States were originally mandated based upon EPA air quality testing. It was subsequently proven that NH's pollution was coming in from the industrial zones around the Great Lakes, but the mandate was never amended.
I’m sure we’re getting a great deal of pollution from the great lakes region…but there’s still a lot of car pollution. The EPA only made the testing mandatory in NH after they found significantly higher readings in Manchester and Nashua then any other part of the state. They also saw significantly lower readings when there was little or no traffic (like 3am) in Manchester and Nashua.
I don’t know what the readings are since they started to do the testing.
There’s a snappy bumper sticker I’ve seen lately that says, “I’ll believe corporations are people after Texas executes one.”
Time to bring criminal charges and prosecute the senior executives who conspired to do this, and also punish VW, maybe by prohibiting them from selling products in the US for a period of time.
i wonder in the big scheme of things, as I understand it large trucks are not tested, not forgiving volkswagen, but picking at the needle and ignoring the haystack?
Large truck industry already went through a similar scandal by rigging the trucks software to only run clean for 20 min because thats how long the emissions test lasted. As truck ran longer then 20min emission components were disabled for higher fuel milage at the cost of higher emission. I think it cost the truck industry a billion dollars in fines in the 90s.
One would think that knowing that the truck industry got caught would be enough of a deterrent from a car company trying it.
I believe the emission defeat laws was specifically written or modified because this
California has long had more stringent requirements for diesels than most states. In more recent years the fed requirements have finally become more stringent, but for a long time big rigs got a free pass. Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel wasn’t even mandated in the U.S. until October 2006. And marine and railroad fuel are still exempt.
Car drivers, on the other hand, have been abused for 45 years!
Pvtpublic, I loved the locomotive photo! Stick a “tailpipe sniffer” in that cloud and it would explode!
Oh, yeah, I DID notice the logo on the front…
I perform opacity inspections on the large diesel powered trucks in our fleet
So "no visible smoke?" That's a LONG way from Tier[whatever] Bin[ditto] gas standards...
I don’t understand the logic: how could VW expect to get away with this, worldwide, forever? Just ONE curious person (out of 6,000,000,000) is enough to scuttle the scheme. I’m actually surprised they got away with it as long as they did.
There are trucks that fail, that do not emit like that locomotive. Not anywhere close, in fact
Large diesel powered trucks have to be retrofitted with very expensive exhaust treatment systems, if they are to continue operation in California. It costs thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars . . . per vehicle
maybe you think it’s a joke . . . maybe not
But the cost of staying within compliance can be staggering
I don’t think it’s a joke…I interpreted “opacity” to mean “how well can I see through it,” which sounds like “visible smoke” to me. After all, if you can see through something, and it produces no visible smoke, how “opaque” can it be?
" how could VW expect to get away with this, worldwide, forever?"
That is an excellent question, and it is likely that we will never find out the answer, but…consider this…
Don’t criminals usually think that they are too smart to be caught?
Except for those who are genuinely crazy and who commit crimes in order to be caught and punished, I think that–in general–criminals think that they are smarter than everyone else. Even when they are engaged in fairly obvious schemes to cheat others, criminals almost always seem to think that they are so ingenious that they will never be caught.
Another problem has cropped up for European carmakers - they’re now being accused of cheating the EU fuel consumption tests, which they use to calculate CO2 emissions. Mercedes appears the worst, with cars using about 50% more gas than the tests results would say.
"Vehicles built by Daimler AG’s Mercedes division used 48 percent more fuel on average than their published statistics claim, with gaps exceeding 50 percent on new A-, C- and E-Class models, Brussels-based Transport & Environment said Monday. BMW’s 5-Series and the Peugeot 308 produced differences between real-world and laboratory results of just under 50 percent. Across the industry, the gap widened to 40 percent last year from 8 percent in 2001, with the difference between published specifications and actual fuel use costing a typical driver an additional 450 euros ($500) yearly at the pump."
This answers that question we’ve gotten here in the past: “Why don’t they sell all those great MPG cars here that they sell in Europe?” Turns out they WEREN’T “great”, after all!
Makes our EPA estimated mpgs look pretty good, in comparison.
.I interpreted “opacity” to mean “how well can I see through it,” which sounds like “visible smoke” to me. After all, if you can see through something, and it produces no visible smoke, how “opaque” can it be?
Absorption/Transmittance potayto potahto
They are looking in the “green” band from 550-570nm and anything above 5% “absorption” is failing. They classify any reason the light does not reach the detector as absorption but as you know there are several reasons for this that are not classically defined as absorption.
Anyway, that is a smoke/particulate level your eye would have a hard time determining. It might only look like heat distortion to your eye and most certainly not “opaque” as you’ve defined it. It is opacity as measured by very sensitive electronics…
Regarding the “cat out of the bag” aspect- it would only take one disgruntled former employee that was in the know. How did they plan to keep that aspect in the bag indefinitely??
“It seems to have gotten a bit worse for Herr Winterkorn”
Not to be flippant but the historical escape route from Germany is through Roma enroute to Argentina. I think it was the guy before him though that was the real culprit.
