Just to play devil's advocate, maybe the requirements really are way over the line. In that case I wouldn't hold any grudges. Just because something is classified a felony doesn't mean it's morally wrong.
Edit: To clarify, I'm not suggesting this guy taking the dive for the execs is ok, just that someone lying about emission test results may not be as horrible as they're trying to make it sound.
I'd say that causing 11 million cars to spew pollution into the atmosphere against regulations is fairly repugnant from a moral perspective. It's not different than him going around the back of a chemical plant that produces toxic byproducts, and opening a valve that releases toxins into a river when he knows the inspectors aren't watching.
Regarding emissions, it's a tradeoff: increased engine temperature increases NOx emissions, but also increases fuel economy, decreasing carbon emissions. I was unable to quickly find a consensus on which type of emission is worse or how to weigh one versus another.
Regarding regulatory compliance, defeat devices are clearly unacceptable; if the regulated requirements are considered inappropriate for whatever reason, they should be challenged through political or legal process, not by detecting test conditions and altering behavior.
The emissions standards are already a dangerous compromise; we should have been making hard decisions about emissions 20, even 30, years ago...they've gotten stricter because they were disastrously lenient in the past, and we see the results of it.
The reasons someone lying about emissions tests are really as bad is it sounds:
- If one manufacturer lies, other manufacturers are forced to either lie, or lose customers in the market to the liar. Thus, dangerous cars become more common, car makers that try to do the right thing make lower profits and sell fewer cars.
- In this case, "clean diesel" lies likely led other manufacturers to waste resources on trying to make clean diesel of their own. Again, competitive advantage goes to the liar who doesn't actually have to make clean diesel; they just say they did, and sell boatloads of it.
- Emissions standards are already too lenient. Our planet's steadily rising temperature shows us this. No one here at HN (I would hope) would be arguing that climate change isn't happening or that humans aren't causing a significant portion of it, so the only sensible thing is to look at what causes it, and regulate it (somehow; I am not an expert on the subject of how emissions are regulated or should be regulated, but I know it's not really working, thus far...as autos are a significant portion of emissions).
So, if the requirements are "way over the line", how does one explain other auto makers complying with them? Are they all lying? There's been increased scrutiny, so it's likely to come out, if they have been. Wouldn't that be an interesting situation?
Diesel soot doesn't cause climate change, that's CO2 which is not regulated.
I think it's ridiculous (at least in Canada) that I have to pay $30 every other year to have my car emissions tested while city buses and trucks spew black clouds unopposed. Just feels like a useless cash grab.
Buses and trucks are also regulated and have to adhere to emissions standards, and get tested regularly; at least, in the US, they are regulated more heavily than autos (or, at least have more paperwork and legal obligations involved in driving them, and have a higher tax burden).
People riding a bus are, in aggregate, producing much less waste than if they were all driving automobiles...so, it's OK that a bus produces quite a bit more waste than a single automobile. And, I might even argue we aren't going far enough to incentivize people to take mass transit rather than driving themselves.
The cargo industry is responsible for a tremendous amount of emissions; freight ships account for millions of cars worth of emissions, in fact. That's definitely an area for improvement on a worldwide level. I'm in no way saying there aren't other sources of emissions, or that regulating auto emissions effectively will solve the problem. Merely that ignoring emissions from cars will exacerbate what is already the single biggest problem humanity faces going forward.
Right, but (per parent comment), you misrepresented the basis for the tradeoff behind the regulation -- you justified it by the need to prevent global warming, but the regulation pertained to NO2, not CO2, and satisfying the former typically makes the car less CO2-efficient.
So, you were justifying a GW-worsening regulation by the need to lessen GW.
(Your point about differing limits for buses vs cars is correct though, and the parent is wrong on that issue. But it would frankly be better if they were just charged per emission and each mode decides for itself whether the extra emissions are worth it.)
Sure, there's the argument that we're squeezing the balloon rather than reducing waste; the waste products can be tweaked to produce more or less of one or the other. My point is that as long as diesel continues to be propped up as a "clean" technology, based on fabricated data, we won't see migration to actually cleaner technology. Of course it's cheaper to make vehicles that are either poisonous or cause climate change (both, actually, no matter how you squeeze the balloon).
Diesel, it turns out, isn't all that "clean". I hate that it's so...I drive a modern turbo diesel vehicle, and have been very disappointed to learn about the tradeoffs and negatives of that technology (though I drive a big Ford diesel, which doesn't make some of the compromises that VW was making in its small engines, and does comply with EPA regulations without trickery, to the best of my knowledge).
Burning fossil fuels contributes to climate change and produce dangerous emissions that are toxic for living things. As long as we continue to allow auto makers and the fossil fuel industry to externalize those costs, alternatives won't be competitive and won't be able to replace those fossil fuel burning vehicles.
It is, in the sense that curbing CO2 emissions is the justification de jour for the current arbitrary fuel economy regulations for new cars sold in the US.
Here, it's more like: "you are free to drive the biggest and most fuel inefficient new car you like, that can be built without the government fining the manufacturer into insolvency."
The backdoor efficiency standards cause OEMs to spend more money on making lighter cars with smaller, more complicated engines, which end up being less durable and more expensive to repair.
You don't know how emissions should be regulated, but somehow you know the regulations aren't working b/c they are too lenient?
My hypothesis is that all of the diesel-powered cars sold in the past 20 years in the US could vanish tonight, and there would be no significant change in the planet's climate vs. had people continued to drive them.
The real motivation for strictly regulating diesels is their predilection to produce oxides of nitrogen and particulates, which contribute to smog and respiratory distress.
While one has to make allowances for the climate and traffic in a particular place (the LA basin is always going to be smog-prone, and probably should be able to set its own regs for mobile pollution sources), the point of diminishing returns for adding more pollution controls to cars probably past at least 15 years ago.
Emissions standards are too lenient? They are too strict if anything. They are as strict as they are mainly because the manufacturers want them that way. It's the best way to keep smaller competitors out of the market and it looks like you're being a good guy to the consumer and environment in the process.
I kind of agree with you actually. To refine my comment above, if you accept the premise that there's criminal culpability here, then it's morally unacceptable to send an engineer to prison but not the executives who directed or authorized him to produce a defeat device.
If, as you're saying, you don't accept that cheating on emissions tests is criminal in nature, then the issue should be settled through commercial and civil sanctions (which could perhaps include this engineer losing his license or charter, but more importantly should include those executives suffering severe financial penalties - perhaps that's a massive decline in value in their stock compensation's value caused by VW's mandatory exit from the US market.)
I don't think it's that VW can't meet the requirements, it's that they don't think it'll be as commercially successful.
I think it's the tension between emissions requirements and customer demand for powerful vehicles. As allowable emissions decrease over the years, which automaker will be successful shipping a vehicle that has less power than the previous model?
And that's the whole reason for emissions requirements, left to their own devices, automakers and customers weren't getting it done.
Edit: To clarify, I'm not suggesting this guy taking the dive for the execs is ok, just that someone lying about emission test results may not be as horrible as they're trying to make it sound.