Avocet

The global cigarette market is pretty big too, but I'm not sure it's a good justification for smoking cigarettes! I'm not sure why you think "the EU" wants all cars to be factory spec, when in the same sentence, you go on to say that even the strictest country in the EU permits modification? I don't have a problem with modification as long as it doesn't compromise safety or environmental performance. I think that's probably the EU position too? Certainly in Germany, they have far stricter requirements on mods than we do, but all they really ask, is that the mods still meet safety and legal requirements. Is that really such a bad thing? If I had to choose between German speed limits and having to make sure your car was up to scratch, or British speed limits and a more laissez-faire approach to vehicle modification, I think I know which I'd prefer. And yes, I was aware of that consultation. In fact, I put in a response.

Back in the day when cars had taper roller wheel bearings, it was worth checking for play, but I haven't come across a modern one that has developed play before it has started making a noise. They often go for months, making a droning noise, before you can actually feel any play at all. By the time the play is evident, the bearing is well and truly "mullered"! Yes, we modify the vehicles for wheelchair access and other converters will also make modifications, but we have to re-approve them afterwards! (Not that the approval authorities would take much notice of wheel spacers, because they're not a type approval subject in their own right. If we fitted wheel spacers, they'd be more concerned with whether the wheelarches still covered the requisite amount of tyre circumference than anything else! They might make us do another braking stability test, I guess, (particularly if we offer it with a space-saver spare), but none of the type approval tests cover a blowout situation. Blowouts are very rare - that's why we're not all dead. I used to d a bit with kit cars, years ago, and some of the deathtraps I used to see, just left me shaking my head in disbelief. Of course, they weren't "safe", but the accident records were completely below the radar because there were so few of them and they did so few miles, so there didn't look to be a safety problem. Normally, with these situations, absolutely nothing happens. By the time the wheel bearings are worn out, it probably won't be the same owner's car anyway. It will be someone else's problem. It only ever becomes a big deal when there's a fatal accident and some accident investigator discovers it had wheel spacers (or the wrong wheel offset - which has the same effect) and puts into a report that they could have contributed to the accident. That's when the trouble starts. Not sure about the significance of the letter. It looks like one of those "Dear government agency - I know these cars are dodgy as hell and don't conform to their type approvals, but they're only for a show anyway and we're not going to register them on your roads" letter?

What happens in motorsport is irrelevant. It's not like it isn't hazardous anyway! If Skoda sell them like that and the track isn't as quoted on the CoC, they're doing so illegally. Dealers might fit them "post-registration", in which case, the dealer carries the can if anything goes wrong. How on earth do you "service" or "maintain" a modern wheel bearing?!

That would certainly be my preference. However, plenty of people do fit them, and they don't seem to die horribly! As a young lad, I put some (pretty big - maybe about 30mm) spacers on my Reliant. (Don't laugh, it was a 4-wheeled one!) and I thought it looked really cool. However, I didn't really know what I was doing, back then.

