Scandal: VW Emissions Dieselgate Explained | Plainly Difficult Documentary

I can't seem to go a day without getting an ad on YouTube asking if I've rented or owned a diesel car recently. This question is usually followed by joining our lawsuit against x manufacturer. Of course, this hasn't affected me because I drive. a god level vision of Honda and those Japanese engineers at Honda can do no wrong, well these annoying and smartly dressed individuals in the videos made me interested in digging deeper into why I am bombarded with these ads. It's May 2014 and the International Council on Clean Transportation is performing

emissions

tests on several vehicles from German manufacturers.

The non-profit organization is doing some pretty average real-world testing. Emissions rules are much stricter in the US. In the US and the TICT we are waiting to see the results of cars from European manufacturers built for the US market and demonstrate the improved

emissions

to Europeans. At that time there were quite large discrepancies between the cars sold in the two markets. Even though they were seemingly identical models, they knew what the official tailpipe emissions were. Their test vehicles had just been certified at the California Air Resources Board facility and were proven to comply with the state's strict rules, but Real-world tests would show how the vehicles reacted when driving on the open road.

The team used three vehicles: a VW Passat, a VW Jetta and a BMW of which the Passat was. Exceptional interest for the team, as it was the most modern, with a newer selective catalytic reduction system. As such, the team of two teachers and two students took a long test drive of the Passat from Los Angeles to Seattle and back, approximately 2,000 miles in total upon return. In their lab, the team found something very out of the ordinary on missions that far exceeded the legal limits set by European and American standards - 20 times the knox levels set in a test bed during U.S. resource board certification. california air a similar result came from the jetta surely there was a problem with the portable tailpipe emissions equipment the researchers must have thought but strangely the results from the BMW were within the range expected in the real world the equipment had to be correct what What investigators didn't know was that they had stumbled upon one of the biggest cases of fraud in automotive history.

The results of this perfectly innocent test would shake up an entire industry. It would cost the Volkswagen Group billions of dollars. It pollutes the air we breathe and it still continues. to this day to remedy it today we are watching the volkswagen emissions

scandal

my name is john and welcome to the

scandal

a clearly

difficult

series background our story begins strangely not with vw but with another german manufacturer mercedes with a car of my personal dreams , the 300 sd, besides looking like a west berlin taxi yes, yes, I know it was more than one, two, three, but you know, a pale yellow Mercedes diesel equals taxi and for me it has to be that yellow whitewashed on an old Mercedes, but this is irrelevant to our story anyway, the W116 300 SD was the first sedan vehicle to use a turbodiesel engine and, as with most Mercedes flagship products, after a few years, they arrived to automobiles and to the masses.

I'm still hoping my Honda will grow night vision cameras, as I seem to remember Clarkson once saying on an episode of Top Gear, well, the engine in the The w-116 received indirect fuel injection seven years later, a turbodiesel from Direct injection had become an automobile available to mere mortals. This was the 1986 Fiat Chroma TDI lift back sedan and Volkswagen would follow in 1989 with their own direct injection turbodiesel. I must say that diesels in Volkswagen vehicles were not something new in 1989; They had been selling Golfs with 1.5 naturally aspirated units since 1976 and had even been experimenting in the 1950s with a diesel-powered boxer unit like many other manufacturers in the During the use of naturally aspirated diesel engines, the cars were painfully slow. , terribly noisy and very shaky.

It was the implementation of turbocharging and direct injection that would push diesel engines to be more usable and less agricultural, but why diesel in the first place? Well, the answer is quite a bit. Simple cost, that is, in fuel economy and reliability, these engines work by compressing diesel fuel to the point that it spontaneously combusts. These engines have very good thermal efficiency, meaning less energy is lost during operation since 1989 and the VW group's first directional injection turbo diesel. which was called tdi, would be a 2.5 liter cylinder unit and was available in the audi 100 and from there the demand for this new smoother and more efficient engine grew, as did the development of the system in the constant battle to reduce turbo lag and increase efficiency.

In 1999, the company would see its first common rail system. Common rail systems help increase pressure in the fuel system, allowing injectors to greatly improve fuel vaporization, making it easier to combine atmospheric oxygen, thus creating better combustion. These engines are more efficient and if designed properly, have greater durability than some gasoline engines, in addition to that, they also have lower CO2 emissions. Where is the problem? I mean, even the most refined engines are still loud and slower compared to similar displacement and turbocharged gasoline engines, but the main thing is that they are taller. knox emissions, okay, we should pause here before we get into the scandal to quickly discuss NOX nitrogen oxides.

