Diesel scandal - the consequences

[dr_mat]

https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7331-the_exhaust_emissions_scandal_dieselgate#video

Long but well worth the ride.

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[Hobby55]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/opinion/sunday/the-dirty-truth-about-clean-diesel.html


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Same old, same old... And I suppose petrol engines are clean as well, according to the same "experts"... <Roll Eyes>

 

[dr_mat]

It's a bit dramatised like all articles in the modern press but yes, petrol engines are cleaner. Why do you doubt this?
Turns out modern direct injection petrol engines do also emit ultra fine particulates but not at the same quantities as similar diesel cars and petrol cars emit almost no NOx, while diesels need efficient urea injection to reduce this to reasonable levels. "Reasonable", but still much higher than petrol, and there is a secondary risk from adblue/urea injection which is that inadvertently overdosing produces ammonia. Which not only smells bad but is itself harmful.
The exhaust flow model in the ECU needs to be very accurate to dose correctly.

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[Hobby55]

They just produce different toxins, so they are not cleaner. It's all relative and about what is currently "dangerous emission of the month", what is dangerous this month may not be next... To try to blame it one one particular fuel, especially when that fuel is becoming subject to more and more restrictions whilst ignoring another, equally bad, fuel is laughable.

Yes I'd agree with you that older diesels that are not subject to the same constraints as an EU6 emissions diesel are bad, but only the same as older petrol cars. I am surrounded by taxis and minicabs in British cities which are not subject to EU6 regulations, they should be regulated as well but aren't...

There's more and more older cars around these days, of both fuels, and as I've said before if you want to tackle emissions then you need to get a grip on them, together with taxis, minicabs and delivery vans, the emissions produced by modern EU6 diesels is minuscule compared with them yet all you lot do is bash diesels... Emissions, proper servicing, take drastic action when checking them by removing them from the roads...

That's why i said "same old, same old" because that's what it is. Typical knee-jerk reaction without looking at the true causes... My daughter currently lives in China and the pollution where she lives is horrendous yet the number of diesel cars is minute, they are mostly petrol...

Emissions from air con plants in houses and offices, for instance... But having a go at that wouldn't suit those in charge would it...

Let's try and be honest here, instead of petrolheads forever bashing diesels, we need to take a long hard look at our addiction to the Internal Combustion engine and start to cut back on it's use, until then we will forever have Pollution Issues...

 

[dr_mat]

They just produce different toxins, so they are not cleaner. It's all relative and about what is currently "dangerous emission of the month", what is dangerous this month may not be next... To try to blame it one one particular fuel, especially when that fuel is becoming subject to more and more restrictions whilst ignoring another, equally bad, fuel is laughable.

Not "equally bad" at all, pretty much all the science disagrees with you there. "Also bad" is true but not "equally". Diesel was only ever pushed because we thought that CO2 was the only evil we should be scared of. This, it turns out with hindsight, was foolish and short sighted. Science moves on.

emissions of older
[*] engines...

Older engines in both camps are bad. The diesels are worse.

There's more and more older cars around these days, of both fuels, and as I've said before if you want to tackle emissions then you need to get a grip on them, together with taxis, minicabs and delivery vans, the emissions produced by modern EU6 diesels is minuscule compared with them yet all you lot do is bash diesels...

Agree, and some cities are applying punitive charges for people driving polluting cars, I agree with this. I do foresee a day I can't drive the Corrado, pretty much anywhere. Sad day, but so be it. Would rather be able to breathe properly.

That's why i said "same old, same old" because that's what it is. Typical knee-jerk reaction without looking at the true causes...

So you believe we should do nothing about diesel pollution?

I actually think we should ban all internal combustion engines but we're not ready for that yet. In the meantime we have to continue to hold all manufacturers accountable for what they are doing. And we obviously need to get better at that because it seems the current regulations are an internal joke at most manufacturers when they deliberately release cars that evade emission controls just to save a few quid.

 

[Hobby55]

Not "equally bad" at all, pretty much all the science disagrees with you there. Science moves on.

No. As you say, "science moves on", what we see is only current thinking and does not take into account developments in technology to combat emissions, for all we know it could prove easier to clean up (!) diesel engines than petrol. Banning one fuel based on current technology is just as bad as the knee-jerk reactions we are seeing now.

Older engines in both camps are bad. The diesels are worse.

Depends on condition, I've followed many petrol engines recently that have been far worse than older diesels, hence my comments about tackling older cars (and for those who didn't know, yes you can tell the difference between a badly tuned diesel and a petrol car which burns oil!)...

So you believe we should do nothing about diesel pollution?

