Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

VW owners may be looking at the kind of retrofits California requires for older heavy trucks.[1] The muffler is replaced with a filter which has to be cleaned periodically. This seems to be working; it's rare to see a truck belching smoke in California. So there's a path to a fix available.

[1] http://www.arb.ca.gov/msprog/truckstop/truckstop.htm

View on HN

I always see large trucks on I-5 regularly spewing huge amounts of smoke when they hit the gas. It gets so bad that people speed around them to avoid the smog getting into their cars. This is mostly large commercial semis and dump trucks. Are you talking about passenger cars?

The black stuff from diesels is soot, not smog. Soot is just unburnt carbon. The term 'smog' covers a whole manner of nasty chemicals, mostly oxides of nitrogen and sulfur.

Soot is relatively harmless compared to smog. A diesel producing soot is running rich and therefore is arguably cleaner than a "clean-diesel" running lean and pumping out oxides. Those carbon-belching trucks are far better for your lungs than the smoke-free VWs pumping out N0x. Beware the pollution you cannot see.

Good post! Years ago I had a slight head gasket leak, and needed to drive the vechicle just one more day before I took the head off and did the nasty job.

I had a little bit of extra smoke comming out of the tail pipe, and I got pulled over by a Police Officer. I told the officer, the extra smoke was mainly water vapor, but was still expecting a ticket.

Well, the officer said he used to be a mechanic, and knew I was likely telling the truth. He let me off with a warning.

I think those days are over though. I have seen people freak out over the wiff of cigarette smoke. Yesterday, I heard this lady yelling at a janitor over bleach smell. She squelched , "You're giving me cancer!". I don't think he understood English, and was probally better off?

I'm all for cleaning up the air, but people need to educate themselves on what exactly is going to give them, or the environment problems.

A leaky head gasket will usually produce a white smoke that smells a bit like pot smoke. That's the ethylene glycol in the antifreez/coolant being burnt.

The new anti-bleach craze is laughable. I had one woman at the local dog beach tell me "You know bleach is the same chlorine they use in swimming pools and we know that stuff causes cancer." I spend at least an hour a day swimming laps. Have done so since I was eight. And I at one point lived in a country where we regularly added small amounts of bleach to drinking water to disinfect it. If chlorine causes cancer I am doomed.

I doubt that NOx can be captured by such a filter. And according to the article particles level is already well below the limit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com