I'd be more eager to cast scorn if I could find a company that hasn't skirted the law.
No, but we could at least hold out on castigation until it's proven they've broken the law. A class action lawsuit isn't proof of anything.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/26/news/companies/mitsubishi-ch...:
> The automaker said last week that it had used improper fuel economy tests on hundreds of thousands of vehicles, including some sold to Nissan
This story suggests a possibility I hadn't considered yet, which is that it may already be economically impossible to build a car that complies with the law.
At this point, while you are welcome to castigate the automakers for cheating, one must also consider that the authors of the regulation may bear some responsibility here too.
And I do mean both bear some responsibility; the cheating of the car companies has prevented the feedback from getting to the regulators that they've created an impossible situation. But they may still have created an impossible solution, and it may mean that people just going "Well just comply with the regulations then!" are proposing a non-solution to the problem without realizing it.
It is also worth pointing out that three years ago the idea that regulations were already impossible to comply with would have been met with hoots of derision, and probably someone is going to reply to me to dismiss it even now. We're asking auto companies here to forfeit billions of dollars, but the regulators themselves have no risk if they are creating an impossible situation.
Just because someone wrote a regulation somewhere doesn't mean it's good, or possible, or economical.
Empirically, VW released patches for their cars to bring the non-test characteristics in line with their test-mode characteristics.
The outcome was that the diesel-engine vehicles had reduced fuel economy and acceleration. [1]
Most customers still enjoyed their cars after the patch was applied.
1. http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/cars/guide-to-the-volkswa...
Did the patched cars also meet mileage standards? How close to the limit were they? (Or are there no mileage standards for diesels?)
2. Collision resistance has improved as weight has decreased.
3. Did they meet mileage standards? Maybe. Probably. 46mpg (the resultant fuel economy after the patch) appears to be outstanding even for diesel vehicles. Mileage is imposed on individual models by year targets and also manufacturer-wide. That is why cars in general are sold with much lower margins: to help manufacturers offset the poor fuel economy and emissions of larger vehicles.
I have no hard data, but my suspicion is that it is not economically impossible in any absolute sense. That is, it is possible to create cars that meet the standard, that can be sold to consumers at a price that allows them to be built. They may have lower power than customers desire, but what else are they going to do? Walk?
What is probably not possible is to do that when they have to compete against cars that only pretend to meet the standard. The cars that only pretend will cost less, or have more performance. If the buyer compares a car that meets the regulation and one that only pretends to, the one that only pretends to is a more desirable car, and will get the sale.
> Just because someone wrote a regulation somewhere doesn't mean it's good, or possible, or economical.
Yup. That's true of regulations on more than just cars, too.
What if the car companies could make a much cleaner diesel engine, but it just wasn't cost efficient?
What if this kind of regulation is the stick to go with the various green regulation carrots (tax credits on fuel efficient vehicles, subsidies for renewables, etc...)?
What if making lawmakers responsible for legislating something out of business has unintended effects? Consider that in some places tobacco companies are suing governments over labeling, imagine the lawsuits if a car company could sue when they didn't like emission laws.
I agree it is easy to look at this with a sympathetic eye to automakers, but I think we cannot condone cheating when other alternatives exists. It may well be impossible to build a clean enough diesel engine. If so we should drop diesel and figure out something with another energy store
We can only dream that we will eventually reach the point where cars cost enough to offset their cost to society.
All the more reason to consider EVs a moral good.
Jokes aside, there is no "offical" source for my claim. But the fact that they use a linux based system yet have no place to download it is all the evidence you need really. You can find a number of people detailing their (unsucessful) GPL requests in forum posts etc. by searching for "tesla gpl" or "tesla gpl violation"