"Track", in engineering terms, is from the centre of one wheel to the centre of the opposite one on the same axle. To answer J.R.'s question, the centre of the tyre tread should be the centre of the wheel width too, measured between the tyre bead seating surfaces. Yes, there might be small variations due to camber, but for all practical purposes, the two are the same. This will only coincide with the mounting face for the wheel on the hub, where the offset is zero (ET = 0). A couple of things about wheel spacers though: 1. Already mentioned, but yes, if they're not "hub-centric", you give the wheel bolts a very hard time and run the risk of the wheels not being centred on the axles. 2. You give your wheel bearings a harder time, because you're usually increasing the leverage on them. Imagine a car with 1000mm wheel spacers as an exaggeration and you can see that he loads on the bearings goes up. Whether that translates to a wheel bearing life going down from (say) 100,000 miles to 90,000 or 60,000 or whatever, depends on how much of a safety factor was in the original design, and how much of a wheel spacer has been put on. 3. On some suspension systems (e.g. McPherson struts), it puts a bending load into the damper piston - again, reducing life and adding friction. 4. Perhaps the most serious effect, is that you change the "scrub radius" on a steered wheel. It's the distance between where the steering axis (kingpin axis) hits the ground and where the centre of the tyre contact patch hits the ground. If they're both in the same place, you have "zero scrub". Few cars are like this, because it makes them feel horrible and the steering can be very heavy unless the car is rolling. "Positive scrub" was more common, as it's quite hard to get enough space to fit the discs and calipers in, without it. Back in the day, a front wheel blowout often lead to a crash - sometimes fatal at higher speeds), as the steering wheel was ripped out of the driver's hands. This is because you get a sudden drag on the side of the deflated tyre, and because of the positive scrub, the extra drag tries to turn that wheel to full lock. Over the last few decades, manufacturers have gone to simple piston sliding calipers, and one of the reasons, is to allow the wheels to be mounted a bit further inboard. Many cars have a small amount of "negative scrub" these days, so that when you get the sudden tyre deflation (and resulting extra drag), it actually tries to steer the wheel the OPPOSITE way round the kingpin axis, thereby counteracting the extra drag, to a large extent, so you have much less tendency for the wheel to be pulled out of your hands and can stop in a straighter line. A similar effect occurs when braking on an icy road and one wheel hits a patch of ice. The tendency (before negative scrub) was for the car to steer towards whichever side had the most grip. Obviously, fitting a wheel space, stuffs-up the original steering geometry in that respect, and the car comes potentially much more dangerous. Fortunately, few people suffer a front tyre blowout in their whole driving careers. If anyone's curious and has access to it, the front and rear axle track of your car, in the condition in which it left the factory, is on Field 30 of the Certificate of Conformity.

Gosh! I've never seen that before! The things (from a homologation point of view) that limit towing capacity, are usually either brakes or hill start capability. Clearly it is capable of doing a hill start with 2 tonnes on the back, so it's unlikely to be that. At the same time, I'm struggling to believe that the 200 horse one would have less capable brakes than the 150! Looking at the two asterisks, I see it has a note about towbar prep. This suggests (to me at least!) that this is stuff-all to do with homologation, and that they're just hiding behind "homologation" as a reason. I could believe that the 200 horse one might need cooling system mods for towing, but that's not a homologation issue. Homologation is only about safety and environmental performance - both of which would be excellent, once your engine has blown up! But then again, if it's a cooling problem, how could it be OK to tow 2 tonnes?! Doesn't make sense at all... very strange....

The driver's door sticker will only quote the maximum train weight, and that would be for the braked trailer. This is particularly sneaky, as I would look at it and think "oh, it's OK for towing up to 2 tonnes".

Certainly true, but I think the article was talking about the nation's "car pool" as a whole, rather than just new cars. And yes, many petrol cars now have GPFs to meet the emissions requirements, but that's fairly recent, because unlike diesels, they don't produce much by way of particulates. (Both petrol and diesel cars produce the smaller particulates, but diesels produce more of the larger ones too). I think we just don't hear much about GPFs because they're not really troublesome. They regenerate much more easily, because petrol engine exhausts run hotter naturally.

That's pretty much the same view, isn't it? Diesels better for climate change, petrols better for air quality.

Figures published by the manufacturer not reflecting real-life usage, is not uncommon.

Yes, that's not uncommon. WLTP has made figures a fair bit closer to what the average driver can expect, but there are still discrepancies. WhatCar was one of the first to start doing this when they tested cars: https://www.whatcar.com/tag/true-mpg

Indeed, but I'm not sure what point you're making, that we haven't already discussed?