I never said that, please don't put words into my mouth. What i said is that there are a lot more pressing matters than modern i/c engines, namely older i/c engines. We need to get our priorities right and at the moment we seem to be reacting to this with no logic, just a heavy handed response which could just be the wrong way forward (like the CO2 you mention before - which is still regarded as a major part of the problem)...

I actually think we should ban all internal combustion engines but we're not ready for that yet. In the meantime we have to continue to hold all manufacturers accountable for what they are doing. And we obviously need to get better at that because it seems the current regulations are an internal joke at most manufacturers when they deliberately release cars that evade emission controls just to save a few quid.

Agreed, but it must be a considered response, not just "ban 'em all" as some people advocate...

 

[dr_mat]

No. As you say, "science moves on", what we see is only current thinking and does not take into account developments in technology to combat emissions, for all we know it could prove easier to clean up (!) diesel engines than petrol. Banning one fuel based on current technology is just as bad as the knee-jerk reactions we are seeing now.

Yes. And anyway, this doesn't mean we shouldn't do what we think is right based on currently considered best evidence.. Science also agrees that climate change is happening, and is caused by humans. We can't afford to wait and see what new tech might come along to fix it, we have to do what we can, today.

If they had a magic bullet for cleaning up the emissions on either type of engine, don't you think they'd have used it by now? At the end of the day we are trying to perform a controlled burn of a very approximately regulated amount of fuel in a poorly defined amount of oxygen with a random mixing factor. It's not just hard, it's impossible to clean burn in all circumstances. If ICEs could be operated in a fixed RPM with fixed load with fixed throttle position then there's a better chance we'd get close, but they aren't. And if you're doing that, why wouuldn't you go full electric anyway?

Depends on condition, I've followed many petrol engines recently that have been far worse than older diesels, hence my comments about tackling older cars (and for those who didn't know, yes you can tell the difference between a badly tuned diesel and a petrol car which burns oil!)...

Maintenance aside, diesels are worse for health than petrol cars. A more immediate risk of respiratory problems due to particulates that petrol has historically produced less of.

I never said that, please don't put words into my mouth. What i said is that there are a lot more pressing matters than modern i/c engines, namely older i/c engines. We need to get our priorities right and at the moment we seem to be reacting to this with no logic, just a heavy handed response which could just be the wrong way forward (like the CO2 you mention before - which is still regarded as a major part of the problem)...

I don't see any heavy handed response. Other than to smack VW up side the head for lying to the car buyer and breaking the law in the US, almost nothing has changed. The government has changed the excise duty bands for future cars, but to the average driver this has very little impact, and I don't really see anything diesel-specific in these regulations.

Whilst I agree that the vast arrays of older heavily polluting cars on the road is obviously a huge problem, I think the government would be very hard pressed to regulate them off the roads. Can you image trying to get that one through?

The reality is the best the government can do is to financially persuade drivers to drive something frugal and clean, which generally means buying a newer car .. but if new cars don't even stick to the regulations either, this is a completely false step and it's all a waste of money ..

Watch the video I linked. It's quite interesting, if a bit geeky.

 

[dosbox]

My daughter currently lives in China and the pollution where she lives is horrendous yet the number of diesel cars is minute, they are mostly petrol...

This is ridiculously disingenous given that China's air quality standards are nowhere near as stringent as the EU's or the US's.

 

[cldlhd]

This is ridiculously disingenous given that China's air quality standards are nowhere near as stringent as the EU's or the US's.

This is true so where is all the outrage against China?

 

[dr_mat]

China is having huge problems right now and it's very little to do with cars, it's the fact that their cities are much like industrial victoriana was in the UK. They are racing to catch up with our western clean air policies and industrial controls. They will only achieve it when they successfully outsource all manufacturing to Africa...

And why would anyone but the Chinese be bothered about Chinese pollution anyway?

 

[Hobby55]

For the same reason you mentioned earlier, global warming, the sheer size and the basic nature of the regulations (if there are any at all) make what they do a major issue to all of us... You can add India and Russia to that list if you want as well... Anything we do pales into insignificance compared with them... BTW "racing" is a slight exaggeration if what she has seen is anything to go by... Life is cheap as they say, and you don't argue with the bosses...

"Thedosbox" - apart from it being true, as cldlhd says, the point I was making was that they don't have many diesel cars so the pollution (other than industrial pollution) is produced by petrol cars so they are not the panacea they are made out to be by the diesel haters...

DrMat, the point I am making is that you don't cut your nose off to spite your face. Diesel is a more efficient fuel than petrol so it would be sensible to try to develop methods of cutting diesel emissions so as to reduce dependency on fossil fuels. It is possible, a lot has already been done, but with petrolhead attitudes that many people show all that good work could be wasted, please open your mind a bit...

