
How the car industry hid the truth about diesel emissions - NeedMoreTea
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/22/dirty-lies-how-the-car-industry-hid-the-truth-about-diesel-emissions
======
ummonk
I remember Mazda having trouble making their diesel engines performant while
conforming to California emissions regulations, and wondering why they were
having so much trouble compared to European car manufacturers. Then this
scandal broke and it was obvious why.

~~~
alkonaut
I wonder why _mazda_ or some other competitor didn’t find this by doing their
own research? I make software for structural engineering and when some
competitor launches a program that makes “better designs” it has usually
turned out to be because they simply don’t follow the design
codes/regulations. We wouldn’t be pushed from the market by that - we’d fund
the analysis, reverse engineering and legal processes necessary to show the
competitor is cheating.

~~~
bboreham
My conclusion, from the first time I thought about it, is that they were all
cheating.

Engineers move job; they talk to each other. Every car company had to have
people who knew the truth and, if they were being unfairly competed against,
could publish this truth.

~~~
close04
Correct. Every single manufacturer in the industry knows what the others are
doing. They all buy each other's vehicles and tear them down to the last bolt
and bit to see how they work and how they can "borrow" some ideas without
infringing on any patent (or breaking the law maybe).

They were all aware of what VW was doing and it wasn't a surprise, lots of
companies did it [0] a lot of times [1]. Usually though the penalties were
light. Many times they involved US companies and the strong local lobby pushed
for the lighter fines. Like the heavy duty diesel engines case where 7 truck
manufacturers were ordered to pay $1bn _together_ for doing the exact same
thing. Which in the grand scheme of things was peanuts compared to VW's $4.5bn
(plus the tens of $bn of extra costs). So the expectation was always "it's
just the cost of doing business, pay it and let bygones be bygones".

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/22/us/record-penalty-
likely-...](https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/22/us/record-penalty-likely-
against-diesel-makers.html)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal#Previ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal#Previous_defeat_device_cases)

------
Yaggo
European here. My next car will be electric, likely a Tesla. The dieselgate is
the reason why I'm not even considering Volkswagen's upcoming 'ID' family of
electric cars. I've similar feeling about the whole traditional auto industry.

~~~
justasimpleman
My next car will be "no car at all". Even electric cars have huge
externalities that you do not pay for, but your children, namely, the disposal
of the batteries, pollution created by the manufacturing, costly extraction of
rare earths etc. Instead we should heavily invest in high-speed trains.

~~~
maccam94
Except lithium ion batteries are very recyclable, and rare earth elements
aren't in limited supply, they're just usually very sparsely distributed.

~~~
justasimpleman
Wear from car tires cause the majority of microplastics that get into the seas
(around 50%, if I'm reading understanding this study correctly):