My job's a bit "niche" really. I started in the late 1980s, working as a design engineer for a sports car company. That gave me my first encounter with the world of "homologation". I then moved to work at a university for a small consultancy and test house that dealt mainly with specialist vehicles of various sorts. Just over 20 years ago, my wife got the chance of a good job in rural Cumbria where there was no car industry (to speak of) so I had to think of something I could do largely from home. Homologation lends itself to that pretty well... I now have 3 jobs, really. I work for a company that converts medium and large MPVs into wheelchair accessible vehicles (including the new Caddy, as it happens!), but I'm also paid by the industry as a whole, to monitor and lobby for appropriate changes and concessions to proposed vehicle regulations for our sector, so I work for the UK and our EU trade associations too. Converting a vehicle for wheelchair access means dropping the floor, usually, and that typically means displacing fuel tank, exhaust and AdBlue tank. That would be sufficient to invalidate the base vehicle's emissions approval. Ordinarily, that would mean us having to hold our own emissions approval for the converted vehicle, but that would be both impractical and ruinously expensive. Plus (as we found out in the wake of the VW scandal), the bloody cars we were converting, would not have met the emissions requirements anyway - even before we converted them)! Long story short, I've been doing this for a long time now, but emissions has been kept (as far as I'm able) at arm's length, which is why I have very limited direct experience of emissions testing - and I'd like it to stay that way! (It is fearsome in its complexity. There are homologation engineers who specialise in emissions and nothing else. I have to be a bit of a "jack of all trades"). We have enough trouble managing the structural requirements (seat belt anchorages, seat belts, seat strength, fuel tanks and so on). However, I do attend wide motor industry regulatory meetings, so I get to hear the major manufacturers talking about forthcoming emissions regulations, I speak to various type approval authorities (usually the Vehicle Certification Agency in the UK, but also RDW in Holland and (since Brexit) STA in Sweden, in the course of my work. Those guys are bound by various professional conduct requirements, so they can't actually "dish the dirt" on specific manufacturers and their tests, but they've said very interesting things "in general terms". Lastly, my lobbying work does, of course, mean that I talk to the civil servants (both in Brussels and London) who draft the regulations. Anyway, getting back to your story above, I feel a bit sorry for VW when it comes to CO2 discrepancies. CO2 emissions and fuel consumption are directly related. ALL ICE car engines have very similar efficiencies, so the CO2 figures and the fuel consumption figures are very close to being proportional to each other. Certainly, for all practical purposes, we can regard them as being proportional. Under the NDEC requirements, "official" fuel consumption figures were widely regarded as a joke. Few cars (VWs or otherwise) ever gave their official MPG figures. Therefore, their CO2 figures were similarly inaccurate. As mentioned previously, that's a separate discussion on whether or not it constitutes "cheating", because (in my view at least) that's as much a failing of regulation as anything else. In the case you mention above, I think the authorities were just "*&^%ing VW about" a bit, by way of punishment. Believe it or not, the EU Commission didn't have any really effective sanctions against such wrongdoing, at the time, so I think individual type approval authorities all across the EU just went out of their way o make life a bit difficult for VW. That's now been addressed though. In the subsequent raft of legislation, the EU has given the Commission the power to fine a car manufacturer up to €30,000 euro per non-compliant vehicle and the recalls scheme (which was really only ever used for safety issues), has now been extended to cover environmental non-compliances. Plus, of course, advances in emissions testing equipment technology, has made "lab grade" gas analysers small enough to be portable so they can now do "real" emissions testing on a real road. Anyway, best get some work done...

OK, I guess a tuning box / remap / chip might be able to do something with that. Whether they could get it much better than Honda did, is a different question, but yes, I could see how it might get a bit more power.

I've only skimmed through them, but it looks like both stories are about them cheating on NOx, rather than CO2.

