitations on the roads anyway.
Low-emission might not be a priority, but people still think of it, and some governments measures target the most-polluting vehicles to discourage their use.
Which is why we need make the punishment fit the crime. The problem is, an appropriate and fitting punishment is going to be painful for a large number of people completely associated with the crime.
If we want companies to follow the law, then those that violate emissions standards should face harsh punishments. For example, they could be banned from selling vehicles in the US market for one year, all of their lineup should need recertification under more strict oversight, and they be required to fix or buyback the offending vehicles. And personal liability for senior executives.
The major problem the US has with all automotive regulations is GM and Ford get their lobbyists to write the laws with loopholes that cater to them. For example, CAFE standards that are based on vehicles footprint and are different for passenger cars vs. "light trucks." While the regulations are "fair" on paper, but in practice, they are much more lax for the types of vehicles domestic automakers sell.
> People don't want to buy cars because they're low-emission, they want to buy cars because they're fast, big, and safe
You forgot the two biggest factors - cost and efficiency. Most people doesn't want big or necessarily fast cars. Most people want cheap cars that go a long way on a little fuel. However, it's difficult to make cars that are cheap AND fuel efficient AND environmentally friendly.
And now the car manufacturers have got caught cheating, so they're going to have to (I guess) face some penalty, and stop selling cars that cheat the tests.
People might want big, fast and safe cars, but they don't get to have them at the expense of the health and wellbeing of everyone else.
Bigger and faster is precisely the trend that should be reversed. While safely systems overall has improved, making faster cars makes them less safe. Cars should NOT be built like race cars. We can have separate race tracks for that.
No it doesn't. Driving a car faster is less safe, all other factors being equal, but simply making a faster car doesn't make it less safe. Look at Mercedes's performance cars, which typically lead the market in safety features. An example off the top of my head is the carbon cone built into the front of, I think, 2000-era SL500s. They could dissipate a tremendous amount of energy, making that fast car significantly safer than most other cars on the road at the time.
Aside from exotic safety features, performance cars tend to be better weight-balanced and tend to have better brakes and better tires than average cars. In normal driving, performance cars are safer because they'll be easier to control in emergency maneuvers.
(Of course when you push the limits of the car, all bets are off again.)
This isn't true for the SL500 at all, and I would venture to say not for performance cars in general. The SL500 is a pig at nearly 4,000lbs and has way too much torque and horsepower, and as a result, oversized parts which aren't made for normal driving. As the "performance" of the car ramps up, so does the difficulty of handling the car. A possible exception to this rule is AWD cars.
I am all for shaming the auto manufacturers that get caught cheating. The regulations are aimed at reducing pollution and I think that is a good thing!
it's not about what the regulations AIM to do, it's what they achieve, and also if they could feasibly achieve something closer to their aim, which is what was suggested.
that's to say, if emission testing was done differently, maybe we would have caught these cars earlier. Now it seems likely every single non-electric car on the market is polluting more than advertised/allowed, which begs the question if there is a systemic issue here. I tend to agree that there is.
The 'systemic issue' is that conducting lab tests in cooperation with automakers is clearly an inadequate way of enforcing the regulations. That does not imply the regulations are faulty, it implies they need a more robust enforcement methodology.
The regulations might have a good aim, but when everybody is violating them it's probably safe to say something is wrong with them. I don't know if the problem is in the content or in the enforcement, but it exists.
I don't think criticism of regulations should replace shaming of auto manufacturers, but it might be more effective.
From a recent HN thread[0], it sounds like this issue is present across the auto industry:
> One way to reconcile these seemingly contradictory statements is the following.
The actual programmer & designer of the software is the supplier of the engine control units (ECUs), in most cases Bosch. The software that they supply actually already contains these cheating routines. These routines are delivered as a part of the software packages, and can be turned on/off with some flags.
It is up to the auto company how to set these flags.
This gets repeated on every thread on this topic but from what I've read is not true and heavily favors VW. VW was caught actively faking the test results by having the ECU detect it's being tested and change its settings. What every manufacturer has been caught doing is optimzing for the test and not getting the same results in real world conditions. That's a fault of the test and is perfectly legal. The only guilt of the manufacturers is lobbying to not upgrade the test.
IIRC Mercedes wasn't caught cheating they just got in trouble because they use the same engine control units which contain the routines that make cheating possible.
"everyone is cheating, VAG just got caught first."
