Reviews of Pollution Fix on Volkswagen Audi 2013 20 L Tdi

Last month's news that Volkswagen had been illegally rigging its diesel-powered cars to cheat on pollution tests has sparked all sorts of outrage. Hearings, lawsuits, fines, general opprobrium. And rightly and then; the visitor's deception was bloodcurdling.

But at that place'southward a broader, more consequential problem here that a lot of coverage has danced effectually or hinted at only indirectly. So let'due south say it: Europe's promotion of diesel fuel vehicles as a green transportation option has been a disaster thus far — for reasons that get well beyond the Volkswagen scandal.

E'er since the 1990s, European governments have been encouraging drivers to buy diesel fuel cars as an alternative to traditional gasoline-powered vehicles. The rationale was simple: Diesel engines employ fuel more efficiently, so the switch was supposed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and assistance stave off global warming. Thanks to tax breaks and other incentives, diesel cars now make up one-tertiary of Europe's armada:

Europe'due south diesel push button seemed like a perfectly sensible idea at the fourth dimension. Merely they execution was badly botched, full of unintended consequences over the next twenty years.

One main drawback of diesel cars is that they tin emit higher levels of other harmful air pollutants like particulates and nitrogen oxides. And those concluded up existence much harder to clean up than experts initially predicted. We at present know that Europe'south regulators have failed spectacularly to control diesel pollution, relying on weak rules and flimsy testing procedures. Lots and lots of automakers — not just Volkswagen — accept been manufacturing diesel cars that emit far more gunk than they're supposed to. It's one reason why cities like London and Paris are however clogged with unhealthy levels of air pollution, causing thousands of premature deaths each year.

It as well appears that Europe's diesel push didn't really do much to aid global warming, as ane 2013 written report by Michel Cames and Eckard Helmers constitute. The CO2 benefits from switching to diesel cars were overrated and probable offset by the actress soot the engines produced. On acme of that, Europe's entrenched diesel industry has impeded progress on hybrid and electric motorcar technologies that might have provided far deeper emissions cuts.

The whole episode is a sobering case study in how well-intentioned dark-green industrial policy can get badly awry. Then let'southward roll the record and run into what lessons we can learn from Europe'due south diesel fuel problems.

Why Europe embraced diesel cars in the 1980s and '90s

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When crude oil gets pumped out of the ground, it'southward sent to refineries to be turned into usable fuel. Those refineries typically distill the oil into lighter and heavier components. The lightest stuff includes gasoline. On the heavier side is diesel, which contains more energy per gallon.

For almost of the 20th century, automakers largely designed cars to run on gasoline, which was more flammable and combusted easily using sparks. Engines that could combust diesel fuel, using air compression, had been invented back in the 19th century, but they were noisier and belched more smoke, so they were mostly confined to large ships and trucks. Instead, diesel was often used for heating and producing electricity.

But starting in the 1980s, French and German automakers began showing more involvement in developing diesel cars. The reasons why take e'er been a piffling murky, although Cames and Helmers propose information technology traces back to the OPEC oil crises of the 1970s. Later on global crude prices spiked, France decided to swear off using diesel fuel for electricity and built a fleet of nuclear plants. Germany, similarly, switched from oil to natural gas for heating. When the crisis subsided, Europe's refiners were still producing lots of diesel with no buyers. So governments began urging automakers similar Peugeot to look into diesel-powered vehicles.

Past the late 1990s, diesel engineering had improved dramatically, thanks to advances in fuel injection — common track, particularly — that allowed the engines to run more quietly. The newer diesel engines were a technical marvel, operating more than efficiently than their gasoline counterparts and using less fuel per mile traveled (and, importantly, emitting less carbon dioxide per mile). All they needed was a market.

Rising business organisation over global warming provided that push. In 1997, the European Union signed the Kyoto Protocol and committed to cutting its heat-trapping carbon-dioxide emissions viii percentage by 2012. The next year, the EU reached a landmark agreement with the continent's car manufacturers on reducing CO2.

At the time, at that place were lots of dissimilar paths Europe's automakers could have taken to green itself. They could've pursued direct injection engineering science for gasoline vehicles, making those engines more than fuel-efficient. They could've ramped up development of hybrid-electric cars, as Toyota was doing in Nihon. But European companies similar Peugeot and Volkswagen and BMW had already been making big investments in diesel, and they wanted a climate policy that would help those bets to pay off.

