The VW scandal. How far does it go?

[ainarssems]

More vehicles involved

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/compa...cid=spartanntp

And VW possibly buying back affected cars in USA

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36097244

[steamship]

Originally Posted by ainarssems

More vehicles involved

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/compa...cid=spartanntp

And VW possibly buying back affected cars in USA

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36097244

Interesting article, though it seems to focus a lot on German cars. I heard an article on the ITN news the other night about the top selling 37 cars all failing tests.

http://www.itv.com/news/2016-04-21/e...your-car-rank/

I was only half listening to the report, but I'm sure the reporter said that although they fail the tests, they won't fail a MOT because the figures are fine during the test. Is that not the same as the VW scandal, with cars producing one level of pollutants during a test and significantly higher ones in real every day use?

[ainarssems]

All of them pass MOT, NOx or CO2 are not measured at MOT. Only thing MOT measures on diesel cars is amount of smoke or opacity when engine accelerates. So they floor the engine to raise rpm from idle to limiter and see how much smoke car emits. Basically emission gasses pass through glass chamber with light source in one side and sensor on the other. It measures how much light is lost in the exhaust gasses.

[tintin]

Originally Posted by Witchfinder

Diesel is dying, here comes hydrogen:
http://www.theguardian.com/environme...britains-roads

Link here - http://electrek.co/2016/05/23/tesla-...scam/?pushup=1 , text below

Not likely - according to Marc Tarpenning, who's calling hydrogen fuel cells a “scam”. He also said out loud what many in the industry are thinking – that energy companies are supporting the technology for its inefficiency.

Tarpenning is not with Tesla anymore, but he is one of the original co-founders with his long-time friend and business partner, Martin Eberhard. He was on the Internet History Podcast last week to talk about his ventures and he explained in great details the foundings of his two companies; NuvoMedia and Tesla Motors.

"If your goal is to reduce energy consumption, petrol or whatever resource, you" want to use it as efficiently as possible. You don’t want to pick something that consumes a lot for whatever reason, and hydrogen is uniquely bad.

There’s a saying in the auto industry that hydrogen is the future of transportation and always will be. It’s a scam as far as I can tell because the energy equation is terrible. It’s just terrible.

People will say that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but it’s abundant out there in the universe not here. We live on a planet where hydrogen is super reactive – it’s bound up into everything. It’s bound up into water, wood and everything else. They only way that you get hydrogen requires you to pour energy into it to break it from the chemical bonds.

Electrolysis is the most commen method. You put electricity in water and it separates it, but you are pouring energy in order to make hydrogen, and then you have to compress it and that takes energy, and then you have to transport it to wherever you actually need it, which is really difficult because hydrogen is much harder to work with than gasoline or even natural gas – and natural gas is not that easy.

And then you ultimately have to place it into a car where you’ll have a very high-pressure vessel which offers its own safety issues – and that’s only to convert it back again to electricity to make the car go because hydrogen fuel cell cars are really electric cars. They just have an extraordinary bad battery.

Hydrogen is an energy carrier and not a primary fuel source on this planet. Maybe out somewhere in the universe, but not on a terrestrial planet.

When you add that all up, it turns out that the amount of energy per kilometer driven is just terrible. It’s way worse than almost anything else you can come up with – which I always suspected is one of the reasons why the energy companies have long been big proponents of it.

When we were raising money the first time, we had very carefully gone through the math to understand fuel cells because there was a bunch of money going into fuel cells at the time and we also looked at biofuels and ethanols – we sort of went down the whole list to figure out what the most energy efficient system was – which turned out to be battery electric cars"

[steamship]

Originally Posted by tintin

according to Marc Tarpenning, who's calling hydrogen fuel cells a “scam”. He also said out loud what many in the industry are thinking – that energy companies are supporting the technology for its inefficiency.

Isn't that also true for the likes of Wind farms and solar panels? Read something a couple of years back that both technologies are very inefficient in operation, and the likes of Wind farms were just money earners for the manufacturers.

[tintin]

Originally Posted by steamship

Isn't that also true for the likes of Wind farms and solar panels? Read something a couple of years back that both technologies are very inefficient in operation, and the likes of Wind farms were just money earners for the manufacturers.

I'm not sure: I know solar panel production costs are falling quickly. I think the key principle in the article I posted is that the more conversion steps there are, then the more inefficient it is likely to be as an energy source due to conversion losses, and on that count hydrogen - like IC - loses.

[Pug]

It's interesting to see everyone's comments and views on the situation; I've seen the manufacturers comments direct to us dealers. The actual laws and conditions are very different than the media present. The model answers they have given to potential questions are very interesting.

For instance, to pass 'type approval' the car only needs to adhere to the NOX limits during the test, to pass the test. What the car does on the road is not under any law, hence why vehicles are still being driven on the road, passing MOT's and still being traded.

The recalls are now happening as we speak so it will all be a distant memory in a few years.

[HPsauce]

The man in the BMW factory that I spoke to on the tour on Monday assured me they passed all the tests cleanly as prescribed by the German state!

Interestingly the train you take from Munich airport into town is the, wait for it...... S8.
(Not that I saw many, too many beemers)

[Adrian E]

Originally Posted by Pug

What the car does on the road is not under any law, hence why vehicles are still being driven on the road, passing MOT's and still being traded.

That's not strictly true, and is going to be less so in future. There are circumstances under which a vehicle can operate with engine protection functions to prevent damage to the engine. Some manufacturers interpret that quite differently from others hence the range of compliance you see in the published data from testing.

In the future manufacturers will have to comply with RDE (Real Driving Emissions) which will come in next year and will require vehicles to demonstrate via PEMs (Portable Emissions Measuring) that they comply on driven routes which are far more open in terms of temperature and severity than a lab test.

Originally Posted by HPsauce

The man in the BMW factory that I spoke to on the tour on Monday assured me they passed all the tests cleanly as prescribed by the German state!

From the results I've read about they were pretty good. Full report of UK testing can be found here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/public...me-conclusions

[tintin]

But interestingly, Audi's is significantly less damaged by dieselgate

http://electrek.co/2016/06/08/tesla-...lue-4-billion/