[http://epanet.pbe.eea.europa.eu/ad-hoc-meetings/workshop-
pla...](http://epanet.pbe.eea.europa.eu/ad-hoc-meetings/workshop-plastics-
environment-11-12-may-2015/presentations/microplastic-pollution-
norway-m.-kjeldby-miljodirektoratet/download/en/1/S2%205_Kjeldby.pdf)

~~~
justasimpleman
At least in 1st world countries. The contribution of those are rather small
compared to China and India.

WorldBank Pollution data:
[https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/en.atm.pm25.mc.m3?end=2...](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/en.atm.pm25.mc.m3?end=2016&start=1990&type=shaded&view=map&year_high_desc=true)

Maplecroft Deforestation Risk 2018 (as opposed to his 2012):
[https://www.maplecroft.com/insights/analysis/esg-
deforestati...](https://www.maplecroft.com/insights/analysis/esg-
deforestation-risk-shoots-up-over-2018/)

Statista Countries Polluting Oceans (updated version of his):
[https://www.statista.com/chart/12211/the-countries-
polluting...](https://www.statista.com/chart/12211/the-countries-polluting-
the-oceans-the-most/)

[https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/05/1818859116](https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/05/1818859116)

------
TheRealDunkirk
I work in this industry, so I've been following it from the start. I've run
test cells and written software to analyze the results from the emissions
cycles that the government uses to validate the emissions compliance. I have
worked around and for a very large diesel engine manufacturer who I am
convinced does not cheat on this test. You'll understand why, below.

I recently leveled-up my career, and I now work with the person who originally
setup such testing at this manufacturer, and one of the two people who
literally wrote the spec, which is one of the most thorough technical
documents I've ever laid eyes on. These are 2 of the highest-caliber engineers
I have ever met in my 25-year professional career, both in terms of
intelligence and capability, and in terms of integrity and trustworthiness.

This quote from the article pisses me off: "What I understand now is that the
people we entrusted with the power to protect us essentially decided not to
bother. Instead, they have allowed carmakers to spew whatever they want into
our air." Really?! The government commissioned the spec. The government
mandated that engine makers make their engines comply, and validate this
compliance with internal testing. The government then paid independent testers
to validate the manufacturer's results.

Excuse me, but what more did the author expect the government to do? The
regulators entrusted this process to expert engineers, and expert testers. Did
the author expect people who could invent the spec and create a test cell to
do the validation to go to work for the EPA directly, and do the paperwork,
instead of the engineering? Did they expect them to escrow the code, and
validate that there was no cheating? Possible, but, again, you're asking a
very specific skillset to give up DOING, and instead REGULATING, and that
doesn't usually work.

The fault of this scandal lies -- of course -- with the manufacturers, but the
fault also lies with the legislators. To control diesel engine emissions
within the spec requires an array of very expensive after-treatment
components. That can work in the class-8 heavy trucking industry, but you
can't even fit it into a passenger car, let alone make it affordable at
gasoline car prices. To think that cars could use diesel engines, be cost-
competitive with gasoline-fueled alternatives, AND pass the ridiculously-low
emissions standards that lawmakers have arbitrarily decreed was simply wishful
thinking.

~~~
topspin
"Excuse me, but what more did the author expect the government to do?"

It is not some outrageous expectation that the $8,000,000,000+/year, 14,000+
employee EPA and/or DOT independently verify the real world emissions
performance of passenger cars and other vehicles. The cars were so grossly out
of compliance that anyone with a ordinary field emissions testing machine
could have caught it.

If, as is very likely the case, the regulators had no technical resources
among their hordes of lawyers they could have asked any number of publicly
funded universities to perform the actual investigation and go beyond the
agreed upon and easily fooled test regime. The discovery was actually made by
US academics with very limited financing.

This institutional pencil whipping is SOP at EPA. GOA had a gasoline powered
alarm clock (among other improbable devices) Energy Star certified as part of
an investigation in 2010. Energy Star certifications are literally pencil
whipped through an automated system with no human review.

When the EPA found itself answering for their part in the emissions scandal in
public hearings there was no defense. They didn't even try to cite limited
budgets[1] -- the go-to excuse every time some regulator comes up short -- as
a cause. They just failed.

That's difficult to accept for some, and so all manner of rationalizations are
employed to dilute that simple truth. But I'm not among them.

[1] [https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4787386/blaming-
budget](https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4787386/blaming-budget)

~~~
TheRealDunkirk
I still shake my head at this. If you wrote laws that said manufacturers of a
particular thing had to do X, and expected them to adhere to it internally,
and then paid expert testing facilities to validate those results, why would
you EXPECT that you would have to do additional testing to validate the
validation?

And further more, why would you think that merely testing the test would lead
to a different result? You can say that the Euro V is "not representative" (as
someone else did in this thread) of normal driving, but the FTP test's torque
and RPM curves were lifted from real-world driving through hilly areas. It
most definitely is representative. I don't know about the Euro V.

So I don't get it. In this scenario, what people are asking the EPA to have
done was load up vehicles with mobile emissions equipment (which is a very
difficult thing to do, by the way), and validate that the TEST ITSELF
correlated with real-world driving. Granted, this is an interesting exercise,
but one that I would expect the EPA to - again - pay someone else to do.

Given the engineering that went into the spec on the US side, I wouldn't
expect that this was something they should have needed to do. You can say that
they were the regulatory body in charge of this, and therefore should be
responsible for catching cheaters, but I don't see how a reasonable person can
find that the EPA was intentionally negligent in this matter.

