You realize it’s an international felony to link to one more of those bejeezed “put funny captions about a current event on the clip of Hitler going berzerk” videos, right?
I’m very much nowhere near being an expert, but my impression is that a simple ECU reprogramming could indeed “fix” the emission problem, but would result in an unacceptable impact to performance and/or fuel economy, or else VW would never have bothered doing this in the first place. Actually fixing it the right way (where not just regulators, but also their customers are satisfied) will require a way to reduce nitrogen oxide with minimal impacts to performance and fuel economy. As some have alluded to, some combination of SCR and/or LNT devices will likely have to be installed and maintained/refilled periodically by the operator.
I plead not guilty by reason of apropos nationality.
You know who else linked to YouTube videos of Hitler going bezerk?
Do you? Because I don’t.
most of the affected vehicles had lean NOx traps, but AFAIK the normal (i.e. non-emissions-test) calibration probably overwhelms it.
and even then, one or two models on the list of violations have AdBlue SCR, but CARB found that even after repeated runs of the test it was reducing the AdBlue dosing and NOx levels were rising out of compliance.
One thing I haven’t seen was how do it know?
How did the system know emission testing was going on and it was time to turn on the emissions mode?
I can think of at least three different ways, but do we know how VW did it?
The steering wheel is one indicator. During an emissions test, the car is in a test cell on rollers, and the steering points straight ahead all the time. If the ECU sees that the car has been going in an absolutely straight line at city/highway speeds ever since the engine was started, it knows it ain’t out on the road. If it sees you wiggling the steering wheel - going around corners, veering around the bend in a highway on-ramp - it knows you ain’t in a test cell.
Diesel passenger cars are more or less de facto illegal in China, for precisely this reason. Beijing has a lot of air pollution problems but they are not primarily due to cars which in Beijing are actually quite tightly regulated. One reason why the latest round of European emissions regs will more or less match US levels and make diesel passenger cars effectively obsolete is because cities like London and Paris have levels of NOx pollution almost equal to Beijing, entirely due to their corrupt governments’ tolerance of dirty diesel passenger cars.
As for whether The Chinese will take VW down a peg or two, I would give it 50/50 odds. On the one hand, as you said, the Chinese government will take any chance it can get to put a public dent in the air pollution problem, VW is by far the biggest sell car brand in China, and they happen to be foreign, and there’s at least some people within the Chinese government who find it a bit distasteful that every third car on the street is a foreign nameplate. On the other hand, VW didn’t get to where they are by making good cars, virtually every level of the Chinese government is on VW’s payroll, all the way up to the cabinet minister level. Most state media here have been notably silent on the issue, probably because they are toeing the party line for now.
Passenger diesel vehicles are effectively banned in China, so essentially none of them are diesel. China can’t really refine clean diesel, and despite the high pollution here, the government does at least make the minimal effort to define which vehicles aren’t allowed to use it. Given this is VW’s largest market, it’s probably a good ban for the time being.
I just read an article re China vs VW over diesel.
It seems VW pushed for many years to build diesel cars IN China.
As it is, the only VW diesels are individual imports of/from European models.
Small scale, right? It seems the people doing the one-off imports are TAXI operators.
The tiny number imported are running up more miles than any other class of passenger car.
I’m loving it.
There isn’t a single thing in this post that is remotely correct.
That’s not the way they do it in Maryland. Here they just plug in a code reader and run the car. For the emissions it would look like the car was just sitting and running. The whole test takes like 3-4 minutes at most. They must also have it set up to run differently when the monitor is plugged in as well.
for the millionth time, you’re talking about a state emissions inspection. we’re talking about the emissions certification test VW has to submit to the EPA before they’re allowed to sell the car model.
Why would the ECU receive steering wheel input? Traction control, sure.
you answered your own question.
I always assumed that TCS, stability control and that sort of thing was a separate set of processors.
I can’t speak for the entire market, but I know on at least some vehicles there’s no separate “stability control module,” it’s just integrated in the PCM and ABS module. in which case the PCM would need input from the steering angle sensor.
matter of fact, another easy tell that the car is in test mode is simply disabling stability control. They kind of have to otherwise it would freak out because the drive wheels are spinning but the non-drive wheels are not.
I can’t find it now, but I believe I read somewhere that it was related to if the hood was unlatched/up. That still doesn’t make much sense though since anyone tuning up the vehicle would have to have the hood up.