In July, France 2 (the #1 public national television channel in France) released a documentary [0] that showed to which extent the French auto manufacturer PSA lied about NO2 emissions.
At 1h19s [1], Pierre Macaudière, head of emission control systems at PSA, admits that the model tested emits 1700 ppm of NO2, after measuring 200 ppm (the legal limit) with their own machines.
At 1h17m11s [2], the researchers commissioned by the EU shows the journalist that not one manufacturer respects the legal limits of 200 ppm. He's frightened to tell the journalist that it's all just a widespread fraud.
How is it possible that the real emission is 40x the allowed limit? Wouldn't you see VW being the only manufacturer under the limit, and everyone else unable to get the car approved? Or alternatively, everyone is cheating? Because you can imagine a world where some firms cheat to get 10-20-30% less than rated, so that they're in line with the industry.
But if VW's normal car is 40x worse than advertised, and most cars were close to the correct standard, wouldn't they just hire a guy who knew how to fix their cars? Did VW's internal testing test competitors' cars?
Is this going to explode across the industry?
Also, this isn't the only kind of test that a car goes through. There's crash tests, MPG tests, and all sorts of things that I wouldn't know about. If you can game an emissions test, you can game the crash test and the MPG test, which are probably both things people care about a fair bit more than emissions.
When I was car shopping the VW diesel numbers, for tdi sportwagen in particular, were impressive. Nothing else came close to VW's combination of power, space, and mileage. Now maybe there are people who know more about cars than I do and can dispute that, but that was my perception a couple of years ago.
If I were the other car companies, I'd want to know exactly how VW was pulling that off. They must have looked into it, and surely they're not as easily misled as I apparently was (how would I know if VW was outright lying about the car?).
This suggests to me that the other car companies must have known that VW was doing something wrong. The fact that they didn't rat VW out suggests to me that they were either doing the same thing (maybe not as aggressively as VW) or they hoped to get away with the same thing. The former seems more likely, and if that's true then I expect this to spread beyond VW soon.
"Volkswagen hasn't explained exactly why it cheated, but outside analysts have a good guess. The NOx emission controls likely degraded the cars' performance when they were switched on — the engines ran hotter, wore out more quickly, and got poorer mileage. Some experts have suggested that the emission controls may have affected the cars' torque and acceleration, making them less fun to drive. (Indeed, some individual car owners have been known to disable their cars' emission controls to boost performance, though this is against the law.)"
So basically, they wanted the cars to have acceptable performance in real-world conditions, which pushes the emissions up.
I had read something about how diesel engines can use Urea to trap emissions, but it must be refilled frequently, so possibly other manufacturers are using that method. This is tested and proved to work well. However, VW was using another type of method to diminish emissions that has not been well proven. Source: a comment I read on Reddit, so take it with a grain of salt.
The 4 cylinder TDI was for the economy range of vehicles. The more expensive models with bigger engines use urea tanks or BlueTec as Mercedes Benz politely calls it. More expensive to make and service, but those who buy more expensive vehicles expect these kind of added service costs. Those on the lower end do not.
It is why competitors like diesel Cruze had worse performance and others like Mazda did not quite bring to market. VW knew they could own the US diesel small passenger car market but they had to meet customer demands on fuel efficiency, performance, and price.
it's 40x from "faked condition test" to "road condition". And the "test condition" are totally unrealistic behavior on the road (such as 0-50km/h in 26 seconds)
Most car are above the allowed limit in real situation.
Collision tests can be gamed obviously by designing for the fixtures used... But the variety of fixtures in use and testing protocols imposes a decent all around level. It's hard to cheat when 3000 lbs of steel is crashed at 40mph against a concrete obstacle.
Fuel consumption however, now that is rife for cheating by trading off performance for better fuel consumption in the ECU and automatic transmissions.
As I'm observing this scandal unfold, I find it amusing that all the eyes are on the VW company and how it affects it's finances, it's reputation, etc
While the effects on the company are extreme, I think we should also consider the broader and ultimate consequences of this trickery.
The fact that those cars pollute a lot more than officially acknowledged.
I've read figures like 40x as much.
Does that make those 11 million VW cars caught cheating the politically accepted pollution equivalent of 440 million cars ?
Another interesting question - if VW was caught doing it, who else is doing it ?
