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The mkiv Supra Owners Club

We're being made monkeys of.


Annabella

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As of a few weeks ago all new cars will be tested differently in the lab. The old test was an NEDC Which doesn't represent real driving. The new test is a WLTP which is much closer to real world driving.

And don't worry about electric cars, there will be alot of hybrids by untill we get battery's that last longer and a proper charging infrastructure hybrids are the sensible choice.

Plus the government gets a LOT of tax from fuel and not much from electricity.

The rules are pretty strict and it takes a serious amount of mapping to keep with in the limits. If we were to test a supra it would be 100s of times the limits of today's standards.

 

 

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Unbelievable isnt it! Think this is a bigger scandal the VAG cheat.

 

It's not bigger than "dieselgate". VAG were employing a deliberate defeat device in the ECU code to recognize when the car was doing an emissions test, and put the engine into an operating mode which was not available during "real world driving". This is a (albeit interesting) journalism consisting of revisionist history and some selective data.

 

Firstly, the EU directives for emissions (mostly CO2 reduction, which is directly proportional to fuel consumption) have driven real innovation in engine design over the last decade or so. Most of the tech was already on the shelf by the time the march for CO2 reduction started. All the EU had to do was impose a financial penalty on the automakers to suddenly make a clear business case for taking the new gizmos out of the research lab and putting them on to actual production engines. There are two "take-aways" from this: (1) Modern engines ARE more fuel (and CO2) efficient in both emissions tests and real-world driving than their predecessors, and (2) by and large the auto industry won't do anything to improve emissions on production cars unless they are absolutely forced to.

 

Deiselgate, correctly or incorrectly, brought NOx to the fore - and we were already talking about particulates from diesels. DPFs are standard fitment and GPFs aren't far behind as GDi combustion is practically the norm, now. As with CO2 before it, the tech to reduce NOx without cheating was already on the shelf long before VAG got caught with their pants down. I haven't done an exhaustive check, but a quick Google tells me that both the VW Tiguan and Mercedes C250, which are hailed as having "legal" real-world NOx emissions are both available with SCR. This is the tech that reduces NOx in the tailpipe by injecting AdBlue. Another Google suggested that the "dirty" cars (certainly the Qashqai) do not have it.

 

What I will agree on is that the outgoing NEDC test is shockingly bad at representing real-world driving. The new test profile (WTLP) is better, but perhaps not better enough. But it is a step forward. Bit what they both are, is a level playing field and as such the NEDC (and probably the WLTP) have resulted in engines which are optimised to perform well when tested. And this is where the big difference between optimisation and cheating needs to be underlined.

 

Optimisation is like studying for a test. Sure, you may be a gifted pupil and have capabilities above and beyond what is strictly required to pass, but in order to pass the test you must know those things. Now, what if an average pupil was given the option of having private tuition at weekends to learn stuff that would make them more capable, but would not be in the test, or was told they could go out and see their mates instead? No prizes for guessing what most would do.

 

VAG, on the other hand, snuck into the headmaster's office and looked at the test paper the night before. Quite different.

 

So, despite having had a "flawed" test regime, it has resulted in engines which are cleaner, but have become over-optimised for the conditions under which they will be tested. This has come with a compromise. That compromise appears to be that under real world conditions, some newer cars are now less clean than older cars in real-world conditions, but only in ways that public scrutiny / opinion / outrage has not yet fully focussed upon.

 

The "star pupils" in this class are those already using SCR to contain their NOx emissions.

 

So, you can't take a car which has been specifically developed to pass a given test and then test in in a totally different manner and declare it to be illegal. I am 100% certain that the folks at Emissions Analytics have done a sound job, but in a sense Nissan are right, you can't simply derive your own test profile in secret and then claim it to be more representative than another one. Imagine how many different commutes there are, or driving styles, or road surfaces, or traffic conditions. In order to compare apples with apples you have to have a standardised test, and any standardised test will be more representative for some than others.

 

What I am getting from the article is that by and large newer cars are cleaner than older ones, so the legislation to date can hardly be called flawed unless you are taking a revisionist stance. The fact that some newer cars are significantly more dirty in terms of NOx is a shocker, but I guess this is one of those compromises driven by the optimisation for low CO2 on the NEDC drive cycle. 18 times higher than an old Golf it may be, but currently its still legal. Also the industry clearly knows NOx is an issue, because like CO2 previously the tech to reduce it is right there, waiting to be used - when they are forced to do so. This will come at a cost premium in the short term, as did all the CO2 reduction tech, but costs will fall as they become more commonplace.

 

What is a shame is that despite the hge amount of research that has gone into reducing all emissions over the last 20 years or so, legislation and implimentation is so slow. The internal combustion engine could be having its finest hour, but by the time it reaches its full potential, the focus will be totally on EV's, or the petrol will all be gone, anyway.

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