Who’s going to Tesla after their current TDI?

tikal

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@ El Dobro thanks for sharing. I'll watch it later.

I want to share these two stories about pollution (Air & Water).

In late spring, 1969, at the end of my first year of college, I went to Cincinnati, Ohio for summer work. Looking from the Ky side north on I-75, the city was hardly visible due to smog. It was like that all summer (not and smoggy). As I drove through Cincinnati on I-75, I could smell the stock yards, slaughter houses, Formica, Nu-Maid Margarine, Proctor & Gamble, etc. The public transient system buses were all diesel powered with the exhaust at street level. Hudepohl Beer signs were on their sides. (Yeah, I watched the Reds play a few games.)

Really, air pollution was unreal during those days. I suspect in 1969, it was like that across North America in most cities. Then, there were laws passed and regulations put in place in the very early 1970s. As the years rolled by, air pollution subsided tremendously.

Those that never experienced it, have no clue.

(No, I never went to Woodstock, but two gals did invite me to take them...LOL)

The cover page of a monthly edition of the National Geographic in 1968 was a photo of an aerial view of the Mississippi River looking north at St. Louis. The raw untreated sewer discharge plume in the middle of the river was not questionable. National Geographic did an extensive story about pollution and water pollution in particular in that edition.

Anyway, the point is, we’ve come a very long way with cleaning up the air and water. The difference then and now is almost impossible to imagine.

Yes, VW did make a big mistake. I really never kept up with the scandal. And, it is my understanding that some of the other auto makers did similar things.
Great points AndyBees.

I think we have come long ways to lower urban street pollution and that is where the EVs can have a short term beneficial potential ("low hanging fruit") to really help in stop-and-go city traffic contamination. Think of a school bus going electric and other similar scenarios such as the ones described in post # 1,238 by d24tdi (y).

For the highway we are not there yet in my view with EVs. Yes some people have EVs and they regularly do for mid to long distance trips, as in four hours or more driving per day. Kudos to them, but for the average American driver the most convenient way to do highway driving is with an ICE vehicle nowadays.
 

Judson

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But remember it was barely fraud. Laws were changed to be very anti-diesel leading up to and ever since. And in the lawsuit it was found that the VWs in question barely failed the emissions test. It wasn’t like they were rolling coal…
Yeah so they tried to cheat their way around the system, something apparently no one else has ever done judging by the outcry….
 

IndigoBlueWagon

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Yeah so they tried to cheat their way around the system, something apparently no one else has ever done judging by the outcry….
No one, as in every one. I think the only manufacturer selling diesels in North America that escaped prosecution was BMW.
 

gulfcoastguy

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Though VW received the biggest penalty hammering. They were a furren company and didn’t have a congressional delegation to pull strings. Who else had to fund a charging system?
 

d24tdi

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Being a "foreign" company had nothing to do with it, as far as I can see. Others got caught and penalized around the time of Dieselgate -- some were other foreign makers but others were US or US-tied (Chrysler, Cummins). Plenty of others also got caught and penalized for similar defeat-device violations in years and decades prior. Honda and Ford had defeat devices that were discovered in gasoline passenger car engines in the '90s and '00s if memory serves. And in the late '90s a large group of on-road heavy truck engine makers (CAT, Cummins, Navistar, Detroit I believe, maybe others) got caught with them. Some of those are US makers, others foreign. I think on balance if you look at that entire list, there are more domestic manufacturers who were nailed than foreign ones over the years. So I'm struggling to get your point here.

And either way VW themselves had a big production plant in Tennessee to build the NMS by the time the Dieselgate scandal broke open. They would have had a good handful of politicians and power brokers invested in their US success and the local jobs/investments tied to it.

The manufacturers all broke the law, got caught, and paid their punishment, foreign or domestic. Not that complicated?

But I'm a little lost if this is why someone switched from a TDI to an EV. If you don't want to be associated with VW and their fraud (which, as @ZippyNH and others pointed out, worked to the vehicle owners' favor in many respects and also left the owner with full decision-making power as to what resolution they could choose), or you want to protest the damage the Dieselgate cars are estimated to have done to local air quality in certain regions -- then fine. Trading away to a different but similar era/configuration diesel vehicle like a Cruze/Equinox/BMW/whatever, or a different ICE vehicle..... I can respect that. Some people still won't buy Japanese or German cars because of those countries' actions in WWII 80+ years ago. Fair enough, if it makes sense to you, it's your money.

