Hacker News Reader

Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

This is further proof that everyone was doing it.

There are so many valuable lessons to takeaway from this, but weirdly for me, it's to never depend on innovation. Especially specific innovation.

It's important to remember that everyone a decade ago was riding high about the potential for diesel. Consumers, car producers, and regulators. And everyone was making promises about how good diesel was going to get - based on the expectation that you can just dump resources into a certain technology and get innovation, magically and predictably. But it feels like everyone just hit the innate limitation of the resource and tried to pretend it didn't exist.

View on HN

This is such a defeatist attitude that lets VW off the hook. We may yet find that everyone was doing it but this isn't it. No one has been found to be doing large-scale cheating like VW so far. And the technology to make diesel cleaner has always been there. The VW scandal is exactly that they cheated to make the cars cheaper by avoiding having extra emissions hardware. Even after all the scrutiny diesel cars are still being sold and as far as we know pass emissions.

Not just hardware but also just using less adblue fluid.

That seems even crazier on the surface. Let’s kill a few people so our users don’t have to refill a tank as often.

Yeah, I scratch my head on that one. Is a DEF system that expensive for the end user? It seems like it would have been a trivial thing to include.

I seem to remember that after the VW scandal, at some point the emissions tests were made less stringent "to keep things realistic", so it wouldn't surprise me at all if you are right that

>after all the scrutiny diesel cars are still being sold and as far as we know pass emissions.

As far as I know the opposite is true and emission tests have only gotten stricter. The test cycle has been updated to be more realistic[1] and the standard has lowered allowed values across the board[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_Harmonised_Light_Veh...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards#Em...

Consider the following quote from your reference [2]:

(here "conformity factor" CF is the relative violation, so "0% conformity factor" means at the original limit, "100% conformity factor" means twice the original limit!)

>In 2017, the European Union will introduce testing in real-world conditions called Real Driving Emissions, using portable emissions measurement systems in addition to laboratory tests.[24] The actual limits will use 110% (CF=2.1) "conformity factor" (the difference between the laboratory test and real-world conditions) in 2017, and 50% (CF=1.5) in 2021 for NO x ,[25] conformity factor for particles number P being left for further study. Environment organizations criticized the decision as insufficient,[26][27] while ACEA mentions it will be extremely difficult for automobile manufacturers to reach such a limit in such short period of time.[28] In 2015 an ADAC study (ordered by ICCT) of 32 Euro 6 cars showed that few complied with on-road emission limits, and LNT/NOx adsorber cars (with about half the market) had the highest emissions.[29] At the end of this study, ICCT was expecting a 100% conformity factor.[30]

EDIT: adding; to me it seems like the regulators knew all along about the defeat mechanisms, and the VW scandal is just the first step: removing plausible deniability of the regulator. Next steps will be when people realise the conformity factor of their car is increasing over time as the laws get stricter? ;) Then people will start seriously questioning the regulators who formally accept such nomenclature!

What you are describing is yet another way to make the testing stricter. Legally optimizing for the driving cycle will always be possible so adding an extra measurement that compares the test cycle with some real world driving is yet another hurdle to pass. You are somehow assuming that the conformity factor will increase over time but the quote says that it should go down from 2.1x to 1.5x, once again making the test even stricter.

I don't see any evidence that they "knew all along" but this discussion is very common. We've seen it as well with the financial crisis. A set of people get discovered committing fraud and yet the discussion quickly shifts to how the regulators didn't do enough to stop it. Regulators are often inept and regulatory capture does exist. But if regulators were asleep or even worse complicit does not in any way excuse VW. In fact the complete opposite is true. If the industry somehow subverted regulation then that's an additional crime and not in any way a reason to throw up our hands and say "everyone was doing it, the regulators knew all along, that's life".

To rephrase my complaint: "conformity factor" should be more appropriately named "Excess Factor".

