The war on diesel. At best this results in a trip to the dealer for detuning, or more likely to have an AdBlu tank installed.
creative software eh?
Clean diesel eh?
Wow…heard about this on npr, that’s pretty crazy if true. They are gonna get fried for this one, especially with all that marketing hoopla about how great the TDI technology is. VW has been striking out with the NA consumer, good look selling another car in Kali.
Someone high up is going to have to fall on the sword. If that was deliberate I wouldn’t be surprised if the gov’t reams them or presses criminal charges. It’s a fine/impound if someone removes their intake tube but VW does this from the factory? Most of the EPA regs are all honor system based, because they are no where near equipped to enforce them.
Holy cow. I hadn’t heard that yet. Nuts if that’s really how the system works. Wonder how aftermarket software works with it in regards to if its overwritten or still operates as normal. I know tuning the tdi’s is a pretty big business.
Crazy
It was a fallacy that you could get these cars to pass US emissions without a customer filled urea (AdBlue) tank. The larger VW cars that are diesel like the SUVs have it. They skirted it on the Jetta/A3/Beetle and they’re about to pay big. At $2000 per car the fine would be $1 billion.
Dude, they passed emissions with the control software features enabled. The issue is they ONLY enabled this while running the emissions testing. If they enabled it for all time like they should have, then the cars would probably get worse fuel econ, worse drivability and less tq/hp. So basically, they knowingly deceived the EPA.
Unlike the GM ignition fiasco or the Hyundai/Ford MPG exaggerations…there is no way people throughout the company in all sorts of business sub-units were not aware of this strategy. Like I said, someone very high up will have to fall on the sword and they will be penalized big time $$ According to that NY times article, the max fine could be 20 billion, not 1 billion. 20 Billion, that is fucking devastating.
It will be far less, via settlement.
I’d say a bigger concern would be class action lawsuit for car owners suffering from diminished value. Hundreds of thousands of cars are about to be slower and worse on fuel. They will in turn be worth less than they were last week as a result. That will be an easy win for the owners. Something like 500,000 cars x $5,000 in simply diminished value would mean 2.5 billion dollars. When you start adding in other damages that will be the big concern financially, not to mention reputation damages .
The leasing companies will be the ones who drive the law suits. They own most of the $189 a month Jettas.
A good friend of mine has a 2015 TDI Golf. He told me that he was using a OBD2 dongle and torque app to monitor parameters during his commute (most like for fuel consumption). He said his numbers were shit compared to his previous TDI (2014) when he was keeping track via the Torque app. He eventually removed it and started to notice a pretty decent increase in mileage and better fuel economy. He text me on Friday with the article before it was posted here and said “I guess I wasn’t crazy” pretty funny!
So whenever something connected to OBDII it went into Dr Jekyll mode… And then Hyde would come out when you disconnected it? Funny shit.
That’s funny…So what’s crazy, is, if you just plugged in, you’d have no idea the cheat functionality was there.
FWIW, how the hell did the government figure this out that exactly there was an issue, without diagnostics, but simply reading code? They’d have to hire some pretty specialized tuners…OR…enlist the help of competing manufacturers for their talent. I’m betting on the latter, which would make it an interesting case for VW.
I sorta remember honda getting in trouble for a ridiculously high threshold for CELs when OBDII first was rolled out…but nothing as blatant as this.
Guess VW/Audi won’t have the budget to buy the Red Bull F1 team this year.
Guess VW/Audi won’t have the budget to buy the Red Bull F1 team this year.
Curious! First I’ve heard.
It’s not that hard to figure out. You put a sniffer up the tail pipe and measure the emissions, sans OBD2 connector.
Pretty diabolical though.
Looks like the TDI option was removed from the VW Canada configurator:
VW stock is down 40% in 2 days. Literally 40 billion euros of market cap disappeared.
Here’s a good explanation of clean diesel systems:
[quote]Let me recap: NOx (which is the pollutant in question) is formed from the high temperature of combustion, in the presence of oxygen and nitrogen (both of which are inherently present in an engine’s air charge.) Above a certain temperature the NOx production goes up rapidly.
A heat engine’s maximum theoretical efficiency is defined by the difference between the temperature of combustion and the temperature of the exhaust in Kelvin. This means that for the best efficiency and the best power output you want the temperature in the combustion chamber to be as high as possible (without melting things, of course.)
However, doing so makes a lot of NOx.
One of the ways this is managed is to use EGR – exhaust gas “recirculation.” Exhaust gasses are routed back into the incoming air stream, which dilutes it and thus reduces the maximum temperature. This attenuates NOx but at the time hurts both fuel economy and power.
“Clean diesels” also, in modern versions anyway, use what is called “DEF”, which is urea in liquid form. They inject this into the exhaust stream and, in the presence of a catalyst and heat (from the exhaust) the NOx is reduced chemically to harmless nitrogen (N2), water (H2O) and a small amount of CO2 (the carbon coming from any unburned hydrocarbon in the exhaust stream, of which there is little) using some of the heat in the process.
However, that catalytic reduction reaction is only so efficient. It does work, but it’s not possible to eliminate all of the NOx this way, so the amount coming in has to be within a certain boundary or a fair bit of it will not be reduced before the gas passes through the secondary catalyst. That appears to be what’s going on here.
Now for the speculation part: EGR in a diesel has some bad side effects and owners of ALH-engine vehicles (of which I have been one) know about it well. Specifically, the particulates in the raw exhaust stream (EGR is taken from before the catalytic converter and DPF traps) mix with the small amount of oil vapor that is inherently in the intake stream in a turbocharged engine (because the bearings are not perfectly sealed and are oil-lubricated) to produce a paste-like sludge. This deposits in the intake as that is quite a lot cooler than the exhaust stream that is being introduced and over time plugs it up.
That clogging is a maintenance pain in the ass; on the ALH engine vehicles you wind up with having to pull the intake off every 40-50k miles and clean it or it will starve the engine of air and thus both power and fuel economy. The ALH is a relatively simple design in this regard; the newer engines are not.
It is reported that there are “no” intake-clogging problems with these newer designs. What I’d like to know is if the reason there is no clogging is that EGR is basically inoperative most of the time, being engaged only when the ECU detects an emissions test cycle!
If so then the “fix” will have a modest but real impact on both power and fuel economy, but it may have a relatively-severe impact on maintenance schedules and cost. On the ALH engines removing the intake to clean it is a relatively straight-forward if messy operation (~4 hours of work or thereabouts for the guy in his garage) but I suspect that it is materially more-complex for these newer engines as integration of components has become far more commonplace.
We’ll see how this shakes out as time goes on… but I bet this code was not put in these ECUs simply to get a couple of percent higher fuel economy and power output numbers – there were other reasons for it as well, and reducing what may have been unreasonable maintenance requirements may have been a part of it.
[/quote]
While that’s an interesting summary of how EGR works, sounds kind of like speculation as to what the “defeat strategy” is. Guess we’ll find out soon because 40% means something needs to be done ASAP to stop the hemorrhaging.
Another serious issue is Americans received $51 million in income tax credits for purchasing clean diesel cars from VW ($1300 per car in question). The IRS is going to go after VW for defrauding us on the Alternative Motor Vehicle Credit.