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Comment by yc1010 | Hacker News Reader

I am currently shopping for a car and now need to keep in mind which brands/models are affected by this fiasco as another factor in my shopping.

Here in Ireland motor tax is based on CO2 emissions

I can see some very very unhappy VW drivers in this country in coming months if their tax suddenly jumps by an order of magnitude due to this avoidance scheme putting these cars into the high emission bands

I do wonder how Revenue will handle this, not only some people might find themselves with a more polluting car but a larger and unexpected tax bill will impact peoples pockets directly.

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The CO2 amount should remain the same—the issue is with other pollutants that cause smog. The only reason that CO2 might go up is if the fix involves increasing fuel consumption. However, you might not even need the fix in Ireland, as many European countries (as I understand it) have laxer smog requirements to begin with.

Regardless, though, I wouldn't buy a VW product right now, wherever I lived.

Euro standards are backwards; they have stricter CO2 emissions regulations, but are lax on NOx. I'd imagine they don't have a lot of smog events like what happened in California during the 60s and 70s.

I wouldn't call them "backwards". They're opposite of the US, but that's because they're optimizing for reducing a different pollutant. Smog is certainly undesirable (as an asthmatic, I know that from experience), but CO2 may well have more dire long-term costs.

Of course, the optimal situation would be to tightly regulate both pollutants.

I would definitely call them backwards.

The amount of extra CO2 from a car running a better NoX system is utterly irrelevant compared to how much CO2 is emitted.

Trading CO2 for NoX is completely indefensible. NoX is really really bad for the environment.

The main difference is that Europe has separate regulations for Diesel and Gasoline cars, while the US has regulations independent of engine type. You are right that this leads to lax regulations on NOx. That said, the new Euro 6 regulations for Diesel cars should bring Europe closer to US levels.

This is actually an area where TTIP might improve things a lot by aligning different emission standards.

> Euro standards are backwards; they have stricter CO2 emissions regulations, but are lax on NOx.

In Europe, people don't commute as much, and as long hours, in cars, so I would guess NOx levels in city air don't get as high as in the US cities. So maybe there is no need to have as strict NOx emission limits for cars in Europe.

NOtwithstanding the other comments here, in europe the % or diesel cars is already very high. so europe is optimizing for diesel allowances, and the usa is optimizing also for its own local issues.

That was an explicit goal cut CO2 by pushing diesel and ignore the heath effects of NoX

> Here in Ireland motor tax is based on CO2 emissions

The amount of CO₂ produced comes directly from the amount of gas that you burn. There is nothing you can do anything about that. Except drive economically and thus spend less gas.

The present scandal is not not about CO₂, but pollutants that make the local air quality worse.

This is mostly about NOX, not CO2.

I guess, the tax is based on the "official numbers" not the real numbers. So you are in the clear.

As others already posted, this scandal is about the NOX numbers, what is a different thing, but I am pretty sure that the CO2 numbers (which correlate with the fuel usage, as much I know) are forged too (see my other posting).

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