And if other companies (and factories, etc) are doing it, what is the purpose of the international pollution treaties ? How does it affect the plans to reduce pollution, given that the numbers that we base our calculations on might be off by factors of 40x ?
Nitrous oxide is about 300x more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2[1]. It also depletes the ozone layer. So yes, this could be a major issue for climate change.
Well, you can bet a pretty sum that some legal firm is rushing to test every single car currently on the road. So there will at least be enforcement, albeit private. (And for all the whiners about law firms making money off this, that's inevitable when you neuter public law enforcement and rely on private enforcement of laws. Unless the ultimate goal is no enforcement of environmental law... naw, couldn't be.)
Will the EPA and other automotive regulators test other brands for similar problems? Perhaps this practice is widespread. Testing them seems obvious, but I know little about how regulators work.
EDIT: VW isn't the first. From the other story on HN's front page right now [1]
[Caterpillar Inc and Cummins Engine Co] agreed to pay $83.4 million in civil penalties after federal officials found evidence that they were selling heavy duty diesel engines equipped with “defeat devices” that allowed the engines to meet EPA emission standards during testing but disabled the emission control system during normal highway driving.
The EPA has already stated that all diesel passenger cars will be retested. I think all cars should go through the same complete testing process and by more than one organizations.
The EPA didn't find this issue, a university testing team did
Two things that are surprising to me about this story:
1) The secret was kept for so long. How many programmers were involved with the relevant code? How many project managers signed off on it? Surely VW does its own emissions testing internally so some of them must have known. How high up in management did this go? It seems like it must have been quite a few. Amazing that none of them got mad and told someone outside the company.
2) I would never have guessed that emissions from a car engine could vary so widely. 20%? Sure. 50%? Sure. But news outlets are reporting that these cars are emitting at least 10x and possibly as much as 40x NOx as they should. This is clearly because of my ignorance of the details of the engineering here, but I was shocked that such a difference could happen.
The emissions standards are particularly inefficient. They say things like emitting 101ppm is bad and 100 ppm is good. But pollution isn't like that.
A much more practical solution is to annually measure the pollution emitted, multiply by the number of miles driven in the last year, and multiply by the tax rate.
What this does is:
1. cause the consumer to care about the emissions
2. introduce competition to have better numbers, rather than merely meeting the standard
3. enable higher polluting occasional uses rather than banning them outright
Other than border disputes, when has measurement been a political football before? The nerd in me is happy about this, but the rest of me is kinda ... sad.
It's also interesting that there appears to be a tradeoff between NOx and CO2 here.
IMO, VW sort of ... prematurely fell on the grenade in a PR way of thinking about it. Actually proving it as fraud would have taken some doing. Admitting it up front does not have clear advantages that I see. If we use the GM keyswitch debacle as a yardstick, there's evidence than being a cheeseball is rewarded. GM managed to constrain the damage to $99M .
Not saying anyone did the right thing here, but the adversarial approach has consequences.
Problem is they've got the money and the market, CEO can't resign and get away with it, they should pay back all plus a hefty fine. This is much too common nowadays, big corps have no face and are too big to fail, no one is directly accountable and geopolitics are at stake. Hit them hard in the monies, would say, but the risk is fear and a market bubble.
As bad as it is to screw the environment.. I am still shocked by all the out rage coming from countries. Its like everyone forgot GM knowingly left faulty parts that were killing people for 10 years. This entire thing seems so political.
[1] Winterkorn studied metallurgy and metal physics at the University of Stuttgart from 1966 to 1973. From 1973 to 1977 he was a PhD student at the Max-Planck-Institute for Metal Research and Metal Physics, where he received his doctorate in 1977.
Winterkorn embarked on his career in 1977, as a specialist assistant in the research division "Process Engineering" at Robert Bosch GmbH.[4] From 1978 to 1981, he headed the refrigerant compressor development group "Substances and Processes" at Robert Bosch and Bosch-Siemens-Hausgeräte GmbH.
I wish this scandal would somehow add pressure to clean up ship and truck pollution. VW is having severe consequences, but their contribution to the problem might not be that significant:
He was only in his job for about 5 months, but I'm not familiar with his previous work history at VW. Was he in some significant sense responsible for the scandal by way of his prior responsibilities? Or is his resignation, for lack of a better way I can think of to put it, an honor move?
Edit: Thanks for the clarifications, all. Although he assumed Ferdinand Piëch's former position as chairman in April 2015, he was VW's CEO since 2007.
