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posted by martyb on Saturday December 08 2018, @04:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the What-harm-could-a-lie-do dept.

After VW was outed for falsifying environmental data in its cars hundreds of thousand of VW vehicles were taken off the road now sitting in storage sites. Hundreds of thousands of cars now lie in lots in the Mojave Desert, a shuttered suburban Detroit football stadium, and a former Minnesota paper mill in America alone. These vehicles are now in the open slowly breaking down with pollutants entering the environment. Is the the modern cost of corporate greed? What can we do to ensure this never happens again?


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Farkus888 on Saturday December 08 2018, @08:22PM (2 children)

    by Farkus888 (5159) on Saturday December 08 2018, @08:22PM (#771642)

    Those cars ran far leaner than modern cars. Better fuel economy but far worse emissions per mile driven. As a closer to the article example older dodge ram diesels often got 20 mpg. The controls to reduce nox emissions brought that down to 12 or so real world mpg. Both of those with the same 6bt inline 6 cylinder. The simple explanation is that leaner air fuel ratios means hotter combustion and hotter means worse emissions.

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  • (Score: 2) by Whoever on Saturday December 08 2018, @10:49PM (1 child)

    by Whoever (4524) on Saturday December 08 2018, @10:49PM (#771688) Journal

    Those cars ran far leaner than modern cars.

    I don't think so. The introduction of catalytic converters in the mid '70s eliminated lean burn engines before they went into production.

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 08 2018, @11:48PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 08 2018, @11:48PM (#771704)

      Honda's CVCC was a form of lean burn engines, and in fact didnt' require catalytic converters until they were mandated in... 79? 80? All of the modern ultra efficient engines are also superlean burning engines in low load cruise modes. HOWEVER, due to the the mandated catalytic converter requirement, most engines had to maintain a minimum richness to bring the catalytic converters up to operating temperature and then maintain a stochiometric air fuel balance to keep the cat at temperature. The ideal ratio is 14.7:1, but the ratios used in practice were 13.5:1 for naturally aspirated vehicles and 12.5:1 for turbocharged vehicles. What ended up changing this significantly was the introductions of both cheap wideband o2 sensors, and heated o2 cats with PCMs capable of temperature regulation. Those two features, combined with EFI/timing allowed ultra-lean engines to become practical again, combined with variable valve timing it allowed them to provide either fuel economy or performance comparable to much lower efficiency engines.

      The Fieros with iron dukes and a few other cars during the early 1980s had ultra-high efficiency lean burning engines, but the torque curve was anemic and Americans demanded drivability over fuel efficiency except in a small range of mostly japanese econobox vehicles.