Ever have a friend that always screwed everything up? Maybe it was when you were in high school and you had found a hangout that would let you and your car loving buddies gather and bench race until “that guy” did burnouts and got you tossed. Maybe it was in college when you were at the pub having a nice evening with your pals and “that guy” decided to get into it with someone and make a scene. Well, in the automotive world these days, “that guy” is VW and because of their shenanigans, the EPA has begun rigorous on-road testing of all new cars, starting with theirs and expanding to every single, 2016 model that will be sold in this country. Of course this announcement raises lots of questions but it mainly raises the blood pressure of every engineer who has been working to meet a controlled, laboratory emissions standard since the EPA started assigning them decades ago.
On the one hand, we totally understand why this is happening. After VW cheated the deal so brilliantly (because it was brilliant) it made the EPA look like chumps and it also caused them to call into question their entire mode of operation. On the other hand it is going to be interesting to see how long the automakers take to figure out what the “routine” is for an EPA on-road test…because there will likely be one. The EPA’s goal with this testing is to find cheater devices or software like VW was using and to get some real world driving numbers. They use a Mystery Sciene Theater 3000 looking device to analyze the exhaust as the car is actually driving down the road. You can see the thing at the link below.
Lab testing will still be the primary means to certify and analyze a car but this new step has been deemed necessary to make sure that there is no funny business going on. The one ominous line in the story mentions roadside “spot checks” to see if old cars have their emissions control equipment still functioning. Yea, that does not sound like something we’re interested in seeing. We know that California has the portable smog checker machines and we’d be fine and dandy if they just stayed right there.
What all of this means, no one really knows. The truth of the matter is that to this point VW is the only manufacturer that was cheating the system by nefarious means. No other cars have been “caught” failing on road testing after passing in the lab. The bottom line is that we’re never really fans of more intrusion on the business of making cars or our own personal business of operating them.
This is a really good read –
Click here to see the New York Times story about the EPA expanding on-road testing
I’m not sure if the “sport checks” were intended to be roadside testing. They could simply be planning to hit up used car lots for sample vehicles and strap the test contraption to them to see how well their smog equipment works after a couple years on the road. At least, that’s what I HOPE they’re planning.
Well, the news article is sorta right.
There are 2 systems that can be used for on-road testing. For some reason the authors seemed to think that there is only one. The unit described is pretty crude compared to the Sensors unit – my sister-in-law is an expert in on-road testing and the Sensors device in particular. Both systems do work and can be used to catch significant differences between dyno/lab tests and in-use emissions.
Unless a way can be devised to keep atmospheric conditions and traffic conditions – and driver operations – consistent, on-road will never replace lab testing. There are just too many variables to be able to compare the test subject to a standard (which is the point of the whole exercise).
EPA has done some level of on-road testing for many years so this is not introducing entirely new technology. What will change is that products of any manufacturer will be subject to an on-road spot check at any time (past on-road testing has been experimental in nature). I have no idea of the protocol that will be used – driving cycle, cold vs. hot start, etc. Reg writers will be working overtime on THAT one!
It’s too bad that VW pushed this new level of scrutiny onto the whole industry. By the way, cheating is not new and neither is in-use testing. EPA has had a program for many years looking at the emissions based on in-use vehicles borrowed from the public. I have testified in several depositions that led to fines and other punishments for a number of vehicle families. The change here is in going to on-road data to find non-compliant vehicles.
I’m a bit unsure why they don’t run on the all-wheel drive dyno but perhaps they are concerned about other defeat devices outside of VWs wheel speed sensor gizmo.
While emissions testing protocol has been stable for many years (even as standards have changed) it has evolved as situations change. This is just one more step in that process. We can worry about the impact on our project cars but hopefully SANE and others can make a distinction in the minds of regulators between a hobby car and daily drivers.
SUPPORT SANE!
Dan
Typical of government to get an idea 180 degrees apart from what the lesson points to; its not the testing thats the problem, it IS the standards which are faulty. Time to fire everyone at the EPA, and not hire any people to replace them.
Actually, Threedoor, the standards are (mostly) necessary. The issue is with the testing process that is predictable and repeatable. Because it’s consistent it’s possible for bad actors to use that to devise a cheat so that all looks good on the dyno but doesn’t function that way in the real world.
What bugs me is that if you have enough money you can skate around at least some of the regulations (take a look at the gas guzzler tax) while us poor slobs are stuck with towing the line. I’ve long protested (including when I was working at the EPA) that there needs to be a distinction between a daily driver and what I’ll call a “hobby car” for lack of a better term. Several of us proposed a “annual miles traveled” distinction, perhaps 5,000 or 8,000 miles or so. Compared to the total vehicle fleet the small number of vehicles that would fall into this category would have little to no effect on overall air pollution and would allow folks like us to pursue our hobby with pretty much no impact on us – or the environment. A lot of us working in the field supported this concept but the decision makers (you voted for them) were not interested. They don’t think we exist.