~~~
stefan_
Nobody charged the EPA with ensuring adherence to some made up test cycle, but
to the emission limits. If the test cycle is your approximation of real world
behavior, it is highly negligent to never confirm that _real world results_
actually match the approximation! This is science 101.

~~~
TheRealDunkirk
I’m specifically arguing that the FTP cycle result IS, in fact, a real world
result. So to me, claiming that the EPA needed to do their own verification
would be silly. The only reason to do this would be to catch cheaters.

I know I’m naive, and very trusting. I would never have thought a company to
have the utter stones to completely fake the results as VW did. If you’ve
looked at the depths of their algorithms to do it, you see the effort that
went into it. I just would never expect such behavior from one of the largest
auto makers. It’s so far beyond the pale to my expectations that I can’t blame
the EPA for not catching it.

YMMV.

------
jokoon
I live in france, and I often spot cars that have a grey/blue smokes. Many
other cars also have this awful smell.

Here, every 2 years, cars must legally be examined in a "controle technique",
like an exam which controls several aspects of a vehicle.

I wonder if those fumes are legal, and I really wonder if people can manage to
cheat at that exam, because I think I'm noticing an epidemic of those fumes.

How can I really be expected to ride a bike next to cars like this? I'd rather
spend time in a tram or bus than expose my lungs to this.

~~~
eebynight
I have an older diesel VW. It is extremely common for people to run tunes that
disable the check engine light that is produced when you delete the exhaust
gas recirculation valve (EGR), urea pump and diesel particulate filter (DPF).

For things like the EGR, blocking it off is simply installing a bracket or two
and closing off some vacuum lines. I can imagine people would simply reinstall
this and swap the tune to pass and then immediately remove it after.

In the US, for emissions, all you have to do is not run any check engine
lights when at the test center which is easy to do in the software tune.

~~~
UncleEntity
> In the US, for emissions, all you have to do is not run any check engine
> lights when at the test center which is easy to do in the software tune.

Which is very disappointing...

When I first moved to Arizona I had a '67 Galaxy and that thing got to run on
the dyno in the emissions office but when I got my truck to replace it (not
having AC in Arizona isn't fun) all they did was plug in into the computer and
charge me _more_ for the test.

My (carburated) motorcycle was in between, they couldn't run it on the dyno
and couldn't plug a computer into it so just tested it at idle -- which seemed
pretty pointless to me, even being all hopped-up it still got better gas
mileage than most cars on the road, though it did get pretty horrible gas
mileage for a motorcycle considering I had to run premium in it.

------
makomk
" Schmied responded that as long as emissions went down when limits were
tightened, his department didn’t mind they were many times higher than
allowed."

Some context for this: the official European test cycle was known not to be
representative of real driving conditions. Because it was less aggressive than
real-world driving, it pretty much always overstated fuel efficiency and
understated emissions. So real-world emissions not going down at the same rate
as tested emissions is a sign of foul play, but them being higher isn't
necessarily. (The US test cycle is better.)

~~~
mirimir
Sure, but don't the laws limit emissions? Irrespective of how well standard
government tests were measuring those emissions?

So "We publish this data" just sounds like "I'm doing my job. Anything more is
not my problem."

~~~
makomk
The laws limited emissions in the standard government test cycle, and the
thresholds on emissions were chosen based on how well cars could be made to
perform in those test cycles. While actual defeat devices were illegal, the
legal emissions limit wasn't actually the real-world emissions limit and
everyone knew it.

(The EU is now gradually moving to real-world emissions testing and a more
realistic test cycle, though judging from the other reply they might have some
cheating problems with that - especially as real-world testing inherently has
wider errors than lab testing.)

------
yeukhon
Netflix'a Dirty Money documentary Ep 1 covers this topic:
[https://www.netflix.com/title/80118100](https://www.netflix.com/title/80118100)

------
godelmachine
Excellent review by Adrian Colyer for those interested -
[https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/06/20/how-they-did-it-an-
analy...](https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/06/20/how-they-did-it-an-analysis-of-
emissions-defeat-devices-in-modern-automobiles/)

Also, the book _How they did it_ gives insightful glimpses.

------
sidcool
This happens in almost all industries. Big oils' repetitive attempts to kill
EVs, Big Pharmas, insurance and hospitals lobbying against healthcare reforms,
Big Banks working against finance regulations etc.