Everyone was cheating in Europe, because European emissions rules were/are weak and you could get away with a defeat device provided it was for "engine protection".
The difference with VW was that they tried to pull the same thing in the USA, which had much stronger rules and a clear prohibition against defeat devices.
VAG cheated for years, got caught, then lied to regulators for a year, then got caught in the lie. That's how you REALLY piss off regulators (or law enforcement in general).
Also, yes, regulations should be better matched to real world performance.
I think it's great that they're falling on their faces... Hopefully it locks them into only 1 solution - all electric zero. Pumping gas sucks. Smelling gas sucks. Hearing gas burn sucks. Gas cars suck.
That is a ridiculous solution. Batteries are far from clean, what do you propose we do for disposal of these batteries? What about the environmental and human cost to greatly increasing production of materials required? All electric isn't the utopia people make it out to be.
> We found that battery electric cars generate half the emissions of the average comparable gasoline car, even when pollution from battery manufacturing is accounted for.
Yes, EV's have higher energy and emissions numbers embedded in their manufacturing, but that gets more than offset by the much lower emissions of fuel. Breakeven is the first 6-18 months, depending on battery size and emissions makeup of your local grid. Even in "coal-powered car" country.
> EVs are powered by electricity, which is generally a cleaner energy source than gasoline. Battery electric cars make up for their higher manufacturing emissions within eighteen months of driving — shorter range models can offset the extra emissions within 6 months — and continue to outperform gasoline cars until the end of their lives.
As for waste, there is battery recycling, but the more interesting part is second-life storage use. Battery may not have the energy density required for transportation, but you can still use them fine as a cheap powerwall-like product. Cheap because the cost of the batteries was already paid for by the first owner of the car.
Subjectively worse, we don't have enough battery powered cars to compare the timelines with gasoline powered. They contribute to more waste, regardless. Battery packs need replacing 5 - 10 years, are not easily recycled or disposed of and their manufacture and mining of materials still isn't a net positive in terms of pollution. There isn't a one size fits all solution. Going all electric trades one issue for another, cleaner air for more polluted rivers, cities around mines and factories and battery disposal and recycle sites. I personally have no problem with electric but I dislike hearing people tout it as the solution to all our vehicle woes. It isn't.
That's the answer... shift the emissions burden to power companies and battery disposal companies! But I'll feel good driving my "zero environmental impact" electric car around!
I think you meant this as snark, but I agree with it non-ironically. Shifting the emissions burden to centralized power plants makes later reductions simpler to achieve as power generation migrates to cleaner technologies. It's easier to determine how dirty the energy is when it's being generated at N places rather than 1e6(N) places. Emissions per watt decrease as new solar/wind capacity is added to the grid. You have full control over your energy source with an electric car (i.e. you can switch to solar now if you'd like and charge from that).
Actually yes, despite your tone. It's significantly easier to control emissions and implement emission control systems at the production side because economies of scale means that for the same cost of making $number of cars cleaner you can make 1 power plant significantly cleaner using far more expensive technologies and still be more cost efficient.
In the auto industry its generally understood that the emissions limits are so low, especially for diesel, that its physically impossible to meet them in some situations like cold engine + cold weather and when driving up grade.
Emissions regulations have made great progress in cleaning up auto emissions, but now politicians keep squeezing the numbers without realizing some of the limits are becoming impossible. So everyone starts cheating, because otherwise we would have no combustion powered cars.
Insane irony is that ships and even some buildings burn horrifically impure "bunker fuel" or wood, and with car emission limits so low these sources are the vast majority of harmful emissions. Its like cities in Cali forcing citizens to make drastic changes to conserve water, when over 90% is used by farmers.
maybe, but its cleaner in other ways. It burns hotter and more efficiently, creating less CO2 and some other byproducts by a decent margin. It produces more SO due to fuel sulfur content, and more NOX which is produced because of high temperatures. So its a trade-off.
But at this point the limits are just politicians pulling levers. There's not enough science involved to debate which pollutants we care about and what the lowest realistic limits are.
Forbes says that it would have cost an extra $430 per vehicle for VW to meet the NOx requirements fairly. That's hardly the same as regulations resulting in no combustion-powered cars.
>Its like cities in Cali forcing citizens to make drastic changes to conserve water, when over 90% is used by farmers
yes, this is a common process by which private costs are offloaded onto the public so as to increase the private benefits of exploitation of public goods.