But if you changed your sole vehicle from a TDI to an EV, which are optimized for opposite use cases, then that means either your use case for the TDI was wrong or the case for the EV now is wrong. Or those buyers are just seriously confused/impulsive in making decisions about this. The overlap of their strengths is almost zero, and as each vehicle ages, that gap gets even bigger.
 

Mozambiquer

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Though VW received the biggest penalty hammering. They were a furren company and didn’t have a congressional delegation to pull strings. Who else had to fund a charging system?
They were the first one who was caught, it seems the government wanted to make an example of them... But it could also have had something to do with them being one of the only companies who came out hotly in opposition to the 2012 CAFE standards.
 

oilhammer

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There are just too many to list....
Europe doesn't have CAFE, they have CO2 levels, and diesels easily meet those with flying colors, because CO2 is directly linked to how much fuel is burned. Clearly NO large company likes CAFE standards, and clearly the consumers here don't much care for them either.
 

d24tdi

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They were the first one who was caught, it seems the government wanted to make an example of them... But it could also have had something to do with them being one of the only companies who came out hotly in opposition to the 2012 CAFE standards.
I don't have exact figures to add to this, but my sense is that the scale of the punishment simply had to do with the sheer number of defeat-device-equipped cars they sold, not retaliation for the company taking a position on anything or trying to make an example (though no doubt they did want deterrence effect). VW's diesels during the Clean Diesel push in the US for 2009-15 model years were attainable mass market models that consumers bought in high volumes. There were enough of them in use on the road, particularly in California, to add up to a large calculated difference in real world tailpipe emissions. The punishment and prescribed remedy was supposed to be proportional to the harm done. By contrast the other violations that came in the following years were for vehicles that were on the road in far smaller numbers, so the mess they made was smaller.

I don't have figures for this either but for whatever it's worth, I think I recall the fines Cummins was hit with a year or two ago for emissions violations were comparable or maybe even higher. Although as someone pointed out, I don't believe they or other violators besides VW were forced into any novel and debatable remedies like launching Electrify America.

And yeah, VW were the first ones to be caught and punished in the recent round of diesel violations spanning roughly the past decade.... But as stated earlier, there were also plenty of other defeat device violations in history during decades before that, in fact going all the way back to the start of the Clean Air Act in the '70s to the best of my recollection. The original concept of a defeat device in fact was an actual *device* that might disable part of the emissions system in response to a sensed condition -- e.g. some primitive servo that messed with an old feedback carburetor or distributor or mechanical diesel IP -- rather than a line of software code in a modern computer-controlled vehicle, as the definition was eventually expanded to include. All that just to say, bears keeping in mind that VW's 2015 debacle was 40 years after this kind of enforcement started and they are far from the first or the only to have gotten in trouble with it.

(Not saying this to let them off the hook ---- more to the opposite, that they should have known better)

Whether or not the US laws that intensively prioritize NOx and PM emissions over CO2 emissions make sense -- labeling a 40mpg Golf a pollution concern while a 10mpg Tahoe is not -- is a separate question to whether someone broken the rules all parties are playing by. On that though, I would again throw the idea out that if there were reasonably conceived EV choices widely available that actually serve normal drivers' uses/needs (and the charging environment to support them), the intense focus on ICE tailpipe emissions that is turning modern gas and diesel engines into miserable things to own might naturally come to be seen as something that doesn't need as much emphasis. Probably wishful thinking but rational at least, to me.
 

ZippyNH

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The inconvenient truth is the DI gasoline engines used in many cars put out MORE Particulate emissions than diesels do with a filter....
This is a fact that has finely come to light and many European cars with DI gasoline engines now have a particulate filter too ...
So any gasoline car with a DI engine of the same era as diesel-gate are arguably Worse for peoples health due to 2.5 sized particles that go deep into the lungs....
Many of these and some getting sold today as hybrids ARE STILL SPEWING these 2.5 nm particles that are called dangerous while a DPF diesel going back to 2012 does not...
Just something to think about when people say it's black and white, cause it's not.
It's all shades of gray.
 