Consider a car just barely passing a CF 2.1 NOx test in 2017, then it obviously won't pass the stricter CF 1.5 NOx test in 2021. even though the NOx emissions limit will be identical!:

>European emission standards for passenger cars (Category M)*, g/km

Tier Date (Type Approval) Date (First Registration) CO THC NMHC NO x HC+NO x PM PN [#/km]

Diesel

Euro 6c - September 2018 0.50 - - 0.080 0.170 0.0045 6×1011

Euro 6d-Temp September 2017 September 2019 0.50 - - 0.080 0.170 0.0045 6×1011

Euro 6d January 2020 January 2021 0.50 - - 0.080 0.170 0.0045 6×1011

As the emissions standard becomes stricter, then that same car would only pass increasing Excess Factors

A 2017 NOx Excess Factor currently named "110% conformity factor CF" of 2.1 would result in a "50% conformity factor" car in 2021, even though the emission limits and the car are identical... does that make sense to the reader who wasn't pointed out the inversely defined terminology?

It reminds me of "symbolic euro" which does not mean a euro as a symbolic gesture at all, it means a sum of money representing however high the cost will turn out to be, say in damages,...

If the diagram on this page is to be trusted, yes everyone was doing it: https://www.transportenvironment.org/press/dieselgate-1st-an...

From your link:

found that not one single brand complies with the latest air pollution limits (‘Euro 6’) for diesel cars and vans in real-world driving

The important bit is "real-world driving". As far as we know everyone optimized for the test and yet the driving cycle was not realistic. That is not illegal and supposedly the test has now been improved. What VW was caught doing is much worse than that, it's actually cheating during the test. Emissions testing has been shown to be highly fallible but what VW was caught doing is on another level.

Nobody specified what innovation must occur. Nobody even said you had to make diesel engines. They just said if you want to sell diesel engines they must be this good.

Anyway, remember VW themselves had engines that met the spec just fine. They only cheated so they could omit the AdBlue system.

The push to diesel was actually launched by various European governments starting in the 90s: https://www.vox.com/2015/10/15/9541789/volkswagen-europe-die...

They specifically set goals and policies to make diesels a larger presence (hence why so many power diesel sedans and small cars were made for the EU market but not the US).

This is where the blame really lies: "European nations — including Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Austria — had been cutting taxes on diesel car purchases and diesel fuel to promote sales". The big lesson here is regulators should never ever pick winners from specific technologies.

I think your conclusion is not supported by the premise. Yes, regulators fucked up. But that does not mean they are wrong all the time. And besides, it wasn't the regulators that cheated, it was the car manufacturers.

The worst you can really accuse them of is lax oversight.

This is something that worries me about current green initiatives. We throw down subsidies for electric cars, but they still fuel on coal fired plants. Or all the money we throw away to make ethanol.

It would be so much better if we just started taxing externalities like carbon or fertilizer runoff and let markets decide the tech to do it organically.

But let's not let the car oligopoly completely off the hook. At some point they all took that step over the line.

Ethanol is not a green initiative, it is a subsidy program for corn growers. There's no serious green group that argues for ethanol from corn. The "green" aspect is just marketing by the corn lobby.

I think it is still a good thing to subsidize electric cars for several reasons:

1) even if powered 100% by coal plants, these plants have an higher efficiency than cars' internal combustion engines, especially if you consider the energy/co2 emissions due to the distillation process of petrol/diesel. Moreover, having a huge central plant means that you can install heavy and big filters and possibly re-capture some of that co2. You can't do this with cars

2) not all the power comes from coal plants, some from nuclear, some from natural gas, and even from renewables sources

3) when we finally crack nuclear fusion / thorium reactors / we found a way to store the surplus of renewables for underperforming times in a good way (like with molten salt https://newatlas.com/mit-molten-salt-battery-membrane/53085/ ) we can be carbon free from as soon as these technologies spread, without having to way for consumers to change cars

4) Pushing people to use newer technologies means that companies will spend more in R&D on this subject. Imagine if someone finally invents a battery with energy capacity of 5x current Li-ion. A car like the model 3 will have ~ 1500 kms of range

...

Of course there are points in favor of petrol/diesel cars, like the fact that producing current batteries is not that good for the environment, but if we don't invest on this we'll never have the incentive to overcome these problems.

> "when we finally crack nuclear fusion / thorium reactors / we found a way to store the surplus of renewables"

> "Imagine if someone finally invents a battery with energy capacity of 5x ".

3 & 4 are exactly examples of the original point I was making. We shouldn't plan out decisions today based on the lottery machine of future discoveries. None of these advancements are guaranteed.

