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Sara Novak reports that according to a recent study, “badly tuned” cars and trucks make up one quarter of the vehicles on the road, but cause 95 percent of black carbon, also known as soot, 93 percent of carbon monoxide, and 76 percent of volatile organic chemicals like benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes. “The most surprising thing we found was how broad the range of emissions was,” says Greg Evans. “As we looked at the exhaust coming out of individual vehicles, we saw so many variations. How you drive, hard acceleration, age of the vehicle, how the car is maintained – these are things we can influence that can all have an effect on pollution.”
Researchers at the University of Toronto looked at 100,000 cars as they drove past air sampling probes on one of Toronto’s major roads. An automated identification and integration method was applied to high time resolution air pollutant measurements of in-use vehicle emissions performed under real-world conditions at a near-road monitoring station in Toronto, Canada during four seasons, through month-long campaigns in 2013–2014. Based on carbon dioxide measurements, over 100 000 vehicle-related plumes were automatically identified and fuel-based emission factors for nitrogen oxides; carbon monoxide; particle number, black carbon; benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes (BTEX); and methanol were determined for each plume.
Evans and his team found that policy changes need to better target cars that are causing the majority of the air pollution. “The ultrafine particles are particularly troubling,” says Evans. “Because they are over 1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, they have a greater ability to penetrate deeper within the lung and travel in the body.”
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Kromagv0 on Friday May 08 2015, @11:53AM
Given what I have seen and smelled on the highway in traffic this doesn't sound unreasonable. Even with modern emission controls and testing there are still a large number of vehicles that are just pollution factories. So look like they are fogging for mosquitoes as they go down the free way and I usually can smell one vehicle that is burning up their catalytic converter. Then add in the more minor stuff like worn out vacuum lines that are cracked, gas caps with dried out gaskets, plugged or damaged PCV systems, worn out spark plugs, questionable coil packs, etc and that most people don't really care and now the quoted stat doesn't seem unreasonable. It takes some effort to keep a vehicle running well, not a lot but still some, and since modern vehicles are better than the stuff from the 80s and earlier most people just change oil and that is it.
The thing a lot of people forget or don't know is that with minor maintenance vehicles can last a long time with almost no problems and run well, until they have a catastrophic failure like with my previous car. The worst thing that happened to it before the catastrophic failure was the water pump seal failed at about 180,000 and it leaked pretty bad, other than that it was just simple maintenance stuff. At just over