IndigoBlueWagon

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VW bought back about 275,000 cars. There are approx 290M cars registered in the US. If those numbers are correct, the cheating TDIs were less than 1 tenth of 1% of the fleet. I doubt they could show a measurable impact on emissions.
 

oilhammer

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There are just too many to list....
That's the thing, there never was. Never would have been. And now FAR more of them are running around deleted than there would have been had they just left it alone. Yet you'll still see not even a blip on any pollution meter. We have been fighting this locally, to get rid of the [worthless] OBD testing in certain areas. We succeeded in getting rid of it in one county, where I live, but still working to make it go away in the others.
 

wxman

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Actually, no.
The arguments regarding diesel exhaust in that video are mostly unsupported opinions, including the assertion that DPFs are a marketing lie. Here are some contradicting data:

“…Filters are so good that we have measured that in certain circumstances, when the ambient air is already polluted, a diesel car will tend to extract more particles from the air than it emits….”

Source: https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/2020/1/28/tyres-not-tailpipe

Also, an explanation was never offer as to why non-smoking cancer cases are rising as ambient air gets cleaner.
 

d24tdi

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VW bought back about 275,000 cars. There are approx 290M cars registered in the US. If those numbers are correct, the cheating TDIs were less than 1 tenth of 1% of the fleet. I doubt they could show a measurable impact on emissions.
For sure not measurable directly by air quality sensors nationwide, given the noise and uncontrolled variables in any given area. But easy enough to rough-estimate in a localized way by calculation using registration and VMT data x g/mi emission rates. And that's what they did.

For criteria pollutants they are targeting for local air quality health concerns in certain regions, they can make the case that harm was done. In areas where low altitude ozone (smog) is a problem due to local factors like PM and sunlight and population density, NOx emissions really matter, even at tiny levels, as an ingredient. The cars were emitting 40 times the allowed rate of NOx, or something like that. That's 40 times an already tiny number, but apparently enough to be meaningful in the select places where tailpipe NOx has any meaning at all. And some of those select places (CA........) happened to have significantly higher proportion of Dieselgate cars registered than the entire US fleet population numbers as a whole that you quoted, so the effect was magnified.

That said, in the extreme majority of other areas of the US those emissions don't matter whatsoever. If PM and ozone are not a problem in your area, then whether the cars are compliant with the NOx standards or emitting 40 or 400 times that amount is irrelevant. It's strictly a local concern, and only in a small number of localities at that....

Having national standards set for a geographically huge country based on local emission problems that involve only a few urban areas in the Southwest is another piece of absurdity of course. I would have much preferred to see an approach like European nations have adopted where older, more polluting vehicles are excluded from urban areas where they create problems but freely allowed elsewhere. Making our standards work that way would have made sense. CA is actually doing something like this statewide with commercial vehicles now. But EPA and CARB didn't see a workable path on that for setting standards evidently. And I think the OEMs didn't have much of a desire for it either, since it could have led back to selling different CA vs 49-state models again..... Inefficient for them.

We can all wish it had been done differently but I don't see much value in trying to dispute the fact that in the extremely narrow scenarios they were most concerned about, the excess emissions did in fact represent a problem.
 
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oilhammer

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There are just too many to list....
California clearly has their own set of problems that cannot be corrected via constant obsession of environmental concerns at the cost of their citizenry. The last 10 days is proof of that. I don't want what they have, nor would I want anyone else to have it.
 

d24tdi

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Yeah, certainly true. And what makes it worse is when there are efforts made to solve those localized problems that involve the rest of the population operating under standards that bring zero benefit in their own area, at great cost. More of that is probably yet to come.

That said, at least those outside CA who choose off road weight loss programs for their vehicles (or just choose to own older diesels that never had aftertreatment to begin with, as I choose to do....) can sleep easy knowing that their gross NOx emissions will most likely have no effect at all on air quality anywhere unless they go visit LA.
 

ZippyNH

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And while we're at it, let's bring back DDT and agent orange.
In Michigan you still get these items...
In places like California they actually inspect inbound tractor trailers bill of lading to ensure they aren't carrying non California compliant products...like cold weather windshield washer fluid and oil based stain or paint in packages bigger than a pint.....
You beloved diesel will be illegal in California someday
 

pedroYUL

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Ok...we can get us some wooden rims for your car!!
Good old wagon wheels on a VW!!
VW donk!!
Now we're talking! One could simply fix them with glue, no need for all that fancy metallurgy.
 

dieseldonato

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Wood is renewable, too!
100%, but the epa is doing their best to phase out all wood stoves/ furnaces. Insurance companies arnt helping either. I've fought with more then one about my house being heated with wood. Insurance company I'm with now, is local ish and didn't have an issue with the furnace in the house, since it still has its UL listed and epa plate on it.
 
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