Europe's policymakers obliged. The EU agreed to a voluntary CO2 target for vehicles that was largely in line with what diesel technology could meet. As researcher Sarah Keay-Vivid later noted, these standards were crafted and then equally not to force Europe's automakers to develop hybrids, electric vehicles, or other advanced powertrains.

Meanwhile, European nations — including Britain, French republic, Frg, Italy, Spain, and Austria — had been cutting taxes on diesel motorcar purchases and diesel fuel to promote sales, all in the proper noun of disappointment climate change. Diesel sales soared. Back in 1990, simply 10 percentage of new car registrations in Europe had run on diesel fuel. Past 2011, that had climbed to nearly 60 percent.

Today, Europe'due south diesel cars are a public health problem

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Diesel engines do have ane notable pitfall. They may be more fuel-efficient and emit less CO2 than gasoline engines, but they also tend to emit higher levels of other nasty air pollutants, including soot, particulates, and nitrogen oxides (NOx). Heavy exposure to these pollutants can exacerbate heart and lung affliction, trigger asthma attacks, and fifty-fifty crusade premature death.

This was largely known dorsum in the 1990s. Europe's policymakers simply considered the merchandise-off acceptable. "At the time, the prevailing conventionalities was that climatic change was the really difficult problem and should be the priority, whereas we'd had experience improving air quality, so everyone assumed nosotros could easily prepare that issue afterwards," explains Martin Williams, an air pollution researcher at Male monarch'south College London who previously worked for Uk's environmental agency.

That assumption turned out to be wrong. When European regulators later moved to clench down on NOx and other conventional air pollution from diesel vehicles, they failed desperately.

Starting in 2000, the Eu began ratcheting down the legal limits for NOx emissions (though Europe's diesel cars have always been allowed to emit NOx at a relatively higher rate than gasoline-powered cars). New vehicles were tested in laboratories, where cars were placed on giant treadmills, spun through a few exercises, and measured for pollution.

Trouble was, these tests turned out to exist flimsy and easily gamed, explains John German of the International Council on Clean Transportation. Automakers could send cars to labs that were optimized for testing: stripped of excess weight, with the air conditioning turned off, and so on. Those exam cars complied with the pollution limits just fine. But the cars that were really being sold to consumers were quite unlike, with much higher emissions. (German notes that this sort of subtle gaming was technically legal, unlike Volkswagen'due south more elaborate deception, which involved illicit software that only turned pollution controls on during tests. Yet, even if Volkswagen was the nearly flagrant cheater, it wasn't entirely alone.)

Few people realized the EU'south pollution tests were badly flawed until 2010, when researchers started studying emissions from vehicles that were actually on the road. In ane report, Williams prepare upward roadside infrared detectors to measure NOx pollution from cars in seven British cities. What he found was shocking: Europe'due south newest diesel cars were emitting roughly equally much NOx every bit older diesel cars from the 1990s.

In other words, twenty years of increasingly stringent air pollution regulations had done basically zip to reduce diesel car emissions. "That was the most surprising function," Williams says.

Although overall pollution in Europe has gone downwardly over time, diesel fuel vehicle emissions remain stubbornly high. Today, Paris sometimes has smoggy days comparable to those in Beijing. London is struggling with unhealthy levels of nitrogen dioxide. Germany, Austria, and Ireland accept NOx pollution well in a higher place the legal limits, with vehicles accounting for roughly xl per centum of that output.

The health toll is probable considerable. One recent written report estimated that diesel pollution from cars, buses, and trucks in Britain caused 9,400 premature deaths in 2010 alone. It's hard to pinpoint what fraction of those deaths might have been avoided if emission rules on cars had been strictly enforced all along, but that gives a sense of the stakes.

NO2 concentrations in Europe (areas in a higher place the healthy limit in ruby-red)

To exist fair, European regulators have scrambled to improve the tests at present that they've realized what was happening. But it remains to be seen whether Europe's diesel car industry will clean upwards its act.

Starting in 2014, the newest, most stringent emissions standards — known as Euro 6 — crave diesel cars to emit no more than 0.08 grams of NOx per kilometer, an 84 percent reduction from 2000-era levels. Past 2017, Europe's regulators will also starting time requiring on-road testing in addition to laboratory checkups. That'due south what the United states of america EPA already does, and it should eliminate the most obvious shenanigans (though, as the Volkswagen scandal showed, truly adamant cheaters tin can be difficult to catch).