Nox gases in our story are byproducts of combustion when hydrocarbons burn at high temperatures, nitrogen and oxygen react to form nitrogen oxides, which are molecules that contain one. nitrogen and one or more oxygen atoms nitrogen oxides are responsible for the creation of smog and acid rain, the form of which can cause in humans asthma diabetes DNA mutations cancer and other respiratory conditions, the latter is acid rain, it is not necessary To say that it is quite unpleasant, the high temperature caused by the high pressures necessary to create combustion is perfect for the production of fine particles in the form of NOX.

Diesel engines are believed to produce 5 to ten times more knox compared to a gasoline car, obviously most manufacturers do not. I don't care about this unless there are rules and financial sanctions to encourage the reduction of certain particles and this was the case in the US. The country's emissions and pollution laws date back to the Air Pollution Control Act of 1955. The laws would continue to develop over time. In the following decades, one of them was the US national ambient air quality standards, which were a 1990 amendment to an earlier clean air law. This amendment was intended to produce various particles in hopes of addressing ozone depletion from acid rain as well as general air pollution as a decade later emissions regulations became stricter, one of those changes occurring in 1999 and Replacing Tier 1 with Tier 2 rules that reduced the Knox limit from 1.0 grams per mile to 0.07 grams per mile.

Tier 2 standards will be phased in between 2004 and 2009 to allow manufacturers to adapt and this brings Volkswagen back into the picture VW's new clean diesel during this phase of the period Volkswagen stopped selling its diesel-powered passenger cars in the US in 2007. The company announced that this retention occurred while they obtained new compatible technology, but they will soon return to the market a year after the start of the phase in Volkswagen had considered reaching an agreement with Mercedes in 2005 to license your blue tech bluetec system uses a selective catalytic reduction system that uses diesel exhaust fluid known as adblue and a nox absorber system adblue is a mixture of urea and deionized water that is injected into the exhaust supplied from a separate tank because it makes so much heat in the exhaust pipe that the adblue decomposes into ammonia, this then reacts with the nox reducing it to oxygen and hydrogen.

The bees are then expelled into the atmosphere. The system, although quite intelligent, has a number of drawbacks, such as the weight due to the additional liquid and the additional cost of having to buy the adblue, plus the system is generally more complex, although there are complications with the brand of the system. on volkswagen vehicles resulted in daimler ag and volkswagen terminating their agreement now that they had no system vw sought to build an in-house knox reduction the company sought efficient knox trap technology which was, above all, cheaper than the bluetec system this system It is much more similar to a conventional catalytic converter, but its medium inside the converter captures particles once it is full.

The system is purged by injecting fuel into the filter, which then burns the NOx in the form of hydrogen and water. The system was touted as a new and wonderful one. Technical marvel of low emissions, high economy, as well as great torque at low revs and lively performance. What's not to like at 39 usmpg highway compared to the 2010 Honda Insights, 40 miles per gallon, it doesn't seem worth wasting your time with the new, modern hybrid systems. More than a mile per gallon Volkswagen put a lot of effort into clean diesel, making the company the major player in the U.S. diesel engine market, even winning green car subsidies and tax breaks. for your green cars.

When tested, the cars fell below the level 2 maximum. threshold for knox particles had seemingly struck the perfect balance, but VW's magical lean knox trap technology was more smoke and mirrors than awe at modern technology, the company had actually failed to meet emissions regulations for its emissions technology. diesel engine, but instead of admitting defeat, management thought. In a sneaky way of passing the defeat device test, you see that the engines were able to meet the regulations, but only when heavily detuned, making the vehicle more reminiscent of the 1970s level of power and economy. VW had a solution to this problem.

How about having two modes of operation in the engine control unit software, one for emissions testing and one for real world testing, the former would reduce power and efficiency solely for the purpose of passing national emissions regulations? exhaust pipes and then for normal day-to-day driving, but how well did you know the car? cars have many sensors such as throttle steering body control, traction control etc, the ecu will be able to determine this due to the lack of information from things like the bcm and steering sensors, but at this point emissions were being tested, the ecu would switch to its test mode and therefore nerf engine performance, needless to say the volkswagen audi group did not tell anyone about this software and therefore the deception was that the broadcasts were too good to be true.

The US in the late 2000s had some of the most stringent emissions testing in the world. in the world and Volkswagen Audi cars met these standards even though the cars had the same engines in Europe they demonstrated compliance with Euro 5 rules but exceeded the United States level 2 rules and this brings us back to the ICCT and its Testing of that Jetta Persatan The tests repeatedly verified their results after each test. Volkswagens were seen repeatedly emitting quantities much higher than the official figures. Their results were returned to the German, who then passed them on to the EPA and Carb.

In May 2014, the EPA began its own investigation and found that its real-world testing was also much higher than laboratory testing. VW was asked why its initial responses were to blame isolated technical failures over the coming months. Carb and EPA continue to question VW management at every meeting. The defeat device was not revealed to government agencies even when they were threatened. With the EPA failing to certify the 2016 model year, VW continued to try to evade the mounting accusations, but the company was now just digging its own grave. The EPA was also doing its own investigations behind VW.

