[1]: https://jalopnik.com/heres-how-much-horsepower-volkswagens-l...
The skeptic in me should have known better. One manufacturer was blowing everyone else out of the water? German engineering? A seriously nifty gearbox? Are those enough to explain the difference? Apparently not.
Maybe VW isn't the origin of this, they could have seen another manufacturer doing something similar, decided to join in and took it too far.
I forget if it was VW or Mercedes, but one of them branded theirs as "blue-tec" or something that doesn't sound like you're handling piss bottles. Let the mechanic worry about that.
There literally wasn't any dealer or provider that could do anything before it hit 20 MpH limit, and the truck wound up being flatbed-ed (luckily the manufacturer picked up the bill, but still).
This definitely makes diesel vehicles less reliable, more expensive to maintain, and likely reduces their lifespan. If I purchased a truck I'd go gas.
Not sure if it would work on that vehicle, but it generally clears emissions codes and the like, even on fairly recent vehicles. Its possible it might have let the car drive another 50 miles or so.
Granted, it tends to get a "boy who cried wolf" feel to it as they've always done it, but they absolutely raised a stink about the constantly rising regulations.
“It’s sort of a case where the dog actually caught the bus,”
Gillis told me. “Now what’s it going to do?”
Referring to American car manufacturers' anti-CAFE wishlist being adopted by Scott Pruitt's EPA. The wishlist was submitted as a sort of bargaining piece, the idea being that industry demand something extreme expecting the incoming administration to meet them halfway. Except Pruitt just accepted it without reservation[1], and the industry was caught flat-footed. So now they're actually _repudiating_ some of their arguments.
The dirty little secret of the car industry is that efficiency and safety regulations help drive the upgrade cycle. When every car from this year has feature X, then all used cars instantly become out-dated and even unsafe in the minds of consumers. And the timelines set out by the regulators help to coordinate competition in a way that would be illegal otherwise. For example, if a new efficiency or safety standard is still 5 years out, then everybody knows to a high degree of certainty how each competitor will time and stage their rollout (not too early, not too late). The benefits may not exceed the overall costs of the regulation, but the industry is built around the system and pulling the rug out creates chaos.
[1] I guess this was a case of the Trump administration taking industry's rhetoric literally and not seriously.
If you then pretend to meet those requirements even though they were too high, you get zero points.
They do that, too. You can probably imagine the response the HN crowd would give, which is pretty much the same response the news media would spin it with... money-grubbing rich companies trying to escape from beneficent, unambiguously good laws so they can make more dirty, polluting money. It doesn't play well, so they don't make this argument in public. But if you live in Michigan, you can find plenty of engineers who grouse about the standards in various ways, and not just "they're hard". (Believe it or not, engineers have families too, and like them and their families to not die in the cars they quite likely drive themselves.)
Between the media's drive to drum up antipathy towards the automotive companies for both their own ideological reasons and simply because stories about big corrupt companies sell, and the ever-present and unavoidable politics (of all kinds) involved in any sort of standards setting, there's so much noise that on those occasions where literally impossible regulations are created, the system is not very good at dealing with it. I am speaking neutrally here, because in the real world, balancing between costs and benefits of regulations is a very hard problem and I'm not really yelling at any particular party here for not getting it perfect. It's a systemic problem.
I rather strongly suspect that if we could get a perfect judge that the current set of regulations is probably already impossible to comply with at all; failing that it probably can't be complied with economically. I seriously doubt emissions are the only problems, they're just the ones people are motivated to test. I bet if Consumer's Reports or a similar organization set up a full legal compliance suite they couldn't buy a single car from a dealership lot that complied completely with everything. I think they'd be close on most measurements. But I bet every vehicle would fail something, and there'd be a non-trivial number of rather substantial failures.
(For an example of the latter, noise regulations on how loud cars can be as they pass you at various speeds are really easy to fail on a specific car. A particular bit of trim that came loose during shipping or something can fail you out very easily. Now, this one is less important in the grand scheme of things than emissions, but it's an example of a regulation that could pass at the test site but fail on many or even most cars in the field.)
It's not like that late 1970s and early 1980s when cars became smaller and had anemic engines in order to meet with new regulations.
You are assuming away the very question I'm asking, though; are those cars actually in compliance? If not, you don't have a point. (I don't mean "you are wrong"; I mean, you literally wouldn't have a point to your post.)
It is the competition that pushes you to such extremes. If others are doing it, then what is to stop you.
Too much regulation and court procedures are preventing others from coming out and blowing the whistle on themselves.
If the reg's were never put into effect, and companies never given citations, it is institutional failure. And very unfair to all entities who are suddenly scolded at not meeting the criteria.
VW presumably started it. Other companies eventually competed. And all of a sudden everyone is now in violation.
It is like cheating on a test. One kid starts it. Teacher does not care. Kid does not get scolded. Competition gets intense. Rest of kids start cheating too. The axe falls, sometimes on the dull, slow kid, and then everyone falls in line. But then teacher goes back and sees who else cheated in the past, and the entire class is outed. How is this fair again?
"The penalties for murder are too harsh, so people aren't confessing to many unsolved murders."
Well, yeah. I would not blame "the system" for this, however.
For the record, there have been cases where criminals have come forward for crimes after statute of limitations expired. I am not sure it if was in particular to murder though.
You can compare it to "you are allowed to murder anyone you want, as long as you confess afterwards" and see that that's not the best public policy if your goal is to reduce murders.
Sure. Since the VW incident, many cars from several of the big automakers have been found to fail emissions tests.
> I wonder if anyone will criticize the regulations instead of shaming auto manufacturers.
It's telling that the automakers have chosen to cheat rather than call out the tests for being unrealistic -- or build a slightly less powerful car.
By doing so, they forfeit any possible sympathy from me. You don't get to cheat on a test, brag about how you passed, and then if you're discovered, claim that the test was too hard. Too late.