I’m sure they hope the dialog with the responsible authorities will go as well as the one about NO2, that ended with the goverments of the EU countries making a change to the limits … upwards.
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How long have they been doing this? And why, exactly, should anyone believe that tripe?
How long before the “dialogue with responsible authorities” includes the words “Turn around, and put your hands behind your back”?
if you care about global warming, and many peoples and societies in Europe do, it’s useful. Otherwise, it’s a proxy for fuel consumption and a indication of how much of certain taxes you can expect to pay.
I’m sort of glad that VW has released this information-- it needs to clean house, and expecting NOx cheating to be the full extent of the problem would be naive.
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DMCA didn’t save VW from getting busted. Not one bit.
It was a little more complicated than just using the ODB port to read emissions (they actually hooked up hardware to the tailpipes and put a few hundred miles on it), but the researchers who released the first paper that started this whole mess were more or less working with a black box.
They can cite the DMCA all they like, but the regulators have the tools to catch them in the act. VW is not special in any way in this regard, since they are equally protected in California (where the study was done) by the DMCA.
VW got caught. How many other Sony BMG/VW/? fuckers haven’t been caught because the researchers looked at proprietary software, then at the DMCA, and said, “yeah, no thanks”? So even though I take your point that it didn’t save VW in this case, it has undoubtedly acted as a chilling effect on research.
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Completely agree on so many other companies being protected. The DMCA is the devil, I was just making the point that it won’t save car manufacturers.
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Yes: for every gallon of fuel, a certain amount of carbon must come out, and CO2 is the least environmentally harmful form. If you burn a gallon of fuel and produce less CO2, you must be producing more of something worse.
It’s the basic arithmetic (“stoichiometry”) of car exhaust.
The driving issue is how much fuel you burn, and the answer is, literally, YMMV, since the dawn of official mileage ratings, for every make of car.
[edit:] @xeni, his situation doesn’t warrant the headline, “Dieselgate gets worse.” If there’s something substantially worse here, something we should care about more than red-tape errors appearing under a microscope, you haven’t made a case. I think you would agree that where science and politics intersect, we want to stick to skepticism, science literacy and numeracy (like paying attention to ratios and orders of magnitude).
You aren’t burning a gallon of fuel. You’re driving 100 km. Whether this takes more than 3.8 liters of fuel or less than 3.8 liters of fuel depends on how efficient the engine is.
Of course, fuel cells emit only H20, and batteries, nothing at all-- assuming a non-carbon intensive charging source, of course,
Of course you’re both driving km’s and burning fuel, and CO2 per 100km was on the form VW was filling out, but amount of fuel burnt goes more directly to the environmental point. It’s easy to know, and from it, without knowing how many km driven or what make or model of car, a car owner or gas station owner or environmental scientist can calculate carbon footprint directly. The point is there’s been no [edit:] environmental CO2 secret or surprise with this VW thing.
(You’re not saying that people drive the same distance regardless of fuel efficiency or cost, are you?)
Yes, H2 fuel cells and H2 piston engines produce only H2O, and hydrocarbon fuel cells produce CO2 and H2O in the same proportions as piston engines with the same fuel. Currently, most electricity comes from burning coal, which produces a little more CO2 per kWH than burning oil. A future with battery-charging (and H2-producing) sources that produce less net atmospheric CO2 will be good, other things equal.
People commute, day in and day out. A fairly constant floor, I’d say. Sure, they could move closer to their work places, but it’s not as one has the liberty to say: “my petrol bill is too high-- I’m not going in today.” Over the long term, sure, there are solutions, such as getting an apartment closer to ones place of work, or getting a new job.
In a society where transportation choices are plentiful, it’s possible to choose to commute those hundreds of kilometers per week using public transport, or a more fuel efficient car, or a bicycle. But it’s very difficult to choose, on a short term basis, not to travel “commute distance times 10”.
plus: L/ 100 km has the advantage of being easier to understand than miles per gallon.
Didn’t know Ducati’s a VW brand.
It’s a fuel efficiency concern. Just because you’re combusting it completely, it doesn’t mean that the combustion is efficiently translating to mechanical or electrical energy. In other words, you’re getting poorer mileage. This changes the tax classification in a lot of countries, which is, contrary to @FutureNerd’s assertion: A pretty shitty thing to lie about if you’re a business. Did VW lie about it as opposed to make some errors? I dunno, but at this point skepticism is highly warranted.
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Short-term, no, it won’t… But it’ll slowly render long commutes unsustainable, so either people will start moving closer to their workplaces, workplaces will move closer to their employees, or new businesses will form in local areas. Possibly it will also render public transport for longer commutes more cost-effective and the pressure to produce more of that will increase.
It’s a long-term effect, and short-term, people will suffer. I’m not even going to make the argument that we’ll be better off in the long run, because some people will really suffer.
But it’s very difficult to choose, on a short term basis, not to travel “commute distance times 10”.
The elasticity of demand for car fuel has been studied, and I hope I can relocate that reference.
VW’s prediction of CO2/km is not what an environmentalist would use to estimate VW’s contribution to CO2. And, it’s not what a VW owner would use. The km divides out. CO2 is proportional to volume of fuel. So VW’s mis-predicting or misreporting CO2/km is not a way for them to hide CO2.
This changes the tax classification in a lot of countries, which is, contrary to @FutureNerd’s assertion: A pretty shitty thing to lie about if you’re a business.
I didn’t say whether it’s a shitty thing to lie about. I said it’s not relevant to expectations about how much CO2 VWs produce. And if not, what kind of relevance does it have?
So far we know that this is a regulatory detail, and environmental regulation overall is a sick and misleading game. I don’t believe that cheating on regulations, or sticking to the letter of regulations only, is proportional to actual damage, nor morally equivalent to damage to the environment. I’m angry that people treat regulatory compliance as a proxy moral yardstick. That’s worse than just throwing up your hands. It’s actively endorsing a bad way of judging.
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