In theory, it should exist possible for diesel cars to see these newest Eu standards. The United States already has stricter emission standards around NOx and a few non-Volkswagen diesel models have met them successfully. One fundamental command technology, known equally selective catalytic reduction, involves injecting the car'south frazzle with a mix of urea and water, which breaks the NOx down into harmless nitrogen, oxygen, and water molecules. Studies have found that a few diesel automobile models with this technology accept low pollution even when tested on the road.*

Nevertheless, information technology'south notable that Europe's automakers don't seem to think it volition exist so uncomplicated to comply with the EU's new standards, especially at present that they can't game the tests. In October, the New York Times reported that Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler, Renault, Peugeot, and other manufacturers take been pleading with European union to relax the NOx limits by up to 30 per centum.

Meanwhile, a 2015 study from the grouping Transport & Environment tested 10 of the newest European diesel car models on the road and found that 9 of them still exceed the Euro 6 standards for NOx pollution. The worst offender, an Audi, emitted NOx at 22 times the legal limit. The future of clean diesel is notwithstanding an open question.

The irony: Europe's diesel button hasn't helped with global warming (and then far)

If Europe's diesel fuel surge over the terminal 20 years had helped mitigate climatic change, then maybe (just possibly) y'all could debate that all this extra air pollution was worth it. Except hither'due south a depressing plot twist: The climate benefits appear to have been negligible, at least so far.

In their 2013 paper, Cames and Helmers argued that Europe may well be worse off today, from a global warming perspective, than it would have been if automakers had just focused on improving gasoline-powered cars all along. And it's arguably much worse off than it would accept been if automakers had started investing in hybrid-electric applied science back in the 1990s.

The authors first with the chart below, showing that Europe'south diesel cars may take once had a sizable CO2 advantage over traditional gasoline vehicles. But today that gap has narrowed considerably, as diverse technological advances have made modernistic gasoline engines nigh equally efficient as diesel cars:

Carbon dioxide emissions from new cars in Europe and Japan

What's more, at that place are ii subtle drawbacks to Europe's diesel cars that brand them worse for climate change than they seem.

Outset, fifty-fifty if diesel cars emit less CO2 than gasoline vehicles, they emit a lot more black carbon, or soot, a pollutant that (we've recently learned) also contributes significantly to global warming. The precise accounting here is even so subject to some dispute, but Cames and Helmers point out that black carbon emissions from diesel cars likely negate a big clamper of their CO2 advantage.

Second, remember that European countries encouraged diesel fuel car adoption by slashing taxes on the diesel itself, so that it was cheaper than gasoline. Merely every bit any Econ 101 educatee will tell you, cutting fuel prices gives people an incentive to drive more miles — and increase their overall emissions. This further fries away at any climate advantage diesel might have.

Add it upwards, and Cames and Helmers conclude that "the European diesel car blast did not cool down the atmosphere."

(By the fashion, this analysis doesn't fifty-fifty take into account the atrocious knock-on effects from Europe'due south subsequent policies to secure diesel made from palm oil. Those biofuel mandates have led to widespread deforestation in Indonesia and Malaysia, further exacerbating global warming. The Eu just recently scaled these policies back.)

I final coda here. Get dorsum and look at the Japanese cars on the graph above. Dorsum in the late 1990s, Japanese automakers were too thinking virtually cutting CO2, but they figured that diesel fuel was a dead-end technology, since the cost of cleaning upwardly the extra NOx pollution would be too high. Toyota, for ane, started investing in hybrid vehicles, with the kickoff Prius appearing in 1997. By contrast, Europe'southward automakers initially scoffed at electric powertrains, and none of them even bothered producing hybrids until Mercedes finally rolled one out in 2009.

Japan'south determination now looks prescient, and Europe's looks shortsighted. Hybrids proved much greener: The newest Japanese cars now produce roughly ten percent less CO2 per mile than Europe's diesel fuel vehicles do, on average. And Nihon's automakers may well be better set up for the future. Many experts now believe that transportation will eventually have to become electrified if we want truly deep reductions in emissions. But European automakers, stuck on diesel fuel for so long, are scrambling to catch up.

Europe is now shifting away from diesel fuel — but it's not easy

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Because of the Volkswagen scandal, and the staggering levels of pollution in cities like Paris and London, Europe's policymakers are now beginning to rethink their fondness for diesel fuel cars. Just it'due south a difficult technology to give up. Path dependency is a hell of a drug.

