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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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Half a Million VW Vehicles Dumped in Graveyards
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A Smith & Wesson beats four aces.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Saturday December 08 2018, @10:24PM (3 children)
There's a difference between "we pass the test, but it's not how people drive normally" and VW cheating (which was "Hey, we're being tested, literally kill the car performance so we don't get caught polluting but never, ever, ever do this in real-world usage".
The mandated goals weren't that unrealistic. A small handful of companies got caught REALLY taking the piss . They now make cars that are compliant. Everyone else was making cars that were compliant. None of them needed to cheat anywhere near as badly as VW did or, in some cases, at all. Hence the goals were tough, sure, but do-able. What VW didn't want was to do the groundwork and/or let people see how inefficient their cars actually were. And that's come back to bite them a billion times more than any mandated goal and compliance with it.
And guess what? If your product is legislated out of profitable production - make something else. ALL of those car manufacturers had options. The options they chose were "build such a car", "build a car that plays the test", or "build a car that outright lies while polluting the fuck out of everyone". There's a fourth option: "Stop building diesel cars, or price them appropriately". Do you see Coke or Pepsi whining like shit because of the EU sugar taxes imposed on soft drinks? No. They put their prices up, carried on, focused on other areas. And that's a sugary drink, not a car capable of killing people and literally choking up the air with fumes.
For decades scientists couldn't work out why low-emission zones weren't actually all that low-emission. It turns out that some manufacturers were literally fucking people over and deliberately polluting. Hell, they should pay for it. It's like making a 747 that "can hold enough fuel for 10 hours of flight" that crashes after 8 - and they know that, and still lie about that, and even go to the extent of making the clocks in the cabin read false times whenever they are in testing.
The goals were not unrealistic, they were necessary. Companies thinking they can just ignore the law and pollute wholesale for decades because of their profit margin (how's that working out for ya?) were unrealistic.
I wouldn't touch a government-engineered car, no. But then, when they say that all cars can only have one wheel now, it's up to the manufacturer's to work around that, and explain why that's a bad idea, not just make four-wheeled car that has a fake single wheel visible from the outside and then LITERALLY LIE whenever it's tested.
DRL have been around for decades. Drivers that are too stupid to realise they can't see shouldn't be on the road anyway. The problem there is really LIT STREETS. Ride down a country lane with just side-lights or DRL and see how far you get. People being dickheads is the reason you have DRL anyway - because people are too stupid to let themselves be seen because they can see out the front of their car "so they must be visible". A 5W LED on your car is not the end of the world.
Red turn signals are stupid and American. European ones are and always have been orange. For good reason. But your cars have been like that for 50 years and you've not done a damn thing about it. Nor about seatbelts being required. But if a driver is ignoring a flashing red light, again you have bigger problems than what the government wrote on a vehicle manufacturing standard.
ABS is demonstrably, provably and repeatable better than a human driver. Except on gravel. Question: Why are you going fast enough on loose gravel to make this an issue? My car actually warns me when traction isn't correct for the ABS to function properly, and temporarily turns off the ABS. That would most likely be the result of a government-mandated safety feature. Because, sure as fuck, manufacturers aren't going to put that kind of thing in their cars AT ALL until they are forced to, especially when you consider that they would ACTIVELY rather just pollute everything and lie about it in government tests. You think if it was an unregulated market they'd bother with airbags or ABS?
The government absolutely should not be involved in car design. The government SHOULD however tell you what the car needs to do, and if it isn't capable of it, you can't sell that car. Which is what they do. They don't care if you use electronic ABS, mechanical ABS, or some quantum-entanglement ABS that does the same job. They say "Cars need to be able to stop in this distance from this speed in these road conditions, at least comparable with what we know is capable with modern technology". How you actually do that is up to you. Case in point: Electronic handbrakes. They don't care whether the handbrake is electronic or cabled. So long as it's independent, operates in the case of primary brake failure, reliable, and passes the same standards as a cabled one would. You might not like it, but it's the car manufacturer that mandates how gadgets like that manifest themselves. The government just say what needs to be achieved. And in the case of the EU, that's 27 governments all agreeing on that. And, for damn sure, if the car manufacturer can say "we're going to totally change how braking is done, how steering is done, how engines are managed, how timing is achieved, how the passengers are protected, how windscreens are made, etc." (just to pick a few of the areas where features that were never standard were put into luxury models, proved popular, got into lots of cars, and proved themselves so much that only THEN did they get mandated by government standards), then they can stop fucking over consumers by deliberately cheating on tests that impact not only the driver, or passengers, but everyone who lives in a city.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Saturday December 08 2018, @10:57PM (2 children)
Not true. In the UK, they were required to be amber [orange] for cars registered after 1958. Not before.
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2013/may/17/new-rules-car-indicators-1956 [theguardian.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 09 2018, @02:26AM (1 child)
So what color were they then before?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Whoever on Sunday December 09 2018, @04:08AM
Some were red. Some did not flash. Some were little "flags" that were raised on the "B" pillar.