Diesel: How it changed Europe and how Europe might change back | Hacker News Reader

Diesel: How it changed Europe and how Europe might change back

arstechnica.com

51 pointsbane27 comments

How come none of these articles in the VW dieselgate wake mention previous identical scandals in this area that make me skeptical that anything will realy be done about it? Took me less than a minute to Google (from 1998!): 'Car manufacturers can use modem electronic equipment to adapt the engine to any type of test cycle. They can even tell the computer of the car how to recognise when the car is being driven according to a specific test-cycle and adjust the combustion accordingly. It was this kind of software that six truck manufacturers, including two European firms (Volvo and Renault), recently used in the United States to defeat the EPA's pollution control. As a result emissions of nitrogen oxides from highway driving increased by 300 per cent. " extract from: 'Cycle Beating and the EU test cycle for cars' - Per Kageson - European Federation for Transport and the Environment - November 1998

That's because too many people think they can do something better than the previous group. Such as situations where people think "this time it will be different!" that usually turns out worse. In this case, they were just thinking they could be better at cheating.

Many people who have bought diesels have made the decision based on the wrong criteria. They bought it because the fuel is cheaper and you get more miles to the gallon.

However people that only drive short distances daily (less than 15 minute trips. I.e. the school run), are damaging their diesel engines because the DPF (diesel particulate filter) needs at least 15 minutes to get to a temperature that can burn off the particulates.

People who don't regularly drive long distances in their diesels are therefore driving on false economy. The repair bills will end up outstripping the fuel savings. Also, as the article points out, cheap diesel is artificially cheap due to government incentives, which could (and probably will) be taken away at any time. People driving diesels in Europe are sitting on a financial time bomb.

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cars/article-2332107/Petr...

In the Netherlands, government is actually incentivising people who drive a lot to buy diesel cars, but not those who drive only a little, and that is going on for quite a while already. Here is how it's done:

- Diesel fuel is considerably cheaper at the pump [0], plus diesel cars have better per-liter mileage. Thus per-mile expense for a diesel car is roughly 1/2 of that for a benzine car.

- Diesel car is roughly twice as expensive in yearly road tax (EUR 1580 / year for a 1500kg diesel car vs. EUR 808 / year for a 1500kg bezine car in Amsterdam) [1], plus a diesel car would typically be slightly heavier. Thus per-year expense is much higher for diesel.

Two observations above combine in a well-known locally rule of thumb - if you drive >20000km/year, buy a diesel; otherwise you're better off with a benzine car. This matches perfectly with the inherent technical requirement for a diesel car to be driven mostly in long trips to be efficient or relatively clean.

[0] http://www.anwb.nl/vakantie/reisvoorbereiding/brandstofprijz...

[1] http://www.belastingdienst.nl/rekenhulpen/motorrijtuigenbela...

The criteria aren't wrong: I want to save money on my car.

Diesel fuel is cheaper, by a lot. Diesel cars drive further than a petrol car (I get about 3.7l/100km). A diesel car produces less CO2, which makes it cheaper to lease (14% instead of 20%-25% for added tax).

If the government taxes the diesel car equally to a petrol car, then people will pick the cheapest.

Just get a cheap decent EV out there with similar properties of a fuel car, and people will pick that. And cheap is in the range of 20000-25000eu, not 60000eu like a Tesla.

Fuel is already taxed heavily here (just compare Europe fuel prices to US fuel prices).

And I don't know what a DPF is, how it works, or that my car has it. I shouldn't have to care about all the hundreds of components in my car. I have enought things to worry about already.

If the startup time is 15 minutes for that filter and that is too long, maybe there should be some force applied to reduce this startup time to say 5 minutes.

I didn't know what a DPF was, nor what an injector was. This January, a 4000+ euros repair bill educated me. This is a seven years old car and taking this bill and the higher car price in consideration, I would have been better buying a regular fuel car.

The particulate filtering technology for Diesel engines has been rushed to market. As well as DPF filters, EGR valves are another thing that get clogged with soot and fail if you do too many short trips. The diesel engines Vauxhall/Opel use are particularly susceptible to it. I had one fail in a 5 year old car, bought the part myself for £200 and my father in law helped me change it but that would have been a £500 garage bill in itself.

