6 hours ago, skomaz said:

 

Probably a good thing for the environment and us then really? 

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...

9 hours ago, roottoot said:

@AvocetI posted 'Conspiring  not to not have to have bigger AdBlue tanks'.

 

Skoda Executives might want to look like they are stupid as VW's Martin Winterkorn did,

but he was an Engineers Engineer yet everything gets blamed on minions. 

 

They conspired to have smaller AdBlue tanks & reduce component costs. To use the Daimler System that was licensed and VW bought.

It was a cabal or cartel.  it was a system so that US drivers would not need to be topping up tanks all the time because if the emission reduction really worked big tanks would be required to have longer between refills.

 

VW Green Diesels were introduced to the US by Stefan Jacoby CEO North America & of the VW Family (never got the top job) that then huffed off to Volvo / Geely in 2010,   **VOLVO /GEELY then completed the Twin Chargers development properly and the hybrids which VW had not done successfully.)

then Stefan Jacoby was off to GM Global. 

He had been at Mitshubishi after his career start at VW and then returning. 

(Now is he a whistleblower or just a cuckoo in the nest?)

 

We know about averages, made up of highs and lows.  Lots of lows to bring an average down.

Lots of manipulation to get the low figures, even using vehicles with no ICE or manufacturers with low registrations of higher emission vehicles as a partner so that you are not penalised for still producing high emission vehicles.

 

VW Testing was cheating C02 g/km with their own test results done at whichever facilities.  Petrol & Diesels.

They might say a fuddle not a fiddle but they were caught.   Putting engine oil in diesel was a cheat that was only too common with the diesels under the old test regime.  Over inflating tyres of test vehicles and that was ones on rolling roads.

VW Group were going to just tweak the engine management for the introduction of the WLTP.

They tweaked 1.5TSI EVO ACTs and still they were too high on emissions and they tweaked till they were certificated but some run like crap.

The 1.4 TSI' for the Plug in Hybrids as they were in 2015/16 actually needed more done to get certificated so production stopped for a bit.

https://slashgear.com/vw-admits-430k-2016-models-have0implausible-co2-claims-17414721

 

 

The Mild Hybrid & Plug In Hybrids tested under the WLTP and RDE2 figures are just pure kidology.

 

Lord Michael Heseltine was there with Margret Thatcher when diesel was going to be the fuel for the UK, she knew that was wrong.

Lord Michael Heseltine owned and then owned again Haymarket Media Group that owns AutoCar, What Car & Piston Heads among other motoring & financial journals.

He owns via his companies part of an Emissions Testing Company that does testing for the Motor Industry and the UK Government.

Lord Heseltine was involved in the Sale of Rolls Royce & Bentley to Volkswagen Group in 1998.

David Cameron brought Lord Heseltine in to help with business an the motor industry. 

At the heart of government and the economy and see nothing just as the heads of VW did not. 

 

Are they all selectively deaf, dumb and blind or just all in it together? 

 

 

 

Martin Winterkorn. Chairman of VW AG.  A details person with yes men and woman around him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

8 hours ago, roottoot said:

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_3581

 

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/05/volkswagen-bosch-fiat-diesel-emissions-cheats-cracked-open-in-new-research

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

6 hours ago, Sargan said:

 The Tech blurb says ......"The switching operation between the two cam lobes is controlled by the ECU which takes account of engine oil pressure, engine temperature, vehicle speed, engine speed and throttle position. Using these inputs, the ECU is programmed to switch from the low lift to the high lift cam lobes when certain conditions are met. At the switch point a solenoid is actuated that allows oil pressure from a spool valve to operate a locking pin which binds the high RPM rocker arm to the low RPM ones."

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.

Petrols / Co2.  Cars were retested, some were bought back / discontinued and the story got mixed up with the defeat device scandal.

