Cummins pickup truck engines tricked air quality controls, feds say

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/12/22/cummins-truck-engines-defeat-devices-feds-say/72013430007/

by rokkitmensch • 3 years ago

175 105 3 years ago

causality0• 3 years ago

It's sad that the largest ever penalty is still less money than the company made off the crime.

gmane• 3 years ago

This isn't even the first time Cummins has been hit with the largest settlement for emissions controls defeat devices![0]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20151002043823/http://www2.epa.g...

chewmieser• 3 years ago

Wow, and then had the audacity to continue the practice beyond that? That fine should be significantly more severe…

distortionfield• 3 years ago

It's America, you get a bonus for this behavior, not a fine.

lifeisstillgood• 3 years ago

VW did it

Renault probably did it

These guys probably did

I think there was a point where regulators said "diesel puts out lung damaging levels of pollutants killing X people a year. We shall either ban diesel engines ... or make manufacturers make diesel engines that don't pollute that badly"

So they set a safe level.

And no manufacturer has been able to achieve the technology to meet that level.

I know some manufacturers claim they can, but honestly that's like a cyclist claiming that they won the Tour De France without drugs. After so many cyclists have been caught (about half since 1990) it's really hard to take the drug free claim seriously - just as it's hard to take the "our diesel engine does it really honestly guv"

chrismartin• 3 years ago

One more reason it's time to transition away from burning stuff to produce energy.

AmVess2• 3 years ago

Transition to what, exactly? Pixie dust? Unicorn farts? There's nothing to transition to.

luma• 3 years ago

It’s actually worse than that - they set goals and then manufacturers started lying to meet those goals, which told the regulators that those goals were attainable and so they set new goals. The entire notion of clean diesel is a farce and has been built on lies from the outset.

FPGAhacker• 3 years ago

It's a typical corporate effect. Management, with no expertise or even competency, creates absurd schedules and goals and thinks that somehow, just by fiat and edict, they can bend physics and make it so.

Retric• 3 years ago

No, some market participants did so.

However, customers and regulators had different requirements so meeting both was difficult without cheating.

4wsn2• 3 years ago

I know this is a popular take, but the blindspot is commercial engines.

bypass emissions sensors on 630,000 RAM pickup truck engines

In this case, and in nearly _every report of a scandal_, the issue is with passenger vehicle engines, not commercial vehicle engines.

Diesel engines can be engineered to meet emissions requirements without cheating, they just aren't except for commercial use.

fragmede• 3 years ago

Why is that? Are the parts necessary to meet emissions requirements extra expensive and so are only worth installing on commercial vehicles which are more expensive, vs passenger vehicles have a different profit margin, or is it something else, like commerical vehicles have lower standards for noise or higher standards for maintenance?

SigmundA• 3 years ago

Not surprising, the commercial version of the ISB in question only goes up to 360hp rating, usually they run 300 or 340 hp. The commercial versions all have SCR (Urea Injection) along with DPF an EGR.

In the pickup it's rated 400 hp. I wouldn't be surprised if in the pursuit of HP / Torque to keep up with Ford and Chevy's diesels they cut corners on the emissions. The hotter you run diesel the more powerful it gets, the leaner the more efficient it gets, hot and lean makes NOx in the combustion chamber from oxygen and nitrogen, the more NOX the more SCR you need to reduce it back in the exhaust.

sottol2• 3 years ago

Used to be known as emissions cheating before VW, now it's emission fraud.

Imo every manufacturer does/did it for gas and diesel engines. I've heard of gas cars in the 90s assuming that they're on a test stand if you rolled down the window shortly after starting and kept it down and reduced power output. And stories like that.

KennyBlanken2• 3 years ago

I've never heard the bit about windows and I don't see how that wouldn't be very obvious in a pre-canbus car; "why does the ECU have a sense line to the driver's side window?"

What is easy is looking for the car to be started and then held at a raised idle. Once cars had traction/stability control, the ECU could look for mismatched front/rear wheel speed, or the steering wheel not being turned more than a few degrees.

avidiax• 3 years ago

And no manufacturer has been able to achieve the technology to meet that level.

Urea-injection seems to work (that's what Mercedes does). But it requires another tank and special equipment.

And VW could meet the emissions requirements. That was the cheat. When they detected that they were being tested, they tuned the engine to meet emissions requirements. During normal use, the engine would make better power or efficiency but higher emissions.