I'm afraid I don't "buy" the "reduce component costs" theory - not for a minute! An AdBlue tank is dirt cheap! The gubbins inside don't need to change with the volume. The expensive bit is the dosing pump, and the heated lines and purge system, They stay the same if you make the tank bigger. The tank itself is just a big "Tupperware" pot. As for Winterkorn, I hope he enjoys his "porridge"! I didn't buy the "rogue engineers" story either, when he came out with that. Just chucking anyone he could think of, under the proverbial bus in an attempt to save his own ass, I think. Fortunately, the judge seemed to see through that one. Quite why Skoda's execs would "want" to look like that, is beyond me?! Their best hope, I would have thought, would have been to play dumb and say they bought the technology in good faith - which they may well have done. However, Skoda will hold their own emissions approvals and some poor homologation engineer's name will be on them! However, I think you're still confusing NOx with CO2? They were caught fiddling the emissions test with regard to NOx. Nothing to do with CO2. It's certainly true that pretty much all manufacturers used to exploit the weaknesses of the old NEDC test procedure in order to get the best possible figures. Whether that's "cheating" or not, is an interesting debate. There's no point in over-inflating tyres on a rolling road, if anything, it might even make things worse, as it increases the gearing slightly. The "cheating" used to get done BEFORE the rolling road test, during the "coast-down" test. During the rolling road test, the rollers have to be "weighted" to simulate the resistance to motion of the car you're testing. To get the "inertia settings" for the rollers, you need to carry out "coast-down" tests on an actual vehicle. This is where you get the vehicle on a test track and get it up to a specified speed, then knock it into neutral and let it coast down from that speed to a much lower speed and time it. You do that several times and average the results. That takes everything into account - aerodynamics, rolling resistance, etc. There's a formula to put the times into, which gives you the required settings for the rolling road. THAT'S where the "cheating" would go on. The regs specifically demand that tyre pressures are checked, so I think that one's probably an urban myth, but manufacturers certainly used to produce "hypothetical" models that were road-legal, but that they would ever sell - for example with only one door mirror to reduce drag, or with no radio to save weight, etc. I've heard various tales of taking the grease seals out of wheel bearings and filling gearboxes with 3-in-1 oil, to reduce drag, but have never actually seen it being done. As for putting oil in the diesel, the test labs put the fuel in the car for the emissions test. They have to use "reference fuel" (the formula being tightly specified, but it's basically a particular point on the range of permitted values for EN590). To be honest, I'd have thought chucking some engine oil in there would have made emissions quite a bit worse! Not sure about the rest of the conspiracy theories, to be honest. VW owns Bentley, but BMW owns Rolls Royce.

Certainly a good thing for the global environment! Whether it's a good thing for us, depends on how much you wanted a high CO2-emitting car, I guess. Kodiaqs are high CO2 emitters...

I'm not sure they struggled any more than anyone else with WLTP? Remember, WLTP is only the drive cycle. The actual emissions limits (tailpipe emissions of chemicals like CO HC, NOx, and particulates, not CO2, which is separate) were set out in the various "Euro 6" regulations. It was all quite simple, with the limits changing for Euro 1 Euro2, 3, 4 and 5. But the VW scandal broke during Euro 6, so the EU Parliament gave the EU Commission a right kicking and told them to get a grip on it. The Commission responded by rushing-in several different versions of "Euro 6" (Euro 6a, 6b, and so on). Even worse, we had "Euro 6dTemp" and then "Euro 6d" - which is what we're on at present. The next one (we're told) will be Euro 7. It gets incredibly complex and I'd have to fire up my "work" laptop to find which changes went with which letters. I've a feeling WLTP came in with Euro 6d Temp and RDE but with fairly generous "conformity factors" (i.e. the manufacturers were allowed to exceed the regulated limits by a small "conformity factor" when tested on a real road, in recognition of the fact that such a test could never be as repeatable as in the lab). I think Euro 6d brought down the conformity factors. I hadn't heard anything about tuners tipping-off academics, but yeah, maybe that's true? I was under the impression that it was students in Virginia, looking at city air quality and comparing it to what it should theoretically have been for the traffic concentrations, if all the vehicles had been emitting according to the regs. They found a surprising disparity. However, as you say, it's not that important who broke the story! I don't really get how you can "conspire" to have a bigger AdBlue tank? They just needed bigger AdBlue tanks to meet the NOx requirements! VW could have done that too, but diesel isn't popular in the USA and the European manufacturers (especially VAG) had really pushed "clean diesel" technology very hard over there. They were just starting to get somewhere, when the regs changed to require AdBlue, and (at least in the story I heard), they were worried that American consumers wouldn't accept having to top up an AdBlue tank, so they tried to size it so that it would only need topping up during services. This meant having to reduce the dosing to make the contents of the tank last long enough. Unfortunately, reducing the AdBlue dosing, also meant that the cars emitted more NOx than they should have done. Accordingly, they came up with the idea of giving the car the required amount of AdBlue only when it was on a rolling road (using the steering angle sensor to work out that the car was being driven but not steered). However, none of that explains why they then decided to do the same thing in Europe! Certainly, over that period, my company cars were a series of 2 litre (150 horse) Sharans and it was very noticeable when they became compliant, because the AdBlue consumption practically doubled on the later cars! Skoda were using the same "cheat" for NOx and AdBlue consumption as the rest of VAG, I'm afraid. However, they might not have known it, because they buy the technology from VW, but even on their own website they admit they were: https://www.skoda.co.uk/owners/ea189-claim CO2 is a separate issue entirely. There was never a regulated limit for CO2 emissions "per car". It was only ever a fleet averaging requirement.

