Random Stuff
Despite the fact that the latest poll says that about 69% of the people don’t want to change the country’s flag, New Zealand adds fifth ‘Red Peak’ design to flag shortlist after public pressure.
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The VW board wants this over with, not dribbling out for months. They are conducting their own investigation to rid the corporation of anyone directly involved in this mess. The firm that BP used was good at negotiating a settlement. BP has since tried to back away from the settlement, but that’s BP. It sounds like VW wants this settled ASAP.
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One of the things that has come out is that it appears that *all* of the European car makers have been cheating, though none so blatantly as VW, and their governments have been wink wink nod nod all the way because they viewed reducing fuel consumption (and thus money spent importing oil) as more important than clean air. I think things are about to become very… interesting… in the Eurozone…
Meanwhile Fiat’s been moaning and groaning for the past five years that they can’t import small diesels into the US because the equipment needed to make them meet emissions standards costs over $8K and simply won’t fit on anything smaller than a large SUV or pickup truck. Now we know how VW could sell small diesels in the USA for under $30K… they cheated. SIGH.
When they computerized cars the people regulating pollution needed to up their game and hire some quality IT people, or just put the cars into a sealed booth and measure the actual output instead of estimating.
The VW board is still looking for the people in management who came up with this plan.
My guess, Bryan, is that there aren’t any people in management who came up with this plan. Rather, I imagine the conversation went like this:
Boss: “Give me a diesel car that both gets 40mpg and meets USA Tier II emissions standards.”
Engineers: “But that’s impossible. The only way to meet USA NOx standards is to run the engine rich and then it will not get 40mpg.”
Boss: “You’re just being stubborn. If you refuse to obey, I will fire you and find engineers who can do the job.”
Engineers: “Uhm… okay….”
(Engineers go figure out how to make it both get 40mpg and meet USA Tier II emissions standards — i.e., by cheating.)
Engineers: “Okay, we made it both get 40mpg and meet USA Tier II emissions standards!”
Boss: “There. Was that so hard?”
I.e., I doubt there is a boss anywhere in the company who directly ordered the engineers to cheat, or has direct knowledge of the engineers cheating. Instead, he ordered the engineers to do something that was impossible to do unless the engineers cheated — and they did so.
That is the most probable scenario, Badtux. I seriously doubt anyone in management knows enough about the system used to even be aware that this was possible. Most, if not all, German auto companies use the same pollution control system for diesel engines, so this problem may well go beyond VW and it’s brands.
It appears that it does go beyond VW. There’s now information coming out that most of the European diesels can’t meet even the more lenient European standards for NOx emissions. I’m also now seriously suspecting that the new Chevy Cruze “clean diesel” is going to end up as part of the scandal too, because we’re running up against fundamental laws of chemistry here that make it hard to handle NOx emissions on a diesel without a *lot* of expensive equipment and a big tank of urea that gets refilled every time the diesel gets refilled.
I knew that Daimler used the same system as VW, and VW owns Audi, Bentley, and Scandia. There are already rumors about BMW. I would bet that they are using a single-sourced emission system, and the designers considered it a feature not a bug.