In the 1910s, steam power was the most promising tech for the development of the automobile. It's hard to imagine a world where we could have just dumped enough R&D into steam power to overcome the natural shortcomings.

We did. Our coal and nuclear power plants are very efficient steam engines.

> A car like the model 3 will have ~ 1500 kms of range

more likely it'll have ~ 700km of range, but only cost half the price!

> even if powered 100% by coal plants, these plants have an higher efficiency than cars' internal combustion engines

Yes they have incredible thermal efficiency, but two things come to mind: The grid does not, and coal has particular difficulty in controlling particulate emissions. This is particularly true of brown coal, which has a very high water content. Just to be particularly frustrating, coal is not distilled the way diesel is (which is famous for particulate emissions) so it tends to have other stuff like excessive sulphur. Though in that case, that stuff ends up in the bunker oil that goes in big ships.

I think this doesn't take into account the reasons behind this (in the UK at least, where I live). Tax cuts were made because CO2 emissions were viewed as being the problem, and Diesels are more fuel efficient than an equivalent-power petrol engine, hence lower CO2 emissions.

It wasn't that the regulators were 'picking winners from specific technologies' as you claim, but they were favouring any vehicle with a low CO2 emission per kilometer. If that was achievable by a petrol car, then it was rewarded; low emission petrol cars got the same break, but they're inherently less efficient due to the lower compression ratio of a petrol engine.

... whereas less CO2 emissions caused by Diesel engines is a misconception, too.

Diesel comes with a higher energy density which means there are more CO2 emissions per burned liter of Diesel in comparison to gas.

Burning a liter of Diesel emits 2.6kg of CO2, gas 'only' emits 2.3kg of CO2 [1].

Plus, a Diesel engine is heavier compared to a gas engine with comparable specs.

[1] https://www1.wdr.de/wissen/technik/kohlenstoffdioxid-sprit-1...

This comparison is wrong. You want CO2 per distance, not CO2 per liter. From these numbers if it could go either way. If the diesel engine gets 10% more distance/liter then it's worse than an Otto engine, but if it gets 20% more distance/liter then it's cleaner than an Otto engine. CO2/liter tells us very little.

However, what is certain is that the CO2 savings from diesel is small and certainly less than 50%. That's not going to get us where we need to go in terms of carbon emissions.

I wouldn't say it's per se wrong. The tax is based on a per liter basis and not on a per distance/liter basis. If you'd want to tax CO2 emissions, Diesel would need a higher tax rate than gas since it'll emit more CO2 per burned liter.

While it's been a while since I lived there, I'm reasonably sure that in New Zealand, Diesel is indeed taxed at a rather higher rate.

> Diesels are more fuel efficient than an equivalent-power petrol engine, hence lower CO2 emissions.

> but they were favouring any vehicle with a low CO2 emission per kilometer

You're making two statements here which sound like they're more or less the same, but they aren't. The first is true, the second is not.

An equivalent-power diesel car produces less CO2. But they aren't equivalent. The tax breaks and lower fuel use led to bigger cars. On average Diesel cars have higher CO2 emissions per kilometer.

>On average Diesel cars have higher CO2 emissions per kilometer.

I don't think that's true (in the UK at least) - both in that it's vanishingly rare to find a petrol vehicle that fit into the lowest 5 UK tax brackets (which are g/km of CO2) - and also in terms of real-world fuel use. I've owned probably 70 cars in the last 10 years or so (I buy and sell as a side gig), and all of the diesels have had lower fuel use for equivalent performance. They tend to be 'one size bigger' in terms of engine (so, say a 1.9 instead of a 1.6, or a 1.4 instead of a 1.1), but even taking that into account they will be a 10-20 mpg better on fuel, with a petrol 1.4 focus giving maybe 30 mpg average, and a diesel (1.6) one easily making 45-50 mpg, more on a run. And that means lower CO2 emissions.

Yeah, you might see the occasional stupidly large diesel car/chelsea tractor, but most of them are 1.9D VAG, and 1.6 or 2.0 Peugeot/Citroen/Ford HDI/TDCIs - there are hundreds of thousands of them out there on the roads.