ToucanLoucan• 3 years ago

It is wild to me that OEM's can straight up include tech to defeat emissions testing and be allowed to continue building engines after that is found. Like, all regulators should operate from the assumption that the entities they're regulating are working in good faith: but once it's been demonstrated they are not, how can you ever trust a product they produce again? They and every other company found to be doing this should be barred from producing engines for good. Or at the very fucking least, be subject to an INCREDIBLE level of scrutiny regarding their software for a solid many years to follow. Like, every single line audited for compliance.

mh-• 3 years ago

I believe it needed the efficiency gains to meet MPG (L/100km) requirements.

So it really couldn't meet both. At least not at the same time.

jmvoodoo• 3 years ago

I owned a Dodge ram diesel model that had one of these engines. It had urea injection, and I had to maintain the 2nd tank.

Gibbon1• 3 years ago

Random idea. Change emissions requirements based on GPS coordinates. That's sort of what they do in shipping. Ships burn cleaner fuel in port. If a semi is driving around Los Angeles low emissions are important. In middle of Kansas not as much.

That said phasing out diesels is better idea over the medium run.

wannacboatmovie2• 3 years ago

Is this a side effect of impossible regulations put in place by bureaucrats with no technical background whatsoever?

The same ones that declared everyone will be driving EVs by 2030.

kadoban• 3 years ago

The regulations are very possible, proven by the "meet the emisions regulations" mode that then gets turned off during normal operation.

dclowd9901• 3 years ago

I think everyone was doing it. After VW got caught, literally every other foreign car maker pulled all diesel models out of the US market. The only manufacturers still selling diesel here are domestic (and maybe MB’s Sprinter?), and that’s only because 10,000 lb GVWR diesel vehicles are allowed to bypass emissions.

Syonyk6• 3 years ago

Is there any detailed information anyone can find on what they allegedly did, at a technical level? "Defeat device" is such a broad category of term that it's useless for understanding the details of what it's claimed they did.

The Justice.gov writeup [0] isn't any better.

The company allegedly installed defeat devices on 630,000 model year 2013 to 2019 RAM 2500 and 3500 pickup truck engines. The company also allegedly installed undisclosed auxiliary emission control devices on 330,000 model year 2019 to 2023 RAM 2500 and 3500 pickup truck engines.

I'd be interested in reading technical details on what, exactly, they did or didn't supposedly do.

[0] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/statement-attorney-general-me...

kotaKat• 3 years ago

Best I have off hand is one of the example recall notices which just says "software update" for the emissions calibration:

https://www.chrysler.com/universal/webselfservice/pdf/VB6.pd...

Guvante• 3 years ago

IIRC other manufacturers would detect the usage pattern of tests and run cleaner as a form of bypass.

Similarly you could lie on the OC2 response.

Syonyk6• 3 years ago

Sure, I know what other manufacturers did.

I want to know the technical details of what Cummins allegedly did "enough that they're not arguing a massive fine, while claiming they didn't do it on purpose."

Claiming they "installed defeat devices" isn't nearly enough detail. How did it alter either the engine combustion cycle or the emissions control system behavior?

oooyay• 3 years ago

I'm guessing they're doing it during state emissions certification. When they do those tests they hook up to your OBD2 port [1] and generally a tube goes onto your exhaust. It'd be pretty trivial to detect, "Cable is hooked up, exhaust has more back pressure. Tune engine to X mode."

1: https://www.progressive.com/answers/what-is-car-emissions-te...

Scoundreller3• 3 years ago

I thought they went away with the tube testing once the OBD data got good enough. Trick to passing the tube tests was to take your vehicle on a nice long ride to get hot (especially the cat).

What I disliked about state emissions testing is that they didn’t do analysis/sampling of data to take an evidence-based approach to target testing against vehicles that tended to fail.

spacecadet8• 3 years ago

Engine computers can easily be reprogrammed to make the engine run at all sorts of different operating bands. You could easily detect state emissions equipment, since it must pull information from the ECU. To me- these devices are either pre-programmed operating modes that produce clean emissions but the vehicle would not operate under this tune (emissions testing is often not under load) and so once back on the road, returns to the original operating mode. OR, entirely fake modules created to trick emissions systems without altering the operating mode.

PS check out Megasquirt if you want to learn about DIY Fuel Injection. I ran a home brew Megasquirt/Megaspark system off an IBM laptop in my Volvo 740 Turbo back in the 90s, one of the things that got me into hardware.

dcormier• 3 years ago

VW's detected emissions testing when the steering wheel was never turned.

KennyBlanken2• 3 years ago

Manufacturers were doing this well before OBD2. They'd look for a condition where the car was started and then idle raised and held raised, for example.

Once things like CANBUS became popular, as well as ECUs getting integrated with ABS/traction control, they'd look for drive wheels spinning and but not undriven wheels. When stability control systems became a thing, they could monitor steering angle and look for the car moving but not being steered, ditto for the accelerometer not detecting acceleration and cornering.

