Cyberswindle? By Eric Peters

The money sentences: “A battery powered device is not “zero emissions. It is elsewhere emissions.” From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

You may have read about the federal government cheating on it is own tests – as regards how far “zero emissions” electric cars can go on a charge, by weighting the math so as to allow the manufacturers of these devices tout significantly greater range than they actually deliver in real world driving.

This is fascinating on a number of levels.

First, obviously, the cheating one.

Remember when VW was practically crucified over what the government styled its cheating on government emissions certification tests? What VW actually did was program the software that ran the computers that controlled its TDI diesel engines to score as highly on the tests as possible. This is something every manufacturer does, by the way. It is also why, as an aside, almost every new vehicle that isn’t a battery powered device has an automatic transmission as these can be – here it comes – programmed to shift in such a way while the car is being tested to deliver the highest possible gas mileage (and lowest “emissions) numbers . . . on the test.

Anyhow, VW was hounded out of the business of making diesel-powered vehicles and forced to get into the business not only of selling battery powered devices but paying for advertising those made by others, among other Soviet-eseque abasements. There was  a reason for all of this, of course. VW’s range of TDI diesel-powered vehicles – models like the Golf, Jetta and Passat – offered so much range (500-plus miles on a single tank) at such low cost (a TDI powered Golf or Jetta could be bought for around $23k) that they constituted an intolerable alternative to $50k devices with half the range.

So they had to go. The cheating was just the excuse.

Continue reading