By now you must have heard about Volkswagen Dieselgate and how they circumvented EPA restrictions on emissions. If not, click here for a nice summary. Basically Volkswagen reached its technological wall in diesel emissions and took a gamble by applying a healthy dose of Captain Kirk’s solution for the Kobayashi Maru problem.
Both emission controls and improved gas mileages come from the dark days in the 1970s after the Oil Embargo and the new era of Environmentalism. Limits were set to reduce one and increase the other, but apparently and by the way the New Communists Environmentalists bitch, moan and cry, they were never reached and we are about to kill Gaia. Except it is not true: Using the original baseline of the Clean Air Act, emissions have been reduced 99%. Fuel economy has almost tripled and that is not peanuts in anybody’s book.
If you clicked on the link above, you are going to see something we are used to see in the Gun Control movement: the continuous moving of goalposts because their desire for control is never enough. There is no “common sense” with these people no matter how much they use those words. Nobody minds and adjustment here and there, but compare the imposed NOx limits from 1975 to 2009 and then tell me with a straight face we are killing the planet with our cars.
“But…but..it is for our own good! Good Air Quality! Do it for the children!” And even that one does not stand. We do not have a reliable set of data indicating what is good or even tolerable because…moving goalposts again. Miami-Dade county got rid of the Vehicle Emissions Tests more than a decade ago for the simple reason that they were just a revenue-generating measure rather than a health control issue as local air quality was not affected by vehicle emissions but by pollen count.
Gun Control operates the same way: “Let’s pass this legislation that will stop all killings in (select your spot)” and once is passes and the ink in the President’s signature is not even dry, they will change their tune and demand more. Old Gunnies will remember the dreaded phrase “It is a good first step” that the Opposition used over and over in the 80s and 90s. Nobody in the Media even dared to ask them why the sudden change from “this legislation that will stop…” to “Good First Step.” We did. We had to.
Always remember: They are never satisfied. They will lie, cheat, steal and probably engage in criminal activity if they can get away with their ultimate goal. It is our duty to fight them and stop them.
The biggest problem for VW is that they got caught. All manufacturers have “adaptive” ECU these days.
My brother works in the auto industry in Germany and he’s witness to the crazyness of that CO2 race. And of course you aim for best results at the standard test.
Complexity has increased ten fold. Reliability is probably going to be lousy on these complex/downsized engines.
All because we got in that stupid “no CO2 race”. Here in France taxation on company cars is solely based on CO2 levels. There have also been tax incentives to go Diesel (instead of aiming for a balanced usage closer to what refineries output) for decades.
In short it’s Diesel all the way. And I – as a tax payer – am extremely glad the standard evaluation cycle is nowhere near actual fuel consumption and I also thankful VW and others probably “optimized” things so that I end up paying “only” 700 EUR of taxes a year instead of 4000EUR.
I’m amazed by the number of people who fail to realize that the only outcome from the whole thing is going to be more taxes with strictly no benefit for the consumer/taxpayer.
It’s a difference in world view. To you and me, ‘pollution’ is the byproduct of our First World lifestyle. So okay, pollution is bad… so we support reducing it as much as possible without destroying businesses and jobs, and confining the rest of it someplace it can’t hurt anybody. We pass laws and when someone breaks those laws, we support punishing them. And at the end of the day, we all want to get into our cars and drive home to a warm house.
To a ‘Green’, pollution isn’t bad… it’s EVIL. Pollution isn’t the Devil’s work, it’s the Devil himself; anyone who produces anything that creates pollution is a tool of Satan, and NO amount of pollution is tolerable at all. You don’t ‘limit Evil to what’s tolerable’, you declare Crusade upon it and wipe it out. If anyone goes against the holy crusade they are to be purged, and there is no such thing as extremism in the war against evil. If that means that working families lose their means of support or that major cities experience blackouts and drought, well, it’s kind of their own fault for binding themselves to Satan. They’d be happier as hunter-gatherers, anyway.
The kind of person that wants to ban toy guns “to reduce crime” and that would rather see a woman raped than see her defending herself with a firearm (and yes, I’ve met them personally) is the same kind of person who would allow a forest fire to burn uncontrollably rather than fighting it with creek water that has an endangered fish living in it; they’re fighting evil and so anything goes.
As far as VeeDubs: If it was me, I’d hammer them because they basically committed premeditated fraud on a grand scale. This is not the sort of behavior that should be tolerated in any corporation.
Of course, one of the absolute worst things you can do for the environment is to redistribute wealth in an effort to “end poverty”, which tends to be a common interest of the left. Never mind that “poverty” is defined as the subset of people with the least amount of money, so you never “end” it, you just redraw the line for what it means to be “poor”. Again, much like environmental regulations and gun control.
Many are criminals
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I’m reminded of a comment I heard at SEMA a couple of years ago, to whit- “The technology doesn’t exist to meet the new CAFE standards, and it’s nothing more than a shell game now to appease enough regulators to keep selling cars.” Another said, “If the industry had any balls, they’d just stop selling cars in California. Then we’d see how long the regulations were left in place…
The gun banners are going down the same road, ‘smart guns’, ‘assault’ weapons, etc. It’s agenda driven and appeasement by our side only fuels the desire for MORE ‘concessions’…
The new emissions standards imposed on diesel trucks force manufacturers to install new equipment such as DPFs and EGRs which drastically reduce engine longevity and reliability, and even, believe it or not, massively reduce fuel economy. They are ruining modern diesel engines with minimal if any noticeable benefit to the environment or public health. Almost every major reliability issue in modern diesel trucks is caused by emissions equipment, which is why many guys nowadays are buying trucks, removing the emissions systems, and installing tuners to reprogram the engine computer.
In the Carter era, at least one VW Rabbit diesel got 50mpg. Of course, America has never really embraced small diesels for some reason.
I’ve always wondered why the left doesn’t embrace bio-diesel as much as they should (which means also embracing diesel cars). It has 1/5th the CO2 as petrol diesel, which means it’s way better than electric cars in the global warming department. I haven’t fully looked into the economics but I would imagine it has the potential to be more self-sustainable than ethanol which needed to be entirely propped up by the government.
Stated goals and their nefarious goals are not one in the same.
Keep in mind that personal mobility is a freedom to which the collectivists are opposed on principle.
Modern emissions system actually make it MORE difficult to run biodiesel due to the risk of oil dilution during a dpf regeneration.