 

[dr_mat]

DrMat, the point I am making is that you don't cut your nose off to spite your face. Diesel is a more efficient fuel than petrol so it would be sensible to try to develop methods of cutting diesel emissions so as to reduce dependency on fossil fuels. It is possible, a lot has already been done, but with petrolhead attitudes that many people show all that good work could be wasted, please open your mind a bit...

It is more efficient, I will grant you that, but I believe we will move to electric cars to hit emissions targets before diesel is clean enough to compete with petrol engines. In the meantime petrol engines are less harmful to health, so in my view we should move that way while we wait for electric. Simple as that, really. The difference in efficiency is also a little more than the difference in hydrocarbon density in the fuel. Considered per litre, it's good, but "per carbon atom", less so.

Indeed, China contributes to a global pollution level. So far the effects of their excess (or rather, our outsourcing), seem to be reasonably localised to only their own health. And they are racing a lot faster than the UK did .. mainly because the technologies they can use to cut down industrial emissions already exist - they just have to start using them. Back in our own industrial revolution we had to wait for process improvements to be invented. (We also had to learn the value of clean air so we started even looking for those process improvements...)

Meanwhile, there is some debate over how much of the pollution is caused by cars (see below), though there is a clear political will to treat cars as the culprit. At the same time they have cut back on building coal power stations, the dirtiest form of fuel known to man .. so it seems to be a mix.

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/arti...plit-over-main-culprit-beijings-air-pollution

 

[Hobby55]

I still don't agree with you re the current emissions of the two fuels, they are both dangerous in different ways, one is not better than the other, but I see we are going to have to agree to disagree about that!

I think the issue with car pollution (or, more properly, vehicle pollution as it's not only cars!) is the fact that they are increasing in numbers far quicker than pollution from other things, so the effect will be greater the quicker the less developed countries catch up. Try transferring current car ownership in the UK and US to China and India and you can see the issue...

Interestingly on the emissions front VW have accidentally (on purpose!) highlighted than diesel emissions can be reduced a great deal, the "defeat device" has proved that, all they have to do is sort out the parallel loss of power!!

 

[dr_mat]

I still don't agree with you re the current emissions of the two fuels, they are both dangerous in different ways, one is not better than the other, but I see we are going to have to agree to disagree about that!

I think the issue with car pollution (or, more properly, vehicle pollution as it's not only cars!) is the fact that they are increasing in numbers far quicker than pollution from other things, so the effect will be greater the quicker the less developed countries catch up. Try transferring current car ownership in the UK and US to China and India and you can see the issue...

Interestingly on the emissions front VW have accidentally (on purpose!) highlighted than diesel emissions can be reduced a great deal, the "defeat device" has proved that, all they have to do is sort out the parallel loss of power!!

We are fortunately less densely populated.. if we had the population density of a beijing in one of our cities we would be much much worse..

I don't actually think there is any loss of power results from enabling the Adblue system properly either - that has never been confirmed by anyone. Only an increased risk of over-dosing which means a) ammonia comes out the exhaust and b) frequent top-ups of the AdBlue tank for the user.

... and even when enabled it's still not producing as low NOx or particulates (overall) as a modern petrol car. (The DPF only catches and stores the fine particles and then has to burn them off later.) The petrol car produces more CO2 for the same miles driven, and there may be other stuff we don't even know about yet from one or both... when we find out, we'll figure out how to respond to it..!

As you say, we clearly disagree fundamentally on the relative risks.. but I still think I'm right and you're wrong..

I think we both agree wholeheartedly, however, that burning fossil fuels in a moving vehicle as a means of propelling it is just downright STUPID, no matter what blend of fuels they are..

(Incidentally, it somewhat makes a mockery of a "Bluemotion" branding in the VW range if the ECU deliberately disables the "AdBlue" injection system because it might cause more trips to the dealers..)

 

[dosbox]

This is true so where is all the outrage against China?

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/09/airpocalypse-now-china-pollution-reaching-record-levels

For the same reason you mentioned earlier, global warming, the sheer size and the basic nature of the regulations (if there are any at all) make what they do a major issue to all of us... You can add India and Russia to that list if you want as well...

Exactly - as demonstrated by the acid rain issue in various Scandinavian countries that was attributed to the UK back in the 80's.

Anything we do pales into insignificance compared with them...

I suggest reading up on the philosophy of incremental improvements.

"Thedosbox" - apart from it being true, as cldlhd says, the point I was making was that they don't have many diesel cars so the pollution (other than industrial pollution) is produced by petrol cars so they are not the panacea they are made out to be by the diesel haters...

This article highlights where the bulk of China's emissions come from - and it's not vehicles:

http://www.theguardian.com/environm...first-time-during-a-period-of-economic-growth