Reporter Says Opel Secretly Fixed Cheating Diesels During A Software Update

Summary: The Dutch news guys might be right, or they might not. I'll form my opinion as more facts come to light.


Details:

I take news reports with a HUGE grain of salt. They're revenue-generating, for profit enterprises whose focus is on making a profit. That's what they do well, and they accomplish that by selling ad space to "sponsors," who equate the price of advertising on a specific delivery channel (e.g., TV station, radio station, print, web, etc.) based on the size of their targetted audience they can reach. News channels are not best known for their rigorous laboratory testing, forensics, and validation of "hot" stories before releasing them as "facts" to their consuming audience.

I say to the Dutch news folks, release your findings to authorities, and let them validate your conclusions. If you're correct, then you'll be recognized as the ones who broke Dieselgate II!

Just as a data point to readers, the Dieselgate story started with a pair of researchers from India who are emissions experts. They love doing this stuff. They love it so much, they do emissions testing and research on their own time, just to gather more data. On a visit to the US, these guys did tailpipe emissions tests on rented cars, which includes some VW diesels. When they were shocked by their high emissions numbers, they first thought their data was bad, or their process flawed, or the equipment faulty or miscalibrated, or the rented car was just an anomaly, so they double-checked everything and repeated their tests on other rented VW diesels, and they got similar results. Disbelieving that a manufacturer could pass an emissions test with these kinds of numbers, they repeated their tests OFF the road, in a lab, under emissions tests conditions, and they discovered the same offending cars were "clean" in the lab! Again, they thought "this shouldn't be", so they repeated their tests with numerous rented VW diesels, and got the same results. That's when they went to the authorities with their data and conclusions, and ask authorities to validate their findings. Authorities did. The story then broke to the news channels in September 2015, and became the Dieselgate scandal we know today.

Smart Opel execs. If VW did this in 2012 and then quietly added the Urea/Bluefluid tanks to their cars on a rolling basis as they were redesigned, this whole issue would never have surfaced.

VW deserves everything it has coming, as they started this fraud in 2008 and then kept it up.

If a reporter says so then it must be true. *rolled eyes*

Indeed! Ditto if you see it on Facebook ;-)

BobM, you've fallen prey to special-interest groups and how they present data to support their beliefs. Here's just one example of how you've been mislead:

Since Dieselgate, researchers estimate that about 60 people (I'm using round numbers for easier comparison) will die prematurely in the US as a result of the actual (higher) NOx emissions from diesels than their claimed emission levels. Meanwhile, similar research asserts that about 250 people will die prematurely from emissions caused by ethanol supplemented vehicles. When we compare 250 deaths to 60 deaths, we see it's about 4x higher, so we believe the articles' assertions that ethanol supplemented vehicles are 4x more deadly than those dirty diesels.

Here's how readers are mislead: The most optimistic numbers tell us that diesels make up about 3-5% of the vehicles on the road in the US. Let's just say 5% to give the anti-ethanol folks the most ammo. So 5% of the vehicles on the road are responsible for an extra 60 deaths (~12 deaths per percentage point), as compared to the rest of the vehicles with ethanol (~2.6% deaths per percentage point). But ethanol/gas blend is not sold in all regions (fair enough), so let's assume that only 1/4 of non-diesels are using ethanol. That still leaves us with ~10.3 deaths (4 x ~2.6) resulting from ethanol cars vs dirty diesels, when normalized to take into account the number of vehicles that contribute to those estimated deaths. All of a sudden, the argument that ethanol is 4x more deadly than those dirty diesels is no longer sound. That's just one example.

Another example of how people are mislead by special interest groups is by combining several causally unrelated factors and presenting them as though they are related. For example, yes, governments are economically driven, and yes, politicians are focused on getting re-elected rather than doing what's best for the nation, so lots of politicians and government factions support US agri-business and subsidize corn and other crops for the purpose of producing ethanol for fuel... even though the data shows that ethanol blended gasoline isn't better for total fuel economy, or emissions, or human health. Articles then lead readers to believe that governments should be distrusted (yeah, I get that dishonesty is rampant). But then, we combine that idea with something that supports "the other side" in order to lead readers to conclude that EVERYTHING a government states must be false, therefore, just because some branch of the government supports some concept, it *must* be the wrong thing.

People will believe what they believe. They'll interpret data to support their beliefs.

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.” – Mark Twain

^^^
Just to be clear, in case anyone misunderstands:
- I'm NOT condoning VW's actions, or trying to downplay them
- I'm not anti/pro-ethanol, nor anti/pro-diesel
- I'm not anti/pro-Obama, and I have no political affiliations

I merely make the point that folks will use data, and present it in a way that supports their agenda, and often, we fall for it.