Diesel cars: Is it time to switch to a cleaner fuel?

[snow hope]

I had an Audi A3 and I feel cheated by VW - German cheaters!

[AutomaticEarth]

The affected cars use the Urea injection method to cut Nitrogen oxides by improving the catalysis. They pumped in more urea when the car is being tested, and throttled back for ordinary driving, to avoid using up the small reserve bottle too quickly.

Why not fit a bigger bottle and sell the stuff at filling stations? Urea is piss cheap.

I thought you was joking until I checked out the wiki for Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR)

$18bn seems a large price to pay for something that could take a few minutes to do (we already fill up the windscreen washer bottle). It'll be interesting to see if any other manufacturer will be caught out doing the same as VW.

[kenneal - lagger]

Officer - I say, I say, I say, wot av we ere? Are you urinatin' on that car, sir?

Owner - No officer. I'm just filling up my SCR bottle!

[biffvernon]

Molly Scott Cato MEP has hit out at government hypocrisy over the Volkswagen emissions scandal, saying it is ironic that the Transport Secretary is calling for EU action when his own government has consistently failed to act in preventing the deaths of at least 23,000 people a year from air pollution.
“It has long been an open secret that European carmakers have been ducking the EU’s rules to enable them to keep their highly polluting cars on the road. Air pollution is a silent but prolific killer in Europe and Greens have long argued for stricter rules on emissions and testing.
"It is high time the UK government and other EU governments stopped siding with car manufacturers in trying to weaken the rules. If the Tories are late converts to better testing and cleaner air across Europe that is to be welcome. But they'd better get their own house in order to prevent the thousands of deaths that occur due to air pollution in the UK each year.”
European Greens are proposing an amendment to the draft law being voted on today in the European Parliament's Environment Committee which, if passed, would require vehicle emissions tests based on actual driving conditions.

[PS_RalphW]

Martin Winterkorn is walking away from Volkswagen with a massive pension pot worth over €28m.

And as he stepped down, rather than being fired, he could also collect two years pay despite the emissions scandal.

From the Grauniad.

As always, the guilty get bonuses and the workers get fired.

[biffvernon]

It will be interesting to see where the criminal responsibility ends up.

[biffvernon]

Nick Taleb would describe the affair as a black swan. Here's an interesting thought:

Analysts at UBS warned that if the crisis worsened it could signal the eventual end of the combustion engine. Julie Hudson at UBS said: “Should transport emissions become too difficult to regulate because of the difficulty of amassing accurate data, we think this might go way beyond the diesel engine, to accelerate the demise of the combustion engine.”

http://www.theguardian.com/business/201 ... porsche-vw

[RenewableCandy]

Anyone else here reckon they're all at it and VW were just unlucky to be caught with their *** in the pig, so to speak?

[adam2]

Anyone else here reckon they're all at it and VW were just unlucky to be caught with their *** in the pig, so to speak?

I suspect that they are all at it, VWs emissions figures were broadly comparable with those of their competitors, which suggests that they all cheated.
It would not surprise me to find out that most modern diesel engine cars use the same microchip and that all the major car builders have independently programmed the chip to cheat emissions tests.

[Lurkalot]

The affected cars use the Urea injection method to cut Nitrogen oxides by improving the catalysis. They pumped in more urea when the car is being tested, and throttled back for ordinary driving, to avoid using up the small reserve bottle too quickly.

Why not fit a bigger bottle and sell the stuff at filling stations? Urea is piss cheap.

I thought you was joking until I checked out the wiki for Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR)

$18bn seems a large price to pay for something that could take a few minutes to do (we already fill up the windscreen washer bottle). It'll be interesting to see if any other manufacturer will be caught out doing the same as VW.

I pinched Ralph's comment about urea being so cheap and mentioned it to someone else. Seems it isn't quite as cheap as that , "proper" VW urea is around £5 a litre although cheaper brands are available although using non guinuine urea could affect the warranty . The person I spoke to owns a VW Sharon and it has a 17 L urea tank and consumes it at a rate of approximately a litre per thousand miles. Seeing as some reports are saying the emissions are anywhere from four times to forty times worse in regular driving would that mean at the optimistic lower claim that one litre of urea would last for around 250 miles?

[PS_RalphW]

(my comment was a bit tongue in cheek)

A figure I saw quoted was £50 a year extra cost for the Urea. At £5 a litre and 10,000 miles a year that equates to 1L per 1000 miles, the same as the Sharon owner. At (say) 50mpg for an average diesel car, 10,000 miles is 200 gallons or 900L. Equivalent to 5p/litre extra cost on the diesel, about 3-5% depending on current price of diesel. Mass production would probably bring costs down.

Of course, it may also be necessary to reduce the power output of the engine and / or reduce the mpg to meet the standard.

I've also seen comments to the effect that running in the clean and efficient mode continuously would destroy the engine quite quickly. Given my experience of my VW built diesel , I wouldn't be surprised by that.

[PS_RalphW]

It turns out my Skoda does have one of the dodgy VW engines - although it is only 3 cylinders and does not have the Urea additive system.

So it is most likely that

1. It has the cheat code in the software

2. As there is no Urea additive, it cannot have it's level modified during testing.

3. It probably passes the official Euro 5 test without cheating.

4. The real world emissions are probably much higher than the official test returns - as previously reported for most diesels.

5. It won't and probably can't meet the new Euro 6 test, let alone meet that standard in the real world, or the Euro 7 test that is in the offing.

6. The big problems with the car that I have had were probably partly from my hypermiling driving style which exaggerated the limits of the technology to return both high MPG and low NOx and particulates (soot).

It will be interesting to see if I get a recall notice, or any description of work they will do to it.

[PS_RalphW]

As I suspected

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... tests-show

[Lurkalot]

I rather suspected your comment was tongue in cheek and used it myself with a similar level of flippancy . Interesting reading your comment and hearing on the news that remedial work would or may result in engines being less efficient. I always seem to struggle with that concept , that burning more fuel results in less emissions.

[biffvernon]

What complicates all this is that, although within cities NOx is a killer, in rural areas (such as Lincolnshire) it is probably not important and to the extent that NOx mops up methane it is a greenhouse gas mitigation factor. The reduced CO2 emission from vehicles that emit NOx is also a good thing.

There's doesn't seem to be a simple answer but more windfarms to produce more electricity for replacement of internal combustion engines with electric vehicles and better public transport and car bans from city centres should all form parts of the solution.