Four more carmakers join diesel emissions row

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/09/mercedes-honda-mazda-mitsubishi-diesel-emissions-row?CMP=twt_gu

by gt565k • 11 years ago

119 68 11 years ago

JoeAltmaier3• 11 years ago

The issue appears to be, that lab testing does not emulate real-world driving conditions. So in the field, emissions are higher than in the lab.

These four car makers involved in the report differ from VW: they do not have a defeat device in their design. Their results are solely because of the lab-vs-road issue.

Its not clear this is any kind of problem. Reducing emissions in lab tests may very well result in car designs that have reduced road emissions. That was the hope when lab standards were introduced. Auto pollution in our cities has indeed gone down as (lab) emissions standards have been tightened over the years.

ChuckMcM• 11 years ago

Sort of and sort of not right? So VW came right out and said "The difference is caused by defeat device code programmed into the computer." Great simple answer. None of these people have offered up a theory of why things are different. It could be defeat devices, or it could be something else, they just don't know.

So step two of this process is figure out all the ways in which actual driving differs from lab testing. And when you've eliminated all other explanations, start looking for defeat devices or their equivalents.

I'm guessing one or more of these companies will end up admitting, after looking into it, that their car control software runs differently if it detects the car is being tested.

JoeAltmaier3• 11 years ago

Maybe we have a different idea about what a 'defeat device' is. Its a physical piece of hardware. Not some code. So to find out if these other cars have it, you stick your head under that car and look.

baobabaobab• 11 years ago

At least in my corner of the industry (commercial) , we've been asking for better test cycles because we don't want to wind up in a situation where we are chasing fuel economy on the test cycle at the expense of fuel economy in the real world. The regulators want to keep the same test cycles so they can measure how emissions and fuel economy are changing over time.

Internally, we have much better test cycles correlated to real world routes that we use to validate fuel economy simulations.

sitharus• 11 years ago

The article suggests on average real-world emissions are 2-5x more than in the lab except for a 20x outlier. VW was 40 times more than in the lab.

I don't think most of these cars are hiding anything, it's just an example of how easy it is to optimise for a fixed test.

InclinedPlane• 11 years ago

It's not as though there haven't been issues with gaming these tests to a degree for a long time. Almost certainly this has been an issue of walking backwards into a big mistake little by little, which is the typical process of making big mistakes. You start by figuring out how to game the system right at "the line" as much as you can, then the day comes where you decide to be more explicit about it and build it into the software. You probably decide that you just want to play around at the edges, with incremental differences between "cheat mode" and real driving in the same realm as the bit by bit gaming they've been doing already. But once the system exists the natural process of optimization would push it to the limit of what was capable, and it turned out that was a lot. But by then you're committed, and it would take a lot of fortitude to walk back from such a mistake.

I'm sure the same sorts of dynamics have played out in many other auto makers, though it's notable that some, with a more developed sense of ethics seemingly, have not gone down that road.

SilasX• 11 years ago

Well, they pretty clearly f'd up by designing tests that differ so hard from actual usage. Given that you only have to sample a small set of the cars, it shouldn't be that big a deal to have it go through longer, more representative one, even if it allows greater intra-test variation. (Perhaps compensate by weakening the standard, since it's more accurate that way.)

These four car makers involved in the report differ from VW: they do not have a defeat device in their design.

I think it's a difference of degree, not kind. They all optimize narrowly for one test at the expense of real-world usage. VW just optimized a lot more narrowly.

kazinator3• 11 years ago

It's like compilers. There is optimization by recognizing cases that might occur in programs. And then there is optimization by recognizing ... entire functions featured in specific benchmark programs, or those entire programs themselves.

grecy2• 11 years ago

These four car makers involved in the report differ from VW: they do not have a defeat device in their design. Their results are solely because of the lab-vs-road issue.

At the end of the day though, all the automakers did whatever was required to make them pass the lab testing, with no regard whatsoever for what that actually means on the road.