Compared to 0.7 through 1.4l petrol cars, the diesel numbers are less than impressive and still bigger. And the 1.4 can easily can have horsepower and acceleration exceeding a 2.1l diesel.

> The tax breaks and lower fuel use led to bigger cars.

We don't know that. Diesel is far more prevalent with bigger cars because they tend to eat through more energy over their lifetime, making it more likely to break even on the up-front premium for diesel (not just more joule per kilometre, but typically also far more kilometres per year). But chances are that without diesel, cars in Europe would be just as big today (e.g. they still tend to be smaller that in a certain famously petrol-centric country)

This was a critical mistake.

The push should have been for Propane.

Propane is cleaner than almost any other carbon source. Also, you don't have to get it from the Middle East.

You might have been thinking Methane with the middle east comment. Natural gas is mostly methane.

Also you should have mentioned LPG, to allow it to be related to existing initiatives (which have now seen decline).

Perhaps someone older can correct me if I am wrong, since this is difficult to research: Here in Germany the tax difference between diesel and gasoline was mainly created in 1991. Gasoline prices were increased to pay for German re-unification and diesel prices weren't taxed as much because of "European tax harmonization" -- I'd say this is code for "we want to remain competitive and lower diesel taxes gives our industry a competitive advantage". To be fair, they increased taxation of diesel passenger cars (yearly fee) as well -- just not enough. So nothing intentional. They needed to increase taxes, gasoline was a convenient target because its price was low compared to previous times or something, they didn't want to hurt the (export oriented) industry, so diesel wasn't taxed as much. Individual consumers looked at total cost of ownership of diesel vs. gasoline cars and started buying the diesel one.

Regulations, at least the European ones, were created with industry input. I believe that they were designed as much as advertisement for replacing perfectly fine existing cars with new ones from the factory as they were designed for actual air quality improvement. Test stand trickery was factored in from the beginning, because basic trickery had already started (for mileage) before emissions regulations entered the picture. Politicians can claim that they have wrestled major concessions from an unwilling industry, the industry feigns a struggle while happily agreeing (as long as nobody looks too hard at the trickery) so that their customers get a free clean conscience with their shiny new car. Repeat a few iterations and the gap between regulatory fiction and reality will be too large to remain unnoticed.

The EPA keeps lowering emissions requirements for future years based on speculation rather than existing tehcnology. IMO it was inevitable for this to happen. You simply can't create a deisel clean enough to meet regulations.

While emissions regulations have a noble goal we would be far better off regulating farm equipment, stationary generators, and boats at this point.

A single farm tractor or lawn mower pollutes as much as hundreds of cars. A container or cruise ship, many thousands of cars.

It reminds me of California approach to water regulations. Squeeze the populace when industry is using 90% of the water.

It's kind of like optimizing software without measuring a performance profile. We're optimizing cars for very little gain. While a lot of low hanging fruit isn't measured and could give us much larger gains. We're not looking at the hot-path.

I think it's because, in the end, with cars you can pass the costs directly to consumers. With industrial and commercial engines you tax business. In our day they have greater political power than voting populace. Same deal with California and water. Easier to force residents to conserve, the businesses using 90% of the water are polically protected

Worth keeping in mind that "emissions" targeted are actually somewhat localised. The initiatives are about reducing NOx emissions within the bounds of suburban areas, where it tends to become photochemical smog[0]. Yes CO2 is an issue, but a different issue, and frustratingly, thermal efficiency is correlated with NOx emissions[1], which is why we have these scandals coming up in the first place.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smog#Photochemical_smog [1]https://www.alentecinc.com/papers/NOx/The%20formation%20of%2...

Edit: Worth clarifying that thermal efficiency and combustion temperature are also correlated, which is not plainly stated in [1]

I'll pile on with the others saying this is a bad conclusion.

Storing large amounts of cash in bank vaults also creates strong perverse incentives, but we do it and create strong disincentives to practically nullify them.

> never depend on innovation. Especially specific innovation.

This is a little bit exaggerated. How about the Internet? Or GPS?

I think what they mean is not that we should not rely on innovation once it has been achieved and is actually working, but that we shouldn't bet our future on forcing very specific innovation in a certain area/metric as that will just incentivize people to cheat.

Similar to Goodhart's Law - "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Reply on news.ycombinator.com