Since all these cars passed the laboratory test, that means there must be something very wrong with the test and the way the standards are enforced. Or all car makers do cheat.
They also have drivers who are above average. That will help with manually shifted cars.
And of course, they pick the best car they can produce, and prepare it optimally. Tyre pressure will be optimized, the car will be perfectly polished, if that helps, etc.
Cheating starts when they tape shut doors to decrease air resistance, or when they explicitly detect "test is being run" and act upon it.
IMO, the real problem is twofold: firstly, the existing tests were designed in such a way that their results do not reflect what happens in the real world, and secondly, some manufacturers went criminally far in optimizing for it.
from: http://www.autonews.com/article/20150929/OEM11/150929807/epa...
So the manufacturer apparently does not get to chose the vehicle, which is one reason why the cheating code was present in all VWs with that engine model rather than just in the vehicles used for the testing.
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?
Like if you were to say "So we're apparently not allowed to bring guns to school".
You can find alternate uses for many words and then you can go and spend many hours debating your reading of what someone wrote but given that I've (1) already answered your question with my response and (2) those do not seem to be the dominant meaning of the term I think that further debate of this particular matter is pointless.
Pointless -> 'not useful', not 'without a sharp pointy end'.
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.
It depends how the law is written.
Case a) - the cars must never emit more pollutants than specified in these rules - then yes, you are correct. The car manufacturers would be rightly concerned about the wide range of situations they would need to account for.
Case b) - the cars must not emit more than the specified amount of pollutants under these specific test conditions (implying hopefully "we understand that the real world performance will differ, and are willing to accept this for the sake of simplicity in testing/lawmaking") - in this case the system is working as intended.
I am not sure which case we are dealing with, maybe someone can advise us.
If NOx was a real concern, the cars would be required to have realtime sensors, the check engine light would come on when they misbehave. All the manufacturers knew. The testers almost certainly knew
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.
it was common knowledge for a long time that the lab tests were not the same as real world driving. But we thought that, even though the lab tests were better, there was some meaningful relationship.
As it turns out, they are wildly divergent in a lot of cases. And the repercussions are ongoing. Long-term, this might turn out to a turning point in the history of internal-combustion engines.