It was actually about 3 VW Group brands submitting their test results carried out at different test centres.

https://autocar.co.uk/car-news/industry/vw-emissions-scandal-nine-vw-vehicles-have-false-co2-ratings

 

@Avocet

Who is it you actually work with and have you been in that job or industry for long? 

I just ask because you say you have not seen stuff being done, so are you at test centres in the UK or Continental Europe? 

 

The VW's had to be retested after 2015 in the UK, well some had to be and VW Group were to pay for it, but the shelled out a million and a bit and then were let off. 

Cars were coming off ferries and going for testing.   Were you part of that? 

 

Pants on fire. VW UK CEO at a period in time.

https://am-online.com/news/car-manufacturer-news/2017/02/21/vw-boss-called-a-liar-by-mps-after-giving-emission-scandal-evidence

 

 

Lots of i do not knows

& @1 hour 24 mins on. 

 Just part of those with the years in the industry and not aware of well published events. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited 3 May, 20224 yr by roottoot

58 minutes ago, roottoot said:

Petrols / Co2.  Cars were retested, some were bought back / discontinued and the story got mixed up with the defeat device scandal.

It was actually about 3 VW Group brands submitting their test results carried out at different test centres.

https://autocar.co.uk/car-news/industry/vw-emissions-scandal-nine-vw-vehicles-have-false-co2-ratings

 

@Avocet

Who is it you actually work with and have you been in that job or industry for long? 

I just ask because you say you have not seen stuff being done, so are you at test centres in the UK or Continental Europe? 

 

The VW's had to be retested after 2015 in the UK, well some had to be and VW Group were to pay for it, but the shelled out a million and a bit and then were let off. 

Cars were coming off ferries and going for testing.   Were you part of that? 

 

@1 hour 24 mins.   Just part of the years in the industry and not aware of well published events. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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...

http://fleetnews.co.uk/news/manufacturer-news/2016/02/10/seat-and-audi-co2-emissions-figures-revised-upwards

List on page 2. 

 

 

 

Edited 3 May, 20224 yr by roottoot

From the same website (Carbon Footprint Calculator, Carbon Footprint, Carbon Footprint from Cars - Fleet News), an easy way to see what your car actually produces by way of CO2:

"Burning a litre of diesel produces around 2.62 kgs of carbon dioxide, whereas petrol has a lower carbon content and produces about 2.39 kgs. Older engines might lose a few percent due to unburnt fuel, but otherwise technology can have little effect on this chemistry."

 

Not much use when/if aiming to buy a new-to-market car, but fuel economy data from the likes of Fuelly.com or Spritmonitor.de will tell you the reality for existing models. Much better data than any figures published by the manufacturer. 

 

Hi.

If anyone needs any help with insurance at all for a chip, re-map or tuning box then please feel free to drop me a line.

Regards,

Dan.

12 hours ago, roottoot said:

http://fleetnews.co.uk/news/manufacturer-news/2016/02/10/seat-and-audi-co2-emissions-figures-revised-upwards

List on page 2. 

 

 

 

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

12 hours ago, Pete_Ex-Wino said:

From the same website (Carbon Footprint Calculator, Carbon Footprint, Carbon Footprint from Cars - Fleet News), an easy way to see what your car actually produces by way of CO2:

"Burning a litre of diesel produces around 2.62 kgs of carbon dioxide, whereas petrol has a lower carbon content and produces about 2.39 kgs. Older engines might lose a few percent due to unburnt fuel, but otherwise technology can have little effect on this chemistry."

 

Not much use when/if aiming to buy a new-to-market car, but fuel economy data from the likes of Fuelly.com or Spritmonitor.de will tell you the reality for existing models. Much better data than any figures published by the manufacturer. 

 

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

What's not uncommon, you've lost me?

I'd trust crowd-sourced real-world longterm data much more than whatcar in a lab/dyno/test track/whatever.

There are other views :

 

" while diesel fuel contains slightly more carbon (2.68kg CO₂/litre) than petrol (2.31kg CO₂/litre), overall CO₂ emissions of a diesel car tend to be lower. In use, on average, this equates to around 200g CO₂/km for petrol and 120g CO₂/km for diesel."