He has been CEO since 2007, before any of the VW models with defeat devices were introduced.
Some of the German analysts and experts who are knowledgeable about the industry itself have said that there is not even the slightest chance that he didn't know this.
He has said publicly that he is not aware of any wrong-doing on his part. I imagine that just about any board would require just about any CEO to resign after something like this, though.
There is usually more than one cockroach in the kitchen if you spot one. I wonder how many other aspects of their software they messed with in ways they probably shouldn't have...
What surprises me is that VW thought they wouldn't be caught doing this, it took a while but it seems like sooner or later someone would figure it out.
[+] [-] _57bk|10 years ago|reply
At 1h19s [1], Pierre Macaudière, head of emission control systems at PSA, admits that the model tested emits 1700 ppm of NO2, after measuring 200 ppm (the legal limit) with their own machines.
At 1h17m11s [2], the researchers commissioned by the EU shows the journalist that not one manufacturer respects the legal limits of 200 ppm. He's frightened to tell the journalist that it's all just a widespread fraud.
* [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JFprj6v37Q
* [1] https://youtu.be/5JFprj6v37Q?t=1h19s
* [2] https://youtu.be/5JFprj6v37Q?t=1h17m11s
[+] [-] differentView|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seren|10 years ago|reply
Edit: it is already circulating in some media, but has not been pick up by other yet.
[+] [-] mey|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeromeflipo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kuschku|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elektromekatron|10 years ago|reply
Average price of new car is around $35,000
So, for this recall, we are talking a list price of over 350 billion dollars.
And that is just from what we know of VW.
[+] [-] lordnacho|10 years ago|reply
But if VW's normal car is 40x worse than advertised, and most cars were close to the correct standard, wouldn't they just hire a guy who knew how to fix their cars? Did VW's internal testing test competitors' cars?
Is this going to explode across the industry?
Also, this isn't the only kind of test that a car goes through. There's crash tests, MPG tests, and all sorts of things that I wouldn't know about. If you can game an emissions test, you can game the crash test and the MPG test, which are probably both things people care about a fair bit more than emissions.
[+] [-] joshmoz|10 years ago|reply
If I were the other car companies, I'd want to know exactly how VW was pulling that off. They must have looked into it, and surely they're not as easily misled as I apparently was (how would I know if VW was outright lying about the car?).
This suggests to me that the other car companies must have known that VW was doing something wrong. The fact that they didn't rat VW out suggests to me that they were either doing the same thing (maybe not as aggressively as VW) or they hoped to get away with the same thing. The former seems more likely, and if that's true then I expect this to spread beyond VW soon.
[+] [-] downandout|10 years ago|reply
"Volkswagen hasn't explained exactly why it cheated, but outside analysts have a good guess. The NOx emission controls likely degraded the cars' performance when they were switched on — the engines ran hotter, wore out more quickly, and got poorer mileage. Some experts have suggested that the emission controls may have affected the cars' torque and acceleration, making them less fun to drive. (Indeed, some individual car owners have been known to disable their cars' emission controls to boost performance, though this is against the law.)"
So basically, they wanted the cars to have acceptable performance in real-world conditions, which pushes the emissions up.
[1] http://www.vox.com/2015/9/21/9365667/volkswagen-clean-diesel...
[+] [-] TheGRS|10 years ago|reply
Edit: found at least one source on how this works: http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1042727_adding-urea-to-c...
[+] [-] BashiBazouk|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethagknight|10 years ago|reply
I would guess that its just more expensive to implement, more steps in the filtration process, larger catalytic converters, etc.
[0] http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/23/us-usa-volkswagen-...
[+] [-] mzs|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malka|10 years ago|reply
Most car are above the allowed limit in real situation.
[+] [-] acveilleux|10 years ago|reply
Fuel consumption however, now that is rife for cheating by trading off performance for better fuel consumption in the ECU and automatic transmissions.
[+] [-] chaostheory|10 years ago|reply
http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/lg-under-the-gun-...
[+] [-] mhb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superuser2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] autobahn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codeshaman|10 years ago|reply
While the effects on the company are extreme, I think we should also consider the broader and ultimate consequences of this trickery.
The fact that those cars pollute a lot more than officially acknowledged. I've read figures like 40x as much.
Does that make those 11 million VW cars caught cheating the politically accepted pollution equivalent of 440 million cars ?
