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Comment by ummonk | Hacker News Reader

I remember Mazda having trouble making their diesel engines performant while conforming to California emissions regulations, and wondering why they were having so much trouble compared to European car manufacturers. Then this scandal broke and it was obvious why.

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I wonder why mazda or some other competitor didn’t find this by doing their own research? I make software for structural engineering and when some competitor launches a program that makes “better designs” it has usually turned out to be because they simply don’t follow the design codes/regulations. We wouldn’t be pushed from the market by that - we’d fund the analysis, reverse engineering and legal processes necessary to show the competitor is cheating.

My conclusion, from the first time I thought about it, is that they were all cheating.

Engineers move job; they talk to each other. Every car company had to have people who knew the truth and, if they were being unfairly competed against, could publish this truth.

Correct. Every single manufacturer in the industry knows what the others are doing. They all buy each other's vehicles and tear them down to the last bolt and bit to see how they work and how they can "borrow" some ideas without infringing on any patent (or breaking the law maybe).

They were all aware of what VW was doing and it wasn't a surprise, lots of companies did it [0] a lot of times [1]. Usually though the penalties were light. Many times they involved US companies and the strong local lobby pushed for the lighter fines. Like the heavy duty diesel engines case where 7 truck manufacturers were ordered to pay $1bn together for doing the exact same thing. Which in the grand scheme of things was peanuts compared to VW's $4.5bn (plus the tens of $bn of extra costs). So the expectation was always "it's just the cost of doing business, pay it and let bygones be bygones".

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/22/us/record-penalty-likely-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal#Previ...

> My conclusion, from the first time I thought about it, is that they were all cheating.

Mazda did, in fact, admit to cheating in emissions testing.

In other words, yes, pretty much the entire automobile industry cheated on those tests to varying degrees. The current "iteration" was also by far not the only one.

Its even simpler- they send each other prototypes, way before release of a new model, so everyone can reverse engineer that.

If Mazda was attempting and failing to get their cars to pass the defined emissions test, one can imagine they were only ever testing their own and their competitor's cars under those test conditions—which we now know triggered the cheat mechanism in VW cars.

But yes, had the research group not performed their on-road tests, it would have only been a matter of time before an honest car maker would have realised their competitor's sums don't add up and perform or fund their own independent investigation.

(Perhaps this is exactly what happened behind the scenes? It's known that CARB ordered the research due to discrepancies in US v EU numbers—but someone pushed them to look at the numbers closely. They put a lot of work in to perform these tests so it couldn't have been on a whim.)

> It's known that CARB ordered the research due to discrepancies in US v EU numbers—but someone pushed them to look at the numbers closely.

This is revealed in these quotes from the article:

German and his colleagues at the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) in the US just wanted to tie up the last loose ends in a big report, and thought the research would give them something positive to say about diesel. ... German’s group also forwarded the findings to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and California’s Air Resources Board (Carb). “We were definitely scared. We wanted EPA and Carb to take over.”

Were they having technical trouble or just having trouble finding a cost-efficient solution?

AFAIK the technical solution (Urea injection) works fine, but it's expensive and VW didn't want to include it in all cars.

VW uses urea injections, but they wanted to make it transparent to the end user. The urea was to be refilled during maintenance, and disconnecting the system was the only way to make the tank last that long.

Not all TDI that were part of the emissions mess use urea, they also have a system that injects diesel into the particulate trap and burns out all the particulates at high temperature. Look up DPF regen. Note: I owned one of these cars, this is firsthand knowledge.

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