Let me be more specific, since you asked the puzzling question in the first place.
What do you find hard to believe? What’s your implication? That VW competitors knew and said nothing?
Maybe other companies did find it, and they didn’t reveal it because they have their own cheating scandals they don’t want the EPA beating the bushes after. Who knows?
Hopefully the EPA goes headhunting now, though I have my doubts. Their statements don’t fill me with a ton of confidence:
Ms. McCarthy said the alleged violation was difficult to detect, but she is “pleased Volkswagen is taking such an aggressive stance on admitting the problem and attacking it.”
She’s “pleased” they’re taking an aggressive stance attacking the problem they created and covered up for 9 years? Ugh.
I have a sneaking feeling that this won’t end with VW. There could be a whole lot of email deleting going on at other car companies tonight.
I think Sarkus’s point is this: you’re a Mercedes engineer who has to rely on a PITA uric acid injection system. The VW guys across town claim to have a magical engine that doesn’t need any of your PITA stuff to achieve the same result.
You’d be tearing apart their shit, post-haste, to figure out how they do what they do. You wouldn’t just plug it into a smog check system and walk away when it comes back clean. You’d want to know HOW it’s clean.
I, too, am puzzled that this wasn’t revealed through reverse engineering by competitors.
Well, as you yourself said in an earlier post, their competitors were resorting to a much more complicated system to accomplish the same result. At some point there had to have been someone who realized it didn’t add up given what they saw when they took apart a VW diesel engine. Granted that auto software is complicated, but unless its encrypted in some way and nobody is able to look at it, then it was all there to be seen. It’s hard to believe that in the same world where someone can hack a Jeep and make it drive on its own, though. So what we are left with is that some of VWs competitors, or at least their engineers, had to have known what VW was doing. Its possible they kept it quiet for various reasons, but its also possible they tried to leak it and regulators just didn’t follow up on it.
The difference and reason I guess is that everyone else also uses a urea-injection system for their diesel engines. Guess who licenses and gets piece of the action for every liter of AdBLU or BLUDef or however it’s branded? Might be far more profitable to let VW do their thing while you collect the cash from everyone else using the proprietary chemical additive that belongs to your company, no?
That didn’t make any sense to me.
To take full advantage of a proprietary product, there has to be high/unique demand for that product. VW’s non-reliance is a direct threat to that approach, not a benefit to it. One would think Mercedes would be keenly interested in how VW avoids the need for Mercedes proprietary approach, while still achieving purportedly the same result. Whether Mercedes decided to try and take their engines down the same path (or respond in some other way), once they understood it, would be a separate question. But it doesn’t explain why Mercedes wouldn’t reverse engineer the VW approach to understand the relevant technical issues.
I’m not following your logic, at all.
Maybe Mercedes or BMW made it work in a lab setting, but couldn’t get it to work in road trials and gave up rather than think that someone would do something so brazen as to program a defeat device into the engine.
EDIT: Although in EU they may not have to have the urea-injection system. So I dunno.
This.
It’s sort of the entire reason we have these organizations.
I mean if you found out tomorrow that all your beef had a shitload of arsenic in it, you wouldn’t say “well who made food purchased based on arsenic content anyway?”
Buy his point is that if you are another car company, and VW has some process which is seemingly better than yours, YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW IT WORKS.
That makes sense to me, anyway. However I wouldn’t be surprised if some chain of events like this occurrs: Daimler engineer tells his boss WTF is up with this POS VW diesel? Word travels up the management chain and mid-level people sit on their hands waiting for an answer. In the meantime the Daimler CEO who sits on the Philips board and the BAE board and the D’Assault boards with the VW CEO (I just made that up, naturally) have lunch together and word comes back down the chain to the engineer to forget about it, because the Daimler guy needs support from the VW guy to become a director over at Siemens.
There are some interesting questions being asked here. I suspect, these and others are being asked, oh, in Germany, as well as in Washington, D.C. VW lost like a third of its market cap so this is rapidly become A Big Thing, even if people wanted to downplay it. I really hope it doesn’t screw up their gasoline car lines, though. I still want one of those Rs with a manual…
Yeah, I’ve never seen that. Truckers usually account for a significant amount of revenue and they all run diesel. Out here in the midwest most farmers and truck owners run quite a lot of diesel as well.
Buried in this Guardian article are some pretty staggering numbers:
The rigging of emissions tests may have added nearly a million tonnes of air pollution by VW cars annually – roughly the same as the UK’s combined emissions for all power stations, vehicles, industry and agriculture. According to a Guardian analysis, the 482,000 non-compliant US vehicles would have released between 10,392 and 41,571 tonnes of NOx annually at an average US mileage, rather than the 1,039 tonnes the EPA standards would imply. Scaled to the 11m global vehicles, that would mean up to 948,691 tonnes of NOx emissions annually. Western Europe’s biggest power station, Drax in the UK, emits 39,000 tonnes of NOx each year.
I have a 2009 TDI Jetta that I bought in October 2008. Its been a good daily driver. But the maintenance costs on the car are very high given the car’s price point. For a 25K vehicle there are some serious preventative maintenance costs. Every 40K the 6 speed automatic needs like a $500 service. And the oil it uses is not stocked anywhere aside from VW dealers. They also have a 100K timing belt/chain maintenance that is like $600.
I had an issue in like 2013 where something in the fuel pump broke and basically bricked the engine and even though it was way out of warranty VW covered the $2k plus repair cost. Aside from that, no unexpected issues. Diesel is readily available in Texas. I estimate 60-75% of gas stations in San Antonio have at least one diesel pump. I will say that my mileage has never really approached VW claims except when doing long distance high way drives like San Antonio to Houston. And I don’t think I have a lead foot these days, I use cruise control a ton and drive like 4 miles over the speed limit.
If the cars were polluting 40 times more than the standard, and you’ve got 11 million cars that were affected, you effectively are talking about the impact of 440 million vehicles. In comparison, there are only about 250 million registered passenger vehicles in the United States.
Here in the SF Bay Area, the majority of stations don’t have diesel pumps. Only those very near to the freeway have them. I suspect it’s the same in So. Cal.
It’s pretty hard to find a diesel station where I am, (CT), and some of the ones that do have diesel only have the massive truck pumps, where the nozzle doesn’t fit in the car.
Probably 30% of the stations around me have a usable diesel pump.
Here in Chicagoland they are near ubiquitous. Certainly there are stations without diesel, but you’re almost never more than a few miles from a station with one. Typically, though, I see stations with about 20% of the pumps having a diesel spout. So even though most have one, they have fewer than regular gas.