Volkswagen under investigation over illegal software that masks pollution | Business | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/business/201 ... violations

That has been a well known secret for years, that many manufacturers use such routines to produce cleaner results when testing - they do the same when being run through the standard driving cycle for fuel economy tests. They produce up to 30% better results than you can actually achieve on the road.

Are VW selling 1940's tanks disguised as cars?
How can a modern car be that bad?

Volkswagen chief quits over emissions scandal as car industry faces crisis | Business | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/business/201 ... ns-scandal

Basically it has been covered up at every level, including national governments across Europe. That's the only way that 'works' for so long, and if VW were at it... I imagine it was discovered years ago and nobody wanted to be left out in the cold when they squealed. There's no way someone in countries other than Germany didn't notice this before now. VW's rivals alone!

It just needs one employee, who thinks it is a good idea. And it doesn't make any difference if it was in 1 car or 100M cars, it is a bit of software, if somebody manipulated the software and put it into the release version, then it automatically lands in every vehicle, it isn't as if somebody sits there and types up a new version of the software for each vehicle rolling off the production line.

Interestingly they have made an "Anzeige gegen unbekannt" (a legal complaint against party unknown), which will allow the German police to investigate - they didn't, as the article states, lodge the complain against VW the group.

Ford has already been through this, although they only got a wrist slap, because somebody had entered the GPS co-ordinates of the US test centres into their software.

According to a report earlier this year by ADAC (German AA), it is standard industry practice to notice when the standard cycle simulation is being performed on the vehicle and put it into "super economy" mode. They did tests with around 40 different cars from different manufacturers and all of them returned unobtainable fuel consumption (and through that emissions) when running the test. It is one of the reasons why they have always run their own test stretch of around 100KM of real roads, which they put every vehicle through that they test.

Their tests showed that cars obtained between 20% and 40% better fuel economy in the standard cycle simulation than those vehicles can achieve under real conditions.

Thats a problem as the tests are probably badly written. Even if they are road tests they if they say something like

" Car will start from stationary, accelerate to 30 mph, drive for 1 mile and come to a stop" but unless it states how you do it you can accelerate VERY slowly, drive on the smoothest road possible with over inflated, low resistance tyres and after the mile coast to a stop. This is of course totally different to what happens in real life

It is done on a rolling road and the acceleration and braking curves are clearly defined. That is how they can detect the test is being performed - probably even easier with GPS on board wheel speed = 30mph, GPS speed = 0 == Test.

IFIFY

Which, potentially, means that:
a) were all driving cars far filthier than we realised
and
b) The tax bands (based on CO2 emissions) are all wrong.

My first question is: who else is doing this? VW are unlikely to be alone in manipulating figures. IIRC these emission figures come from pre-production models.

What you need are independent testers to take samples of cars and then produce more accurate, real-world results. I suspect they're far likely to exceed current expected levels. Which means the entire banding would need to be revised (eg keep same cost but just change figures around), or massively mark up cost, which would mean a drop in sales.

I think it would be grossly unfair to penalise consumers if it turns out that they've been deceived by the car manufacturers although that doesn't mean it wouldn't be proposed by some greedy fecker at the treasury of course.
If it did happen however the car manufacturers would legitimately be finding themselves on an even larger wodge of class action lawsuits than is likely to occur anyway.

There has always been a discrepancy between official fuel consumption and emission figures and what's achievable in the real world but the idea is that they allow relative comparisons to be made between vehicles and engines, certainly from the same manufacturer if not across the entire industry. Almost by default a laboratory test result is going to very difficult to reproduce outside of the laboratory conditions simply because of the variability of driving styles real people have.

n24 TV channel is reporting that BMW is now being eyed, especially the X3.

I read a report saying European testing standards have very unrealistic criteria for testing that allows all cars to get higher mpg values than can be gained in real life. Interestingly the larger the engine size, the smaller the gap between the claims and reality. Also hybrids are even worse in real life

Had to happen - if one of the manufacturers is doing it, its a safe bet the others are to.

UK to launch vehicle emissions probe

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34352548

Well, what a [LIFTED] bolt from the blue!
This is about doing the right thing, of course, not a quick cash in on raising VED for millions of motorists.