Completely agree that what is lacking here is the regulations. I have tried to argue (often unsuccessfully) that VW did not commit fraud, that the numbers reported by the tests were 100% accurate. The problem being that the way the car is tested is not even remotely similar to how people drive. The clear fix to me is to simply give normal people free leases for a short period of time and generate something similar to http://www.fuelly.com/ . The only way to cheat that is to convince people to drive more efficiently, seems like a win.
How is embedding software that changes the way the engine behaves during tests versus during actual usage not fraud?
The numbers may have been accurate _for an engine with the 'limit emissions' mode enabled_ but it's still fraudulent if you do not make that explicitly clear.
If you use the car the way tests use the car, the performance will be the same. The trick is you can't complete your daily driving needs by driving the way the test does.
The only way to drive in a way that would have replicated the results of the VAG tests would be to not touch the steering wheel. At all.
For VAG this wasn't a case of the test not being quite the same as regular driving, it was VAG deliberately detecting a tests and altering the way the engine worked to avoid failing.
The intent was to cheat the tests by secretly tailoring the behavior to the tests, even though they knew that real-world driving would be different and that the tests are supposed to indicate real-world emissions.
Intent matters. You can’t set out to cheat a test, succeed, and then say that it’s legal because you succeeded, any more than you can steal from a store by hiding an item under your coat and then say that it’s legal because you disguised it well enough to fool the guard.
That's the whole point: you cannot use the car the same way as during the tests, even if you exactly match speed, acceleration, distance, friction, temperature and any other variable. The software that limits emissions is disabled during "normal" operation, ie. driving.
I will attempt to make an analogy that tries to shine light on the angle I'm coming from. When we interview for software engineers, many companies place much of the emphasis on algorithms as opposed to other hard-to-test skills. Now, you have a candidate that aces any algorithm question put in front of them yet completely sucks at software engineering. Did that person commit fraud? It seems, to me, that the test is what is broken.
We all clearly understand the angle you're coming from, but you haven't been able to make the case it isn't fraud. Because it is textbook fraud.
If you think the test is bullshit, then you make that case separately. You don't lie about how you're passing it and then when caught say 'but it's the test's fault!'.
Emissions tests are different from fuel efficiency tests, and in fact are often at odds with each other. A more efficient car doesn’t necessarily have better emissions, and there’s no easy way for a typical driver to measure their emissions.
Thank you for the extra insight, I may have had the wrong conclusion but I think the logic still follows. From this system I outlined, the manufacturers would be forced to alter designs to get the desired emissions during normal driving conditions. This is the whole spirit of the regulation right?
My point is that the system you outline doesn’t work, because ordinary drivers can’t check their own emissions. It would be fine for fuel consumption since that’s easily measured, but emissions requires special equipment and careful testing.
I will watch that video later and get back to you. I understand what they did. I'm not saying that what they did was right, simply that it wasn't fraud. My point being that if the test is already deceptive for true vehicle emissions (laboratory settings, very particular configurations, etc.) then the test itself is the problem. If we flip the script and say that a car fails the emissions testing but is in reality the cleanest car, is it not "fraudulent" to label this car as dirty?
Without knowing the general driving population's driving habits, it's difficult to estimate how effective driving will improve fuel efficiency and/or reduce pollution. Sure there are known bad driving habits like sudden accerlation/sudden stops will increase fuel consumption, but what about road sign design, speed limits, traffic light designs and Electronic Toll Collection systems? Those are all factors of fuel efficiency.
Also, the government regulation on emission is going to get tighter and tighter due to incentives to push for EV adoption. So arguing emission test method is a moot point.
Regulations are obeyed and enforced by humans. There’s a general expectation that common sense is applied, which is hard to define but “you know it when you see it”.
“The engine will fundamentally perform differently when you’re testing it because it will detect the test” is not common sense and is not a reasonable interpretation of how to comply with the rules.
I agree that a better method would be to attack sensors to a random (and ideally, concealed from OEM) sample of cars and charge automakers per unit of detected emissions. That would force them to optimize for real world driving, which is much harder to game.
What stinks seems to be the way the regulations are being implemented moreso than what sort of detours the manufacturers can take to avoid them.
I won't be surprised when we see more auto makers added to the list, however I wonder if anyone will criticize the regulations instead of shaming auto manufacturers.
Here's a non paywalled BBC article: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44763905