Yes, a great engine, also the Alfa twinspark engines. But was the Honda's valve timing under the control of the engine management system? I know the Alfa's wasn't, so there was nothing you could do with a "chip", "remap" or tuning box, that would alter the valve timing.

These are two completely separate bits of emissions legislation, though. Nobody was accusing VW of cheating on the CO2 reg. And yes, we now have a separate GB one that mirrors the EU one, but don't get me started on "Brexit dividends". We've shot ourselves in the foot quite nicely by doing that! Beforehand, there was one New Car CO2 Regulation for the whole of the EU, and manufacturers could average their fleet CO2 emissions over their entire sales across the EU. Now, they can do that across the EU but for the GB regs, they can only average their emissions across what they sell here. Unfortunately for us, the UK likes its higher performance, and heavier cars, so when we were in the EU, they could average their CO2 emissions with loads of little city cars and low CO2 emitters, sold in the Mediterranean and Eastern European countries to meet the targets. Now, many of them are going to be struggling to meet the same targets for GB-only. I therefore think they're going to start withdrawing some o the higher CO2 emitters from our market, whilst still being able to sell them in the EU.

Unless the car has variable valve timing that is under the control of the engine management system, you can only change ignition timing, not valve timing - which is what the cam swap would do. Yes, you can give them more fuel, but without a way of getting more air into them at the same time, they just run richer. Easy with a turbo, if the wastage is under the control of the ECU, but pretty hard to do with a well-sorted naturally aspirated engine.

Yes, of course you can get more power by making actual physical changes to the engine, such as you describe, but I thought we were talking about electronic changes only?

I think you might be confusing some of the test work? VW were cheating on the NEDC drive cycle tests (which were only done on a rolling road). The RDE tests were introduced as a direct result of the VW scandal, as a check to make sure the car delivered more or less the same results on a real road as it did on the rolling road, so that it would show up any VW-style defeat devices. The WLTP drive cycle was introduced because the NEDC drive cycle was (quite rightly) widely criticised as not being representative of how cars were driven in real life. The main drawback was that it was a "one-size fits all" drive cycle, so the accelerations in it had to be attainable by the lowest-powered cars on the market. You therefore ended up with your 1000cc "shopping trolleys" working quite hard to achieve it, and your Aston Martins practically doing it on a closed throttle. The WLTP now has three different drive cycles, depending on power-to-weight ratio. Naturally, no standardised test can ever be exactly representative of how any one particular owner drives their particular car, but I think the current regime is a million times better than what we had before. As far as I'm aware, it was a bunch of American academics who initially broke the VW story?

I've never tried such a box, but the internet is awash with claims for these sorts of devices. I work in the car industry and I know OEM emissions engineers who would sell their own mothers for an extra 3% - never mind 20% fuel economy and CO2 reduction! More power is easy with a forced induction engine. Give it more boost and more fuel and it will make more power. These box (and remap) suppliers often produce dyno graphs showing the extra power - and they might well be accurate. However, they tend to rely on customer testimonials for their claims on fuel consumption. They could go off and do the same emissions and fuel consumption tests that the car manufacturer would have to do for type approval, but strangely, they always seem to choose not to...

Strictly speaking, I wonder whether the sequence should in fact be: 1. Come to stop 2. Apply parking brake 3. release footbrake 4. put into "P"? I tend to find that on a slope, there's still usually a small amount of additional movement as the car settles on its rear springs once the footbrake is released.