The EPA is NOT the problem. We support the testing needed to keep our air breathable. Just doing the math based on 1966 emissions data times the number of cars in California shows that the LA basin would be uninhabitable TODAY if not for the efforts of the EPA (don’t get me started on CARB!). The issue is the regulations as passed by Congress that EPA has to support. It all trickles down from Up There.
Hence my comment – SUPPORT SANE. They are our voice on Capitol Hill and they are pretty much our only hope of getting something done.
Dan
My uncle who flew for TWA for 30 years and my father a USAF navigator used to tell stories about how to find LA by the brown dome of air hanging over the city all through the ’60’s and ’70’s.
I agree there needs to be an EPA, but there needs to be a balance of taking care of the environment and laws that do nothing. As someone who lived in California for 25 and the California Air Resource Board are so arrogant in believing they are setting the world standard of climate control they get sued by the EPA for breaking federal laws.
Those who we vote for do not make the laws, the unelected bureaucrats make the laws and we can not vote them out of office. Take any bill and the regulations it spawn will be on average 9-10 pages longer than the actual law and have wide reaching effects. The clean air act and its amendments over the years is not being warped to regulate carbon dioxide which is no where in its original purview as a pollutant but the powers that be and the bureaucrats that have an agenda make it so. I believe that the EPA IS the problem, once any of these agencies get started they grow and cause major damage never to be shrunk or eliminated.
As for what you said about using 1966 emissions numbers and extrapolating it. Its nonsense, the market provides all that is necessary, people want better mileage out of their cars, better mileage means less emissions across the board. Ill throw in the caviot that leaded gas was a problem, especially for the California Condor who’s habitat is down wind from the LA basin. But it too would have gone out of favor as market pressure worked its way on the fuel manufacturers.
‘now’, not ‘not’ in my third sentence
I wonder what happens when that baby hits 88mph?
(someone had to say it!)
We in the enlisted ranks have a saying when a mass punishment is handed out from leadership—-“When one person $h!ts themselves everyone has to wear diapers.”
“They use a Mystery Sciene Theater 3000 looking device…”
Are you a psychic? I’m watching MST3K right now.
As far as the real-world EPA testing goes, I’m pretty much beyond the point of caring about new iron. There are some rare highlights (Hellcats, Chevy SS, Focus RS, GT-R), but 99% of the stuff on the market is just uninspired garbage.
I’m just going to keep rebuilding my pickups until I can’t drive anymore.
There’s a great big “I told you so” in play here. 20 or 25 years ago, every auto exec needed to be forced to memorize and hourly recite a simple phrase;
Pleasing your enemies does not make them your friends.
The EPA has long been controlled by people who are opposed to ANY industrial enterprise. If you truly want to end industry, you’ll be far more successful making it die by a million cuts than trying to kill it with a smaller number of heavy blows. You know, rights and all that get in the way when you do it the quick way.
Their is no measurable difference in the achieved air quality between what freezing emissions standards at 1995 levels would have achieved, and where we’re at today after two decades of minuscule but increasingly expensive and harder to achieve emissions cuts. Billions of dollars of consumer and shareholder dollars have been flushed down the memory hole by increasingly stringent reg’s that the public are told they want, and the automakers are told the public wants, by a federal agency that needs a healthy dose of Lee Harvey Oswald.
The industry needed to dig in their heels and tell the Feds to show them the market research that said the public wanted thousands of dollars tacked on to the cost of new cars in order to meet unrealistic emissions targets. Instead, they played along in the false hope that the EPA might eventually get a life.
Guess what? They were wrong, and instead of taking a softer stance, the environmental Maoists saw compliance in the face of unreason as a weakness to exploit and doubled down instead.
VW needs to fight back and go to their customers. A good chunk of those people could be convinced that they got what they wanted: great fuel economy and good performance in a combo that only a diesel provides. Put the onus on the EPA to demonstrate that those people didn’t get what they wanted. There’s probably not 500 diesel VW owners who really considered emissions at the time of purchase.
The rest of the industry needs to get a backbone, as well. We all knew that there were more mating pairs of Bigfoot in Eastern Montana than there were runaway Toyota’s, yet Toyota let the lawyers run with the ball and fuck that mess up instead of amassing a handful of high horsepower cars and getting a bunch of TV journalists to try and get them to move from rest at full throttle while applying full braking, after having them watch an hour’s worth of YouTube videos of people driving through the front door of the 7-11 or the laundromat.
Mark my words folks. In my adult children’s lifetime, if not my own, we will see the day when the EPA dances on the grave of the last private industry in America.
Amen, and its not billions of dollars, the last time I read a report on regulation cost to the US economy it was well over TWO TRILLION a year, a full 12% of total US GDP.http://www.forbes.com/sites/waynecrews/2014/09/10/hairball-the-cost-of-federal-regulation-to-the-u-s-economy/
This is not the fault of VW, this is the fault of the government creating absurd regulations. VW did their customers a solid by improving their mileage and increasing their horsepower. This article is nothing but and expose of the author’s slave mentality. “Oh, he broke the rules and now we’re going to be whipped twice a day now. It’s his fault”. No, it’s the slave masters fault that they are being whipped.