~~~
hjk05
Big Parma is lobbying FOR healthcare reforms.

~~~
maxxxxx
Not for anything that may reduce profits though.

------
pkaye
So did the recall all those failing 97% of 250 car models in the EU?

~~~
armada651
Yes, but in many countries like the UK the recall is voluntary, it's just a
recommendation.

~~~
thepangolino
Thank God it is as it worsens mileage.

~~~
AnthonBerg
Thank God it is as it allows you to place externalities on us?

------
walrus01
I've seen claims that VW's whole diesel emissions and engine control subsystem
was actually contracted out to Bosch. But VW execs knew about the software
defeat device.

~~~
_ph_
The controlling unit indeed comes from Bosch, but it is a generic unit that
can control any kind of engine. The car manufacturer using this unit programs
it to perform the actual world, mostly by specifying parameter sets for its
operation. The car manufacturer has for example to determine, how exactly the
ignition needs to be set up for a given temperature and load etc. There are
plenty sensor inputs these profiles can depend on like engine temperature,
revs, load, outside temperature, speed of the car. The Bosch software can
offer the "test dectection" as one of the inputs. There can be quite
reasonable use cases for that information, but that VW used it in the way they
did, was VWs choices. The same or a similar control from Bosch unit is
probably used by many other car manufacturers, but without abusing this
specific "feature".

As the article writes, there are other "strange" engine configurations with
other car manufacturers, like using the outside temperature. Reducing or
switching off the exhaust cleaning system at outside temperatures below 17C
(the tests are guaranteed to be done at 20C) achieves a similar effect to what
VW was doing without literally breaking the law by using a defeat device.

~~~
pedrocr
_> There can be quite reasonable use cases for that information_

What reasonable use case is there for a detection of the test cycle just from
ECU information? If you're just testing stuff surely you have access to the
ECU to just set a flag manually for anything you need?

~~~
_ph_
Could be reasonabe safety features like not performing emergency breaking, or
functions aiding the testing process (without interfering with it of course).

~~~
pedrocr
I can see plenty of reasons to change behavior for the test. But that's not
the question. The question is why infer you are being tested through the ECU
inputs? Setting a flag manually seems like a much better solution for all
those objectives versus a possibly unreliable inference from speed and other
data.

------
carboy
I could never understand how something that was less refined, diesel, meaning
that it had more unnecessary “stuff” could produce less emissions. Diesel
always did, and always will, as far as I’m concerned he snake oil when it
comes to emissions.

~~~
benj111
Its less refined in the sense of less cracking.

It contains more energy for a given volume, so you get better fuel economy
than with petrol. It might not be better for the particulates and NOx that we
are now optimising for, but its better for CO2, that we were optimising for.
So I don't think the snake oil label is warranted.

~~~
lscotte
Diesel engines are also significantly more efficient at converting that energy
into usable torque. That's why an idling diesel consumes almost no fuel - it
isn't doing any work.

------
CzechTech
I always cringe when one of these "we could have been driving electric cars"
articles shows up. Cars are not bread and the vast vast majority of the
planet's population (who even own a car) don't just go around shopping for new
cars. It's going to take DECADES before electric cars have a significant
impact on the climate change. That is an economic reality. (Not to mention
that electric cars are only now starting to barely match gasoline cars in
terms of usability and range.)

------
joelkevinjones
A coworker and I had a discussion with another coworker when this scandal
broke. We couldn't convince him that he was wrong when he said there is no way
car software could "cheat" like that. Even after we came up with several
things that could be done in the space of about a minute, he remained
unconvinced. If you follow through the article to the reference US DoJ press
release, VW's software used several of the ideas we came up with as part of
their "cheat". This coworker also thought that the California drought was a
big hoax, so...

~~~
oska
What's the point of this anecdote other than to make you look smart and your
coworker look dumb? Maybe both things are true but it's hardly a very
interesting observation that there are both smarter and dumber people in the
population.

~~~
Theodores
It is how scandals work. Lots of people believe the lies and can't be
persuaded to think from an evidence first viewpoint. They need the story to be
headline news on the BBC or some other reputable source before they will
'believe it'.

Every scandal relies on groupthink to keep it quiet.

