Nearly all new diesel cars exceed official pollution limits

In Germany, we actually limited almost all cities to cars passing Euro 4, and many even to cars passing Euro 6.

Cars get a sticker with a color based on which standard they pass, and the zones are limited to cars with a sticker of the proper color.

So most busses in Germany are Euro VI now.

People say this all the time, but it's not true. In the US managers at public companies do have an obligation to act in the best interest of the shareholders, but no court has ever said that means maximizing profit. On the contrary, managers had very broad rights to run a company as they see fit. In fact public companies forgo short-term profit all the time in favor of long-term goals such as improving their reputation with customers, politicians or regulators. Shareholders don't get any say in business decisions such as how to handle emissions regulations.

There are some exceptions. You can't explicitly screw over the shareholders, such as by selling the company for cheap in a deal that guarantees big bonuses for management. That doesn't apply here. Craigslist got in trouble and the details of the case are kind of interesting, but it was an extreme and unusual case that also doesn't apply to VW.

I'd assume the rules are similar in Germany. It wouldn't make sense to have a rule that corporations must maximize short-term profit all the time. No one could run a big business that way.

The solution would be to throw some people in jail. Your suggestion that it was even mandatory for companies to behave this way is so weird that I cannot respond to that.

However, regarding corporations:

You will NEVER get the manufactures to act as moral entities -- they are amoral

This attitude is part of what keeps them immoral.

They are profit machines and are required by law to be that way

So, change the law? I'm sure there's been many articles on HN where the prevailing opinion was "the law is wrong, and must be changed".

is coercing a corporation to be an amoral entity? No, VW thought they could get away with cheating, and they were found out, with disastrous consequences to their bottom line. The obvious market serving behavior would have been to avoid cheating. When VW cheated they were serving neither the public nor their shareholders, they were just being dumb.

But yes, the issue is that the US requires dealers to refill them. And also sets a limit for how often refill cycles may happen. And the weight of the tank sets a limit on how large it may be.

The result is simple: Small Diesel cars can’t exist legally in the US.

http://www.landrover.co.uk/ownership/euro-6-emissions-standa...

For examples, see http://www.beuc.eu/great-fuel-consumption-scam#thescam and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKUtiL-R4sU (subtitled in English)

Car manufacturers do not make the measurements themselves, but they directly do pay for it, and do shop around for the best testers. That raises doubts as to the independence of those testing firms.

Are you implying that it's a bad thing that a manufacturer is forced to implement cheats on all cars rather than just provide a rigged car for test?

However, when the cars are used by normal drivers, the usage patterns are so significantly different than the test sequences that the emissions profile changes. In the majority of cases the NOX emissions from cars used by normal people exceed the EU limits.

This does not, as I understand it, mean that the cars are illegal. The cars all passed the tests in the test environment. That is the requirement and they met the requirement.

No law is being broken but that is only because the law is not fit for purpose.

Some manfs were building to the type approval test, but not for real world driving. A car needs to accelerate from 0 kph to 100 kph over a certain time. Normal road drivers would accelerate faster than this test, and acceleration is when the vehicles emit a lot of stuff. The tests are run on engines at their normal operating temperature. So cold engines are allowed to emit more stuff to protect the engine. Many engines in real world use would be at this cold temperature.

The US has particularly stringent testing, and it might not be possible to meet those tests. They should probably have done other stuff to reduce diesel vehicles - taxes and duties on the vehicles and the fuel, with exemptions for commercial operators.

It's clear now that manfs build to the test, and that type approval testing needs to include better real world driving testing.

For instance, the engine in cars as different as the Land Rover Defender (sadly, no longer among us) and the Volvo, say, S80 is basically the same Ford-engineered unit.

A better comparison would be something like UL or FCC. Make the standards and testing body liable for their claims. Require PEs to be part of the organization and personally responsible for signing off.

This is a solved problem. We build bridges and electronics that don't kill people using similar methods.

Moving towards the politics, Rüdiger K. W. Wurzel's Environmental policy-making in Britain, Germany and the European Union's Chapter 5, "The catalytic converter versus the lean-burn engine controversy" seems very informative. Particularly the section "The diesel engine", which contains this:

"In America and Japan, diesel cars almost disappeared from the market in the 1970s after the adoption of stringent limit values for carcinogenic particulates, although this was disputed by the car industry. The EU introduced relatively lenient particulate limit values in the late 1980s. The German government demanded the [Best Available Technology] option for both petrol and diesel cars. However, after heavy lobbying from Mercedes and Volkswagen, fiscal incentives were granted not only for the three-way catalytic converter but for diesel cars which met the lenient EU particulate limits."

(Seen through Google Books at https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0719073340 )

Industry and Politics in West Germany: Toward the Third Republic by Peter J. Katzenstein (seen at https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0801495954 ) adds

"Moreover, since diesel engines get the same break, the European regulation also favours those German producers who are leaders in diesel technology, especially Daimler Benz and VW."

However, Wurzel clearly asserts that the move towards US-style catalytic converters on petrol cars in Europe (which is apparently what first made diesels attractive as a regulatory end-run) was initiated by Germany in the teeth of opposition from German car makers (especially Volkswagen): there was a perception in the UK government that Germany was obliging its automakers in this, but it was wrong. Also, http://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/2190-4715... says that tax incentives for dieselisation in the domestic German market are relatively modest (and that there was a small tax penalty for buying a diesel until 2009, though not after actual fuel costs were taken into account) (2.3.6, 2.3.7). Interestingly, it also suggests that a supply glut of fuel oil (which can be converted into diesel) was the original incentive for the European diesel boom (2.3.1) . Then again, further on down the road it seems clear that the EU's lenient approach to diesel emissions had the effect of advantaging European automakers collectively against competition from the Japanese, who had bet on hybrids instead (2.3.6).

In summary, TIL.