> Just get a cheap decent EV out there with similar properties of a fuel car, and people will pick that. And cheap is in the range of 20000-25000eu, not 60000eu like a Tesla.

Absolutely. I was quite disappointed with the $130k price tag on the new Tesla X. Brilliant car, but way too expensive.

The way you build cheap cars is to make expensive cars first.

The $130K Model X is the signature version. There are 1000 of them, and you had to pay $40K to claim a spot. They are fully loaded with every option. The lower trim packages will be available after those first 1000 are shipped.

The decision was made on right criteria. Usually, it is economy.

Diesel cars are more expensive than petrol cars. That means, you must make math, how much are you going to drive, in order to break even on the savings on diesel.

Usually, the break even point is about 20 000 km/year. You aren't going to make 20k km every year by doing school runs.

About the DPF filter burning: it does not burn all the time. Yes, it needs warm engine, but it needs it once for every few hundred kilometers (in my car, cca every 750 km). That is doable, even when living in the city. Combine that with the break even point mentioned above - it means, you are going to have some longer trip every week or two anyway, so it will burn out the DPF.

There are many other, more probable ways to damage your car by neglect or ignorance, resulting in expensive repairs, not only DPF ;).

"cheap diesel is artificially cheap due to government incentives, which could (and probably will) be taken away at any time."

The french govnerment has already announced it will remove the tax advantages on diesel by 2020, thanks to the Volkswagen scandal.

On the other hand, many newer diesels have cam chains instead of belts, which will just mean the big service at 100k miles (say) is a DPF service instead of a cam belt service. Costs are comparable (This is assuming the cam chain is trouble free and lasts forever, which isn't entirely true of course).

Even if the DPF is abused by short trips, there isn't even a scheduled inspection until over 100k miles, so if there are no noticable issues with it, it might just do a worse job for the environment but not incur higher ownership costs.

Over half of new cars here (Sweden) are leased by companies, and bought with very strict CO2 emissions guidelines, but no other guidelines. That means you either have to buy a hybrid or a diesel, there is basically no way you can get under 120g/km otherwise. Since there is of course also a price treshold, the hybrids are usually out of the question and the end result is that most new cars will be diesels.

How cute and naive, when DPF fails you simply CUT IT OUT (or hollow it out), problem solved.

How will the car pass inspection after that?

I think the recent technological development of the modern diesel is pretty impressive. Environmental policies set the bar at 120g/km and all the manufacturers promptly delivered on that. The engine power inflation didn't even stop (on the contrary, it continued) so now we drive super-efficient and super powerful small engines. 200hp, 300Nm and 5L/100km would seem like sorcery 15 years ago. Now it's par for the course.

This would seem like a massive success for environmental regulation, and then the VW scandal broke. To me it just seems that the regulation wasn't good enough: all it would have taken was to have strict regulations for all emissions (Particles, CO2, NOx, ...) and realistic test cycles.

At this point we should probably just tighten the regulations: set the bar at 100g/CO2 and also tighten the other emissions values to whatever a modern 1.4Litre petrol engine emits today. Then tighten the regulations every year. If manufacturers can squeeze diesels down to those levels, great! If they can't, hybrids and EV's will take the place of these cars that consumers will likely find underpowered under the new emission standards.

Sadly, although this would seem to be a bonus for the environment, I don't think it is. A lot of people have been tempted into buying diesels based on the claimed fuel consumption and emission figures. I was one of them. However, unless you are regularly making long journeys these figures are a false economy. I moved closer to my work and ended up making a lot of short trips in my car. The result? The engine's Exhaust Gas Recycling (EGR) unit clogged up after several months which cost a fortune to replace (and of course the environmental impact of more of these units being manufactured). The garage's suggested fix for this was to make a weekly superfluous trip up and down the motorway in 4th gear to burn off clogged particulates (thus wasting fuel that was supposed to be saved). Other 'fixes' I found on the internet were to apply a kit to bypass the EGR entirely (thus re-emitting the particles that were supposed to be cleaned up).