Maybe it's good on the road, maybe it's not, but in all honesty none of them care.

VW went about it different than the rest of them (that we know about), but the end result is the same - cars that pass in the lab and do who-knows-what on the road.

ibejoeb• 11 years ago

That's not necessarily unreasonable. They complied with the regulation, which is determined by lab test. Perhaps the test is defective, but what else were they supposed to do?

VW acted in bad faith and clearly exhibited the mentality you describe, but it doesn't seem to me that we know enough to determine how these few acted.

It does seem apparent the test is fairly useless. If we want to pursue this type of emissions control, everything I've read suggests that it's very possible to hit the marks in real-world conditions at the expense of power and fuel economy.

mturmon2• 11 years ago

"Its not clear this [lab-vs-road discrepancy] is any kind of problem."

I agree with what you said, except this.

Clearly these NOx emissions are a problem, because they cause smog (like ozone), which is a health hazard. The city where I live has too much ozone for many days of the year, for example.

Unless this problem can be controlled, vehicles like these should not be sold here, and people will have to find other options, or technologists will have to develop better cars.

XorNot• 11 years ago

Except that's not what he was saying. It's been known forever that stated milage and actual mileage differ because the lab test is in a lab.

If people want more accurate tests, then the lab test needs to be modified to be realistic.

Reason077• 11 years ago

Its not clear this is any kind of problem. Reducing emissions in lab tests may very well result in car designs that have reduced road emissions.

This is the logic that European politicians have used in the past.

If there were a direct relationship between lab test emissions and real-world emissions, that approach may be acceptable. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

In the case of NOx, implementing the Euro standards should have resulted in an 80% reduction in emissions over the past 15 years. As the vehicle fleet is renewed, that should have translated into significant reductions in kerbside NOx levels. But this has not happened, and London continues to suffer some of the worst NOx levels in the world.

It turns out that an 80% reduction in lab test emissions has not translated into anything like an 80% reduction in real-world emissions - not even close!

The current system is inadequate because manufacturers simply "design for the test". There is huge real-world variability between vehicles that may record very similar lab test scores. A vehicle may claim similar test score results as another, but in fact have hugely differing levels of emissions in the real world.

Test environments need to reflect real-world conditions!

dongping2• 11 years ago

There is a new testing procedure (WLTP, Worldwide harmonized Light vehicles Test Procedures). Major carmakers just want to delay it:

http://www.transportenvironment.org/news/carmakers-pushing-3...

The emission cycle used now (New European Driving Cycle, or NEDC) is actually a joke, nobody drives like that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_European_Driving_Cycle#/me...

comparing to the new one (WLTP): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_harmonized_Light_veh...

With the new testing procedure in place, you can still cheat like Volkswagen. But it will benefit the customers more, when the OEMs try to game the system by optimizing solely for the cycle.

rurban2• 11 years ago

Since I worked on this SW I have to clarify a bit.

Lab testing of course does emulate real-world driving conditions. Otherwise your tests will not be worth much. Either you play back a recorded existing course (RPS - road profile sequences) or you simulate it, simple steady state and transient cycles. We are automating reproducible test conditions.

But we are here only talking about the different emission tests, where we have 2 major philosophies. The european emission test tracks (NECD), which is also used in India and Asia, which is an highly abstract test with the engine alone driven by a similator simulating multiple real-world driving conditions (a few urban cycles) and the american test on a dyno with a real driver (with varying cycles), so that the american car manifacturers, who traditionally were not so good in designing emission-free engines could traditionally cheat by hiring the best drivers to pass the test.

So Americans have cheated historically the most, but apparently engine manifacturers which couldn't catch up with modern diesel engine development had to cheat also. First it is trivial to cheat, since the test has to be done only once. This is entirely a political game to get the NOx and COx values down, but don't harm their own industries. And esp. Americans seldom use scientifically based values.