 

https://theconversation.com/fact-check-are-diesel-cars-really-more-polluting-than-petrol-cars-76241

Oh yeah, diesel all the way if you care about CO2. 'cos they go a chunk further per litre, more than outweighing the extra CO2 per litre .

That 200/120 ratio sounds wildly improbable though, on the face of it.

Not so much if NOx is your 'thing'.

Edited 3 May, 20224 yr by Pete_Ex-Wino

57 minutes ago, Pete_Ex-Wino said:

What's not uncommon, you've lost me?

I'd trust crowd-sourced real-world longterm data much more than whatcar in a lab/dyno/test track/whatever.

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

1 hour ago, Sargan said:

There are other views :

 

" while diesel fuel contains slightly more carbon (2.68kg CO₂/litre) than petrol (2.31kg CO₂/litre), overall CO₂ emissions of a diesel car tend to be lower. In use, on average, this equates to around 200g CO₂/km for petrol and 120g CO₂/km for diesel."

 

https://theconversation.com/fact-check-are-diesel-cars-really-more-polluting-than-petrol-cars-76241

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

1 hour ago, Avocet said:

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

 

I don't think it's quite so simple. Viz. the recent addition of GPF's - Gasoline Particulate Filters - to petrol engined cars.  

 

There's long been a view that the smaller particulates from the exhausts of petrol engined cars lodge deeper in our lungs and cause more harm than those from diesels.  

10 hours ago, Sargan said:

 

 

" while diesel fuel contains slightly more carbon (2.68kg CO₂/litre) than petrol (2.31kg CO₂/litre), overall CO₂ emissions of a diesel car tend to be lower. In use, on average, this equates to around 200g CO₂/km for petrol and 120g CO₂/km for diesel."

 

 

 

I've done a quick calculation and from what I can make out, if you have a perol vehicle that does 40mpg, you need to get better than 47mpg to lower the carbon dioxide output to less than the petrol car. However, if you take into consideration the cost of fuel, assuming £1.62/L for petrol and £1.79 for diesel, on a cost only basis vs a petrol car doing 40mpg, you only have to do 44mpg in a diesel for fuel costs to be better for diesel.

39 minutes ago, Routemaster1461 said:

on a cost only basis vs a petrol car doing 40mpg, you only have to do 44mpg in a diesel for fuel costs to be better for diesel.

 

Higher fuel prices skew the results in favour of diesel, because the %age difference between the pump prices is less. If you go back to what was normal (£1.20ish for petrol, £1.40ish for diesel), then you'd need more mpg from your diesel (46-47mpg?). You also haven't taken into consideration the higher purchase price of the diesel, but I'm sure we must have done this all before 😄.

I ran plug in tuning boxes for years in various VAG TDi's.. older PD engines, but everything from 1.4 3 cyl in a A2, to 100PD and multiple 130bhp PD's.. never ever had any issues in well over 100k in miles.. fuel economy did come up a bit but you always ended up driving it a bit harder.

 

I also ran a racechip plug in box in my 2018 2.0T TFSI Superb for a while.. it gave it a 70bhp kick up the arse and made a hugh difference..  again, never an issue with lights on dash etc.. handy removed when servicing etc.. 

I have never understood the removing of a tuning box when a car goes in for a service.   If you run it that way and it is just getting oil and filter servicing maybe plugs changed and plugged in to see if any fault codes read the box might as well be still fitted.  You would surely not be making a warranty claim and pretending no tuning box had been fitted. 

16 hours ago, Schtum said:

 

I don't think it's quite so simple. Viz. the recent addition of GPF's - Gasoline Particulate Filters - to petrol engined cars.  

 

There's long been a view that the smaller particulates from the exhausts of petrol engined cars lodge deeper in our lungs and cause more harm than those from diesels.  

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.