tingilinde

stumbling into vw's cheating

John German stumbled onto VW's cheating.  The fact they managed to get away with it for so long is testament to loopholes in the testing procedure. The fact that VW was alerted and continued to cheat is astonishing.

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German published the research in May 2014 and handed it over to the Environment Protection Agency (EPA). “There was an expectation that they would find out what was causing the higher-than-expected emissions,” he said. “We did send a courtesy copy to VW to say ‘vehicles B and C are your vehicles and you might like to know’, we had no response.”

There was no response from the EPA either, but keen-eyed German noticed an EPA press release in which VW agreed to recall almost 500,000 vehicles in December 2014 to reinstall software, which it said would solve the higher-than-expected emissions.

However, a couple of months later the California Air Resources Board (Carb) carried out spot checks and discovered that the “defeat device” software – used to dramatically reduces nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions only when the cars are undergoing strict emission tests – was still present.

“That is actually the single most inexplicable thing about this whole business,” German said. “VW had a chance to fix the problem, and they continued to try and cheat and do what they had done. That’s just amazing.”

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fixing a loophole

Nature has posted a good layperson's backgrounder on the VW pollution exploit. (outside their usual paywall)

The California Air Resources Board has posted a letter addressing the emissions testing loophole that VW exploited. Specifically the test is now much closer to the real-world and the specific details are not revealed to the manufacturer before time.  The EPA posted a similar letter.

The situation may be worse in some EU countries which appear to have weaker pollution testing than the US.  The Guardian has uncovered some unsavory lobbying by the UK, France and Germany. 

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But the UK lobbied for car makers to be allowed to exploit flexibilities such as externally charging their batteries to full before testing. The Department for Transport also argued that the best available technologies should be shunned in favour of outdated ‘inertia classes’, which involve manually adding 100 kilo weights to the car to see what effect greater weight on the amount of CO2 the car pumps out.

Research by the International Council on Clean Transportation has found that car manufacturers often game these tests by optimising test car performances at one pound below the desired inertia class.

Germany went further than the UK, calling for the tests to be conducted on sloping downhill tracks, and for allowing manufacturers to declare a final CO2 value 4% lower than the one measured. France supported all the proposed loopholes, bar the 4% lower CO2 value.

Together, these flexibilities would allow some 14% more CO2 to be emitted than EU regulations permit, according to an analysis by T&E. CO2 emissions contribute to climate change, while the nitrogen oxides (NOx) that VW rigged tests for are primarily a cause of local air pollution.

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two cities

Streetfilms looks at two cities

 

Stockholm

Exploring the Streets of Stockholm from STREETFILMS on Vimeo.

Amsterdam

Bicycle Anecdotes from Amsterdam from STREETFILMS on Vimeo.

testing kung-log

A test from Kung-Log. This shareware appliation appears to be a reasonable tool for dealing with this sort of blog.

first posting

There is nothing like a bit of new space when it comes to weblogs.

As you can see I'm trying something new, but this is a beta and I won't comment on the specifics until the beta period has concluded. Since this is brand new expect to see the look and feel change quite a bit over the next few days.

I'll leave figuring out the title as an exercise to the reader...

In the meantime my normal blog is The Crandall Surf Report 2.0.