Tuners knew all about this shit because they disassembled ECU code and looked at ROM formats. They could point you right to the table used for when the ECU thought it was undergoing emissions testing. The cheating was plain as day and no government regulators cared enough to look. They probably even knew it was going on.

Here's the billion dollar question: the ECUs aren't developed by the car manufacturers. They aren't even coded by thr manufacturers. The car manufacturer just puts in maps for various engine parameters. The ECUs are supplied by companies like Bosch, Hitachi, Nippon-Denso, Magneti-Marelli, and so on.

They almost certainly knew this was going on and were complicit. Why have none of them been held responsible?

calamari4065• 3 years ago

It's actually surprising to me just how differently an engine can perform with different tuning. The ECU can control all sorts of parameters depending on the engine. Things like fuel/air mix, ignition timing, valve timing, shutting down some cylinders, skipping ignition cycles, a lot more than you'd ever expect.

You can tune an engine to sound like a braap braap muscle car or have it be nearly silent. You can burn all your fuel to get a few more horses or blow black smoke, or you can tune it to consume no fuel, emit nothing, and produce nearly no torque.

Plenty of people tune their engines with aftermarket kit and/or software. There are even simple plug and play kits of extremely dubious quality any average Joe can install.

What these defeat devices do is detect the testing equipment or conditions and tunes the engine in a way that meets requirements. Once the vehicle is out of testing, it reverts to the factory tuning which usually gives more power at the cost of illegally high emissions.

That's really all it is, there's not too much magic involved. Just simple cheating.

throwup238• 3 years ago

What's so much worse is that this isn't the first time they've been caught doing this shit: https://www.epa.gov/enforcement/cummins-engine-company-diese...

That enforcement action is from 1998. There was even a consent decree but they've been doing this bullshit for a quarter century. It isn't a small isolated incident, it's literally built into the culture of the company. We need a corporate death penalty for repeat offenders like this.

stefan_• 3 years ago

US company so a penalty that is less than the profit, "no wrongdoing admitted" (its a defeat device!), no criminal investigation (there would be precedent), press release goes out on the Friday before Christmas.

cyanydeez2• 3 years ago

companies are voting blocs, so , you know, democracy inaction.

sottol2• 3 years ago

Interesting that it's called systematic tricking when Cummins does it, with VW it's just criminal fraud?

AmVess2• 3 years ago

Harder for VW to cut checks to the people who matter.

TheLoafOfBread2• 3 years ago

US company caught by US regulator vs European company caught by US regulators.

And then Americans are surprised when Europe does not play ball with US big tech industry in EU.

Hamuko• 3 years ago

I'm already going to wager that they're not going to be shat on quite as hard as Volkswagen was, just like Fiat-Chrysler wasn't.

BugsJustFindMe• 3 years ago

The company does not admit wrongdoing and says no one in the company acted in bad faith

Fuck me, though, right? I know the government can't do it, but this kind of statement itself should merit some kind of additional punishment.

peyton• 3 years ago

I mean, we don’t have any details yet. What if the “defeat device” is something like “if $SENSOR is reading a little high, turn on service light and operate as normal otherwise” As a customer I’d be pissed if my truck wouldn’t run.

e28eta• 3 years ago

Not going to pass an emissions test with a service light on. But I agree that more details are necessary before we can know that the statement is false.

tantalor• 3 years ago

That's par for a settlement

JoshTko• 3 years ago

It's about time these offenses are considered crimes against humanity and have mandatory criminal prosecution at executive levels.

arrosenberg• 3 years ago

Until we send the executives to jail, the fraud will continue.

thuuuomas• 3 years ago

Here’s my pithy slogan advocating this -

If your safety systems fail, we pierce the corporate veil.

gnabgib• 3 years ago

Discussed 3 hours ago: Cummins Fined $1.6B for Diesel Defeat Devices in 630K RAM Trucks[0] (80 points, 124 comments). Maybe don't need both?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38746664

orenlindsey• 3 years ago

There's no way to make a diesel or gasoline car that's not actively bad for the environment. Electric is the only way. (And maybe hydrogen, but that's quite a ways off)

cyanydeez2• 3 years ago

unfortunately, saving the environment is currently a luxury item.

Syonyk6• 3 years ago

An electric car is bad for the environment (described generally, not in the laser-focused "CO2 emissions are the only thing that matters!" modern sense) in almost all the same ways an ICE vehicle is, just with a reduction in runtime carbon emissions, and with quite a bit more mining going into the raw materials.