And then you have cold starts in reality, which is mostly not tested in the emission cycles tests. Emissions will always be higher in the field than with a properly warmed up engine under lab conditions. So it's no surprise that different measurement methods will lead to different results.

andyl• 11 years ago

I hope all this attention on emissions and cheating helps to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles.

artursapek• 11 years ago

Elon made sure to take a jab at it during the recent Model X event. I hope it is.

venomsnake• 11 years ago

The transition would be easier if there were any available at a decent price.

jakobegger• 11 years ago

There are a bunch of EVs on the market at reasonable price points, eg. Nissan Leaf, Renault Zoe. If you need something bigger you can get a Renault Kangoo or the Nissan NV200. Granted, those aren't very sexy cars, but it's not like Tesla is the only option. You can even get used electric cars already.

jeromeflipo3• 11 years ago

The transition would be very quick if fossil fuels were taxed according to their damage on health and climate change.

EVs would become comparatively cheap in a just few years, and their price would also come down very fast as the production of battery packs increased massively. The technology is already here, we just have to manufacture these cars and set up the charging network (already much cheaper than the fuel station infrastructure).

davidgrenier• 11 years ago

Wow, the Money-Market system does bring out the worst in people.

6502nerdface• 11 years ago

Wow, the Money-Market system does bring out the worst in people.

Yeah man, I don't know what's worse, commercial paper or t-bills.

Spooky23• 11 years ago

When does someone bring up the fact that the government's creation of too aggressive emissions targets is a problem? Massive, risk averse corporations are taking massive risks to achieve "compliance"... Maybe the bar has been set too high?

Karunamon2• 11 years ago

There's some truth to this - the race in the auto industry, as I understand it, has been to increase power and efficiency while decreasing emissions.

Unfortunately, you start running headfirst into the laws of physics.

Power, fuel economy, low emissions. Pick any two.

2sk21• 11 years ago

Currently, there is way too much emphasis on power. Who really needs 200 hp for a family car?

skuhn• 11 years ago

There's also the ever-increasing safety requirements, which have resulted in (among other things) substantially heavier cars over the last few decades. Heavier cars require more power, which creates a bit of a catch-22 when it comes to reducing emissions and improving efficiency.

These safety requirements aren't even necessarily a straight up win for overall safety: the increased height of car beltlines reduces visibility and the increased vehicle weight (and resulting impact force) can worsen accidents involving non-vehicular objects.

An unregulated car industry is certainly not the solution (as proven by these diesel tests among many other examples), but overly strict regulation may only serve to improve regulatory avoidance by manufacturers. Sane, obtainable goals must be set, and both sides need to be involved in keeping things honest. It's absurd that these regulations were set without ensuring that they could reasonably be met and that they were actually being met. It reflects poorly not only on VW and the others, but also on the EPA and their counterparts.

PhasmaFelis• 11 years ago

If it's impossible to make a labor-saving device that doesn't harm bystanders, then the reasonable solution is "do without that device," not "go ahead and let it hurt people."

But citizens and corporations stand united against most attempts to reduce our dependence on cars, so we've got to make do with what few concessions we can push through.

yborg• 11 years ago

So what were the five models that matched the lab test?? I notice that BMW was not mentioned as one of the offenders.

blazespin• 11 years ago

How do you emit 20x Nox and get away with it without some kind of cheat device?

scurvy• 11 years ago

You teach to test. Or in this case, you code exactly to the spec.

frik• 11 years ago

Two different things:

Volkswagen (VW) cheated with its motor software and have a very high NOx emission and use a cheaper less useful catalyst in real world scenario.

Others have a higher NOx emission in real world scenario: Renault, Nissan, Hyundai, Citroen, Fiat, Volvo and Jeep, Mercedes-Benz, Honda, Mazda and Mitsubishi

pmontra• 11 years ago

I remember the December 2014 France plan of limiting or outright banning diesel cars.

http://www.autoblog.com/2014/12/01/france-moves-to-ban-diese...

https://www.carthrottle.com/post/no-diesel-cars-in-paris-by-...