In diesel-loving France, Ségolène Royal, the environs minister, recently said that the country would consider phasing out preferential tax breaks for diesel fuel over the next five years. "Nosotros need to get-go preparing our move out of diesel," she reportedly told France 5 telly.But Majestic has also bristled at whatever proposition that France should deed too chop-chop. After all, diesel cars still account for more 60 percent of all European sales for Renault and Peugeot, two major local manufacturers. They can't just unwind those positions overnight.

Volkswagen, for its part, is also engaged in a bit of soul searching around diesel (at least, when it'southward not recalling its 11 million constabulary-breaking cars and dealing with criminal probes). The company recently announced that information technology would have a major plunge into electric powertrains, creating a standardized architecture for a new wave of plug-in cars. "The Volkswagen brand is repositioning itself for the time to come," said executive Herbert Diess. Yet this shift won't happen overnight. Because VW spent so many years dreaming up ways to evade regulators and sell diesel cars, information technology's now playing catch-up to electric motorcar companies like Tesla.

In the meantime, Europe's smoggy cities all the same have to grapple with the fallout from all those older, polluting diesel cars still on the route — cars that will stick around for years.

If automakers can kickoff manufacturing more truly clean diesel cars, that would assist, but it volition all the same take fourth dimension to supervene upon the older cars on the road. And then, in addition, cities like London, Stockholm, and Milan are now experimenting with "emission-gratuitous zones." In the futurity, drivers with heavily polluting diesel clunkers could take to pay extra to travel downtown in certain cities. Information technology's probable to be a deadening, messy process.

Free energy bets tin can sometimes go horribly wrong. How practise we minimize that gamble?

Europe'due south misadventure with diesel cars is a great instance report in how energy policy tin go very badly awry, and no doubt there's a long list of lessons to draw. I'll just mention a few large ones:

Showtime, Europe's complete failure to regulate NOx and other diesel pollution for 20 years is worth studying closely. Non merely had regulators designed shoddy emissions tests — partly at the behest of industry lobbying — only it took two decades to fifty-fifty realize the tests were failing. Crafting ambitious environmental rules is all well and good, merely without ample enforcement and monitoring, those rules are basically pointless. (Note that China is now pursuing aggressive climate policies of its own, but experts keep muttering that enforcement volition be a big claiming — a caveat that deserves serious attention.)

Another possible takeaway is that, if we really want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector, liquid fuels are looking like a dead end and electrification might be the best path forrard. At that place'due south no shortage of experts who believe that, and certainly that'due south the lesson Volkswagen seems to be drawing from this fiasco. That said, it'due south worth noting that Toyota, which was ahead of the pack in developing hybrid electrics in the tardily 1990s, actually doesn't believe battery-electric cars are the future and is pouring R&D into hydrogen cars instead.

Which brings usa to the third takeaway. The futurity is hard to predict. Diesel cars seemed like a reasonable idea in the 1990s and a disaster today. That suggests that policymakers should take a lot more than humility when crafting energy policy. Peradventure battery-electrical cars volition win out, or maybe it'll be hydrogen, or perchance information technology'll exist something else entirely. (Heck, peradventure diesel cars that are genuinely clean could play a office in reducing CO2 emissions.) No ane knows for sure.

So 1 approach here might exist to pursue technology-neutral policies focused on preferred outcomes — say, tightly enforced standards that require lower emissions — rather than favoring specific industries and technologies but considering they happen to seem promising at that moment in time.

This conundrum is likely to come up again and again. For years, governments have been laying downwards large bets on emerging clean energy technologies. France did information technology with nuclear ability in the 1970s and '80s. Germany did information technology with wind and solar power in the 2000s, through feed-in tariffs. The Us has done information technology with corn ethanol in the by decade.

Done right, this sort of government back up can exist valuable, helping useful new energy options intermission into the mainstream against entrenched competition. But there's likewise a huge gamble that governments will cease up gambling on badly flawed technologies that then become the entrenched competition — and prove incommunicable to get rid of. The US arguably made that mistake with ethanol, which has had unintended ripple furnishings on the food supply and deforestation that are proving politically difficult to untangle. The drive for diesel looks like it belongs in that category, too. It'due south not a story we'd like to keep repeating.

* Update: Just to clarify, there are a few make clean diesel fuel car models, such as BMW'due south 328d sedan, that announced genuinely capable of meeting the latest, most stringent pollution rules and tests in both Europe and the United States. (My original wording in this department was unclear.)

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