Hydrogen, meanwhile, is nonsensical in every way you care to look at the problem, unless you look at it through the lens of "petrochemical suppliers who want to ensure that a future vehicle fleet needs to fill up at stations they supply with fuel that can be rapidly delivered in a 5 minute window." And maybe shipping, but even there, I think metal-air batteries that are smelted for recharging are likely to work better. And that's before you get into what a devious little pain in the ass hydrogen is to deal with at a chemical/technical level.

AnthonyMouse2• 3 years ago

An electric car is bad for the environment (described generally, not in the laser-focused "CO2 emissions are the only thing that matters!" modern sense) in almost all the same ways an ICE vehicle is, just with a reduction in runtime carbon emissions

No it isn't. You can charge them entirely with renewable sources (or nuclear), reducing traditional air pollutants in addition to CO2. This is even true when still using fossil fuel power plants, which emit fewer pollutants per unit energy than small engines.

Electric cars use regenerative braking, reducing the use of friction braking that releases brake dust into the environment.

and with quite a bit more mining going into the raw materials.

Electric cars are only marginally heavier than gasoline cars because electric motors are light and the batteries take the place of not only the fuel tank but the entire powertrain and emissions equipment. It's not obvious how mining two tons of raw materials is dramatically different than mining 1.9 tons of raw materials, and in any event the raw materials can be recycled from older electric cars once there are older electric cars to recycle.

maxerickson• 3 years ago

Modern gasoline vehicles don't really release noxious emissions, at least if they are well maintained. Of course CO2 is not benign, but electric and hydrogen will also have CO2 emissions at this point, just further up the supply chain for the energy.

barbazoo• 3 years ago

Depending on where you are there could be a huge difference. For me it’s a CO2e reduction of >99%.

pardoned_turkey• 3 years ago

Is there any article explaining what they actually did, or are alleged to have done? With the VW scandal, there was a fairly in-depth discussion of the technical aspects of it. But all the articles about Cummins seem exceedingly vague.

IIRC, VW had code to detect emissions testing and reduce performance at that time. What did Cummins do?

thelastgallon• 3 years ago

Air pollution kills 10 million/year[1]. All the legacy carmakers + fossil fuel companies are responsible for this. Nearly all the big car manufactures have done this[2-6], and probably continue to do so, these small fines are not a deterrent, just cost of business.

1) Air Pollution Kills 10 Million People a Year. Why Do We Accept That as Normal?https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/environment/air-p...

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

3) ICCT and ADAC showed the biggest deviations from Volvo, Renault, Jeep, Hyundai, Citroën and Fiat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal

4) “Disguise, defeat and deny:” Toyota loses appeal and must pay $1.3bln for dodgy diesel filters: https://thedriven.io/2023/03/28/disguise-defeat-and-deny-toy...

5) Mercedez-Benz faces over 300,000 UK claims over diesel emissions: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/merced...

6) Daimler to Settle U.S. Emissions Charges for $2.2 Billion: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/business/daimler-emission...

bastard_op• 3 years ago

I was just thinking "wasn't Volkswagen vilified for this not long ago?"

So basically all automakers with diesel do the needful and fake around results anyways. I guess these rules are merely up for interpretation loosely, and this is why the planet is dying.

LiquidPolymer• 3 years ago

I have an old Dodge Ram with a Cummins 12 valve engine. The next generation version of my same truck came with a 24 valve engine and more emissions controls. The 24 valve Cummins engine is famous for the ability to re-tune and "delete" features on the engine for better performance and dirtier emissions.

The 12 valve I own only needs a screwdriver to change the fuel mix and increase horsepower. These engines are considered highly desirable because they are very simple with unusual durability (the design comes from Cummins industrial engine product line). When you see the a-holes on YouTube "rolling coal" it is typically from one of these Cummins engines.

These are older than the trucks mentioned in this article, but I wonder if Cummins continued to allow easy adjustments to defeat emissions controls.

twisteriffic• 3 years ago

The VP44 24v didn't have any more emissions controls than the 12v in the traditional sense. No cat, no DPF, no EGR. It just ran cleaner because of tighter control on injection timing and volume due to the switch from a purely mechanical pump/injectors to electromechanical pump in the VP44, then to fully electronically controlled injectors in the common rail after 2002.

This change to electronic control is what made dial-your-horsepower and emissions skirting like this so trivial.

userbinator• 3 years ago

Isn't one of the biggest allures to having a diesel truck is being able to roll coal?

(Not judging, I personally like seeing it once in a while. Everything in moderation, including moderation...)

Cummins pickup truck engines tricked air quality controls, feds say

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