ECU disable devices were not unknown to the industry. and because ofBecause of this, the EPA focused its investigation on the onboard engine control system using owner forums and Volkswagen's own service manuals. Computer scientists were able to obtain and test the ECU code after almost a year of searching, a line of code called the acoustic condition was found. The code was responsible for taking information from the speed steering and traction control sensors and determining whether the car was being tested. The code originally worked to control engine noise when starting, but served as the perfect camouflage to hide and defeat the software.

In August 2015, VW employees met with the EPA, were given a management-approved script that would continue to hide the defeat device, but these employees ended up blowing the whistle and telling the EPA there were two ways to hide the defeat device. operation programmed in at least two liters. diesel engine intended to circumvent emissions testing, smoke and gun had had time to confront the company, the EPA took its conclusions and issued a notice of violation to VW on September 18, 2015. The company had admitted to the deception a few days before the official notice, but the notice gave the Volkswagen Audi group an advantage to destroy as much documentation as possible about the deactivation device.

This destruction of evidence is quite reprehensible. It would also turn out that Bosch had written the original software with the original intention that it would be used for internal testing only. Bosch had even stated that it would not use it in production vehicles, but Volkswagen obviously ignored it on December 23rd. VW CEO Martin Winterkorn issued this statement as he reluctantly resigned from his position. I am surprised by After the events of the last few days, I am surprised that misconduct of such magnitude was possible in the Volkswagen group. As CEO, I accept responsibility for any wrongdoing and do so in the interests of the company, although I am not aware of any wrongdoing.

For my part, well, the US government would disagree, but we'll talk about that in a moment. The company around the same time declared that some 11 million cars were potentially affected worldwide. The Volkswagen Audi group announced on September 29, 2015, but it was planning to recall and recondition the 11 million audi vw skoda brand vehicles see it on porsche these vehicles were scattered throughout the US, UK, EU and in many other countries of the world. Some engines would require hardware repairs, while others just a software tune-up in the U.S. VW dealers were only allowed to sell some new 2015 or 2016 models, but not second-hand diesel-powered cars.

Needless to say, this was another financial hit, but the biggest one was yet to come a day after the announcement. On September 21, VW shares fell 20 points another day later, after a $7.3 billion spend confirmed by the company, the shares fell another 17. 2016 wouldn't be better in March, Volkswagen USA CEO In the US, Michael Horn resigned and the company agreed to buy back about 500,000 cars in the US in April, as well as offer compensation, VW car sales fell by an average of 24 in the US during 2015 after the scandal on January 11, 2016, Volkswagen agreed to plead guilty to a charge related to the emissions scandal and as punishment they were ordered to pay $4.3 billion in fines. six executives were also charged with fraud at the same time.

Well, you know, I said the US government would have something to say about the involvement of now-former CEO Martin Winterkorn, he would be indicted in May 2018 for multiple cases of wire fraud and conspiracy to violate the air law. clean; However, he has not yet faced those charges because he did not go to the US after his indictment, but in his native Germany there would also be a criminal case against him. Martin Winterkorn was indicted along with four other top VW bosses, but at the time of writing, the trial has been postponed due to the former CEO's poor health and the global pandemic, making one wonder if the man from 74-year-old will ever see his day in court even now, however, Winter Corn denies any knowledge that executives still residing in Germany likely won't see a U.S. court unless they go voluntarily, as Germany will only extradite its citizens to other EU countries or international courts, but there are a couple behind bars due to the scandal.

Engineer James Lang and compliance officer Oliver Schmidt were sentenced to prison in the United States. The scandal cost the company about $29 billion. However, public opinion does not seem to have suffered any damage, since in 2018 they sold more than 10 million cars, a record for the company since the scandal. VW has walked away. From diesel to hybrid and electric technology. Many cars from the Volkswagen Audi group, if not electric, have small turbocharged petrol engines, such as the Scolior Octavia with its 1.4 turbo petrol, a car that used to be a well-known site for diesel taxis on the outskirts of London.

In fact, I can admit that many times I walked out of one of them on a Friday night. An estimated 60 to 100 excess deaths are linked to the VW scandal alone, but it turned out they weren't the only manufacturer evading emissions regulations, but several others. Manufacturers have been found to be manipulating mpg figures for their vehicles' CO2 and Nox emissions. This hints at an industry-wide problem that could one day turn into another episode of scandal. This is a simply

difficult

production. All videos on the channel are common creative actions to be shared equally. Many difficult licensed videos are produced by me in a currently average corner of the south suburbs of London, UK.

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