My fix? Sell the car and go back to a guzzly petrol model.

>My fix? Sell the car

Did you know you could simply delete EGR? And that removing this contraption would result in smoother engine and ~3% better fuel consumption?

Its as simple as unscrewing this piece of crap and mounting a blocking plate (plus sensor bypass in some cases). You can even buy easy install delete kits.

This is exactly what is happening in Europe and in the US. Successive euro norms (known as euro 4/5/6) are forcing cars to have cleaner emissions.

The diesel tax advantage that has led VW on it's path to failure is pretty much exactly the same regulatory accident that caused the SUV infestation in the US. A taxation difference between luxury and utility, that America happened to pin to shape and size, while Europe (well, parts of Europe) has pinned it to the type of fuel. We'll see which mistake is easier to fix.

What's interesting to me is that it almost seems like VW fooled themselves: they aggressively pooh-poohed alternatives (hybrid, electic). BMW and Porsche (now a WV subsidiary, I acknowledge) have been working on both those options, chasing Toyota in the former.

VW seem to have convinced themselves that they didn't need to look at other ways of achieving clean(er) engines. Which suggests an element of truth to the idea there was a "climate of fear" under the now-resigned CEO; it would be typical of a couple of companies I've contracted to, where phenominal amounts of money were pissed away because it was career-ending to tell the truth about a particular strategy not working.

In Finland, Diesel is noticeably cheaper than gas (currently below €1.20 per liter vs gas ~€1.45) and there's an offset in the yearly "diesel powered vehicle" tax that is around €350-€400 a year, depending on weight. That offset is easily countered with the Diesel engines outputing better mileage.

I drove a 1988 diesel Mercedes for a year. For a fair sized sedan and for its age, it traveled with 5.5 L/100 km, or 42 miles per US gallon. I bought a newer Toyota roughly in the same size class, slightly smaller, and it needs 6.7 liters per 100 km (35 mi/g). I was saving nearly €700 a year by driving an arguably nicer car (heavier, larger, better isolation). Too bad I had to wreck it.

> To complete the large incentive toward diesels, EU governments also manipulated the price of diesel fuel itself, keeping it below gasoline. They also taxed the registration of diesel-powered passenger cars at a much lower rate.

I'm not sure about the rest of Europe, but I know as a fact this isn't true for Italy. Diesel fuel used to be cheaper when most cars were gasoline powered, and cracking needed to be used to get more gasoline from the same amount of oil. Now that consumption moved heavily towards diesel, the price is almost the same as gasoline (as is expected). They are taxed exactly the same AFAIK.

As for registration fees, until I think 15 years ago we actually had much higher cost for diesels, because they were more polluting (particulate and other nasty things). Those surcharges were only scrapped after technological advances greatly improved those pollution problems.

It's not true for England. Diesel has always been more expensive; the tax has been the same.

We have good statistics for this.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/oil-and-...

EDIT: The fuel has been more expensive; there were tax breaks on the vehicles.

Oh, I thought all of Europe has that tax imbalance. Good to know there's some sense left somewhere.

Same for Netherlands. Diesel is only cheaper if you drive a lot. Owning a diesel car is much more expensive tax wise. So in practice people driving short trips do not own a diesel car.

I think there's a general conversation that people seem to be ignoring. We currently use general taxation as a way to discount certain behaviours. Tobacco/Alcohol duty more than pay for the costs that these forms of consumption place on society. We are even prepared to consider a sugar tax.

Yet the moment we ask the question, why cars do not pay for their costs, nothing happens. Fuel duty should cover road maintenance and the health costs (Killed or Seriously injured, obesity, and pollution related illnesses).

European car makers has been selling a lie to the public. That Diesel cars are cleaner because they emit lower Co2 but instead in practise they exhaust a lot of Nox particles.

It should also be noted that European car makers like Fiat Alfa Romeo invented the common rail fuel injection system that makes modern Diesel engines so effective.

In light of the recent Nox scandal. One can question if diesel cars make sense in big urbanised cities.

Would it not be better to have Electric, Gas hybrid cars in the cities?

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