This car makers reaction in June looks funny now

https://europe.autonews.com/article/20150626/ANE/150629983/a...

goodcjw2• 11 years ago

Actually, I am surprised that agencies like EPA don't test diesel emissions in real road condition from the very beginning. Now the question is: whether VW's diesel engine is the only case, or it applies to all types engines from all manufactures in general...

jpollock• 11 years ago

Part of the purpose of the test is for a consumer to be able to compare models. If the test isn't repeatable, it can't perform that job.

Same goes for regulatory testing. It's kind of hard to judge people against a measuring stick if the stick keeps changing size.

ck2• 11 years ago

I wonder what roads will be like in 20 years when batteries and motors reach peak efficiency and lowest cost of production.

I jog on the side of the road every day and I have to wonder what all these cars that cheat emissions are doing to my health and how I can't make the manufacturers pay for my future lung cancer.

guscost• 11 years ago

Which country do you live in?

chovietonline• 11 years ago

The issue appears to be, that lab testing does not emulate real-world driving conditions. So in the field, emissions are higher than in the lab. These four car makers involved in the report differ from VW: they do not have a defeat device in their design. Their results are solely because of the lab-vs-road issue. I think too !

jokoon• 11 years ago

I am on a passenger seat something like 3 times a week, in france, for the same 15 min rides (about 5 different rides in a southern city), and each time there is at least one car who emits a very foul smoke, so foul we immediately roll windows. Most of the time those cars aren't even so old.

I highly suspect french automakers to cheat too.

There needs to be many more random exhaust controls, or at least much tighter annual or biannual checks. I can't even comprehend why it's not the case already.

It's not even a climate change problem, it's a health problem. I caught a cold already 2 times this year, which was followed by a chronic cough that lasted 3 week after the cold went away.

jeromeflipo3• 11 years ago

"It's not even a climate change problem, it's a health problem": NOx being extremely dangerous for humans doesn't make it less of a problem for global warming.

Nitrous Oxide (N2O) has a Global Warming Potential 265-298 times that of CO2 for a 100-year timescale. N2O emitted today remains in the atmosphere for more than 100 years, on average. [0]

[0] http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/n2o.htm...

sentenza• 11 years ago

As far as I know, the NOX problems that were masked by the VW software cheating are not the kind of problems that everybody driving behind the car in question can smell.

As somebody who has driven only Peugeots for 14 years now, I can attest that the exhaust system of any Peugeot at any point in time is primarily occupied with rusting. I have to change some part of the exhaust every odd year. Most likely the smelly French cars you observed also have problems with rusted through exhausts.

Also: As somebody plagued with respiratory problems, I feel your pain. My health massively improved when I moved from the city back to my home town in the German woods.

VeejayRampay• 11 years ago

As a Frenchman, I reckon French manufacturers are gaming the stats/cooking the numbers as well, but I don't share your view on the age of the cars emitting the foulest stenches. 90% of times there's an issue it's a 10+ year-old car and most often from the cheaper end of the price spectrum.

marincounty• 11 years ago

I have a feeling most carmakers have been fiddling with the emission software in order in pass smog. I feel it's just a matter of time and testing, and I don't think it will just be diesels. I looked into Ford's GT-350 and it's, I believe, the fasted stock vechicle Ford has ever produced. It passes smog with flying colors. Engineers claim is just good engineering. I hope that's the case.

I am for reasonable smog requirements. I know how hard I have to tune, and repair my 4 banger in order for it to pass every two years.

My biggest fear is the federal will tighten smog requirements to the point where most older vechicles won't pass. I am poor. I drive a 4 cylinder vechicle. My vechicles are always in tune. I consider myself a enviormentalist. I still hope I can afford to drive in the future? I know I will probally never be able to buy a new vechicle.

Sami_Lehtinen• 11 years ago

Interesting to notice that nobody cares about particles, even it's widely known how dangerous those are. http://oehha.ca.gov/public_info/facts/dieselfacts.html

Four more carmakers join diesel emissions row

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