Another interesting question - if VW was caught doing it, who else is doing it ?
And if other companies (and factories, etc) are doing it, what is the purpose of the international pollution treaties ? How does it affect the plans to reduce pollution, given that the numbers that we base our calculations on might be off by factors of 40x ?
[+] [-] geofft|10 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/Dymaxion/status/646489476651462657
[+] [-] rcthompson|10 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrous_oxide
[+] [-] hinkley|10 years ago|reply
Essentially I bought it instead of a Prius because I wanted a little more oomph for driving, especially in the hills around here.
Now I find out they cheated to get those numbers, and I'm pretty disillusioned with the whole company.
[+] [-] x0x0|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SandB0x|10 years ago|reply
"All the other carmakers control diesel emissions by spraying a urea solution into the exhaust stream, where a catalyst converts it to ammonia"
and supposedly VW have omitted this mechanism to get diesel engines into their smaller cars.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hackuser|10 years ago|reply
EDIT: VW isn't the first. From the other story on HN's front page right now [1]
[Caterpillar Inc and Cummins Engine Co] agreed to pay $83.4 million in civil penalties after federal officials found evidence that they were selling heavy duty diesel engines equipped with “defeat devices” that allowed the engines to meet EPA emission standards during testing but disabled the emission control system during normal highway driving.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10264894
EDIT2: On queue, from the NY Times: "Volkswagen Test Rigging Follows a Long Auto Industry Pattern"
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/24/business/international/vol...
[+] [-] Shivetya|10 years ago|reply
The EPA didn't find this issue, a university testing team did
[+] [-] harryh|10 years ago|reply
1) The secret was kept for so long. How many programmers were involved with the relevant code? How many project managers signed off on it? Surely VW does its own emissions testing internally so some of them must have known. How high up in management did this go? It seems like it must have been quite a few. Amazing that none of them got mad and told someone outside the company.
2) I would never have guessed that emissions from a car engine could vary so widely. 20%? Sure. 50%? Sure. But news outlets are reporting that these cars are emitting at least 10x and possibly as much as 40x NOx as they should. This is clearly because of my ignorance of the details of the engineering here, but I was shocked that such a difference could happen.
[+] [-] korisnik|10 years ago|reply
http://www.independent.ie/world-news/volkswagen-scandal-germ...
[+] [-] WalterBright|10 years ago|reply
A much more practical solution is to annually measure the pollution emitted, multiply by the number of miles driven in the last year, and multiply by the tax rate.
What this does is:
1. cause the consumer to care about the emissions 2. introduce competition to have better numbers, rather than merely meeting the standard 3. enable higher polluting occasional uses rather than banning them outright
[+] [-] ArkyBeagle|10 years ago|reply
It's also interesting that there appears to be a tradeoff between NOx and CO2 here.
IMO, VW sort of ... prematurely fell on the grenade in a PR way of thinking about it. Actually proving it as fraud would have taken some doing. Admitting it up front does not have clear advantages that I see. If we use the GM keyswitch debacle as a yardstick, there's evidence than being a cheeseball is rewarded. GM managed to constrain the damage to $99M .
Not saying anyone did the right thing here, but the adversarial approach has consequences.
[+] [-] DrNuke|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] floor__|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JustSomeNobody|10 years ago|reply
I'm growing more and more disappointed in the world we are living in.
[+] [-] hodder|10 years ago|reply
Winterkorn embarked on his career in 1977, as a specialist assistant in the research division "Process Engineering" at Robert Bosch GmbH.[4] From 1978 to 1981, he headed the refrigerant compressor development group "Substances and Processes" at Robert Bosch and Bosch-Siemens-Hausgeräte GmbH.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Winterkorn
[+] [-] jhallenworld|10 years ago|reply
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-...
http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/california-and-western-...
[+] [-] deegles|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scramblejams|10 years ago|reply
Edit: Thanks for the clarifications, all. Although he assumed Ferdinand Piëch's former position as chairman in April 2015, he was VW's CEO since 2007.
[+] [-] korisnik|10 years ago|reply
He has been CEO since 2007, before any of the VW models with defeat devices were introduced.
Some of the German analysts and experts who are knowledgeable about the industry itself have said that there is not even the slightest chance that he didn't know this.
There's an interesting talk in German here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKILi7PN37A
[+] [-] maxxxxx|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petewailes|10 years ago|reply
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