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Comment by happyscrappy | Hacker News Reader

Europe was really led astray when they were told that diesels were better for the environment, hybrids would have been the way to go.

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Yes. Optimising for c02 reductions over Nox and particulates is a monumentally stupid policy.

Co2 may have a deleterious effect in 100 years time, but is not an issue for air quality today. In any case, passenger vehicle c02 emssions are a rounding error in the scheme of things.

Meanwhile, particulate pollution and Nox are very real issues affecting millions of people today. It's stupid to push diesel over gasoline for c02 reasons.

Part of the reason VW cheated was because the USA didn't fall into this trap and allow more lax emissions standards for Diesels - all fuels are held to the same standard. So they took the Euro engines and added the defeat code.

The USA is correct on this one.

The focus on passenger vehicles is idiotic though - the amount of Nox and particulates pumped out by a single container ship is immense compared to a fleet of passenger vehicles. Then add trucking, rail, stationery equipment etc...

Cities should be optimising for electric propulsion and punishing diesels. That makes sense for air quality right now, and if co2 proves to be an issue, it is easily fixed by switching the generation source to Nuclear or Hydro.

> Europe was really led astray when they were told that diesels were better for the environment

Were we led astray? Or are we discussing the last few percentages beyond an actual advantage over gasoline engines?

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/24/uk-france...

The reason air pollution is so much worse in European cities than American ones is largely due to diesel passenger vehicles.

Also because US cities are much more sprawled, and are often organized in neat, efficient grids instead of having formed organically over the course of ~2300 years. Compare maps of Paris with any US city.

That both suprises me, do you have any sources? Honest question, both seem counterintuitive. Maybe I am actually fed enough "feelgood" information in the past.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/05/industry-...

That is an article from greenpeace about poor EU environmental standards in power stations. Sure it is bad but, it does not compare air pollution in EU vs US cities or attribute anything to cars.

That goes against my subjective experience. The contribution of buses and trucks in US cities is also significant, and my sense is that EU regs on those vehicles are more stringent than US. I particularly tend to notice how much -noisier- large US vehicles are than European equivalents in a city traffic environment, which tends to correlate with lower efficiency.

Europe generally has more stringent regulation and worse pollution than the US. It's many more people in a smaller space.

Noise isn't a good predictor though, a muffler is a drain on efficiency.

Actually the VWs that were emitting 40x pollution in the US were only 10x of the Euro regs.

Eu has stricter PM limits, the US has stricter NOx limits.

http://www.hybridcars.com/will-america-avoid-europes-clean-d...

See for example Paris's recent (yesterday?) "no car day" in the center. The city's usual blanket of smog is gone. France of course having the highest %age of diesel cars in its passenger fleet of any country.

Paris is one of the densest cities in the world[1], placed 6th if you disregard cities with a population of less than a million. It's the most dense large city among G8 countries. The only vaguely comparable European cities are Athens and Barcelona, both smaller and less dense. London has about a quarter of the density of Paris. The most dense large German cities, Munich and Berlin, less than a quarter. The city I live in -- part of one of the world's largest conurbations --, less than a tenth.

Statistics like these should be taken with a grain of salt (for one thing, city delimitations are fairly arbitrary), but the details are not worth haggling about: the point is that Paris is not at all representative of large European cities.

[1] if Wikipedia can be trusted on this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_d...

Some air pollution data here:

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/health-sapping.htm...

Europe has 'bet on diesel' for many years while hybrids have only recently become available.

All European manufacturers except Renault and BMW are hellbent on not offering attractive E mobility solutions, despite really expensive and extensive internal research programs. We in Germany have a large numbers of Smart cars in car sharing companies that are sponsored by Daimler, but it's not yet economically viable to actually buy an E-Smart (if you've driven one, it's not bad at all).

It's strange. Europe should be a better market for electric and hybrid cars, given the higher petrol costs, but I guess the high purchase costs are putting people off.

I'd buy one if I did enough miles. It's not worth it for a few thousand a year. Even having a petrol car sitting on my drive is an expense of marginal justifiability.

The other issue is that in europe the group of people who are most likely to buy an electric car usually just bike or use public transit instead.

Hybrid cars have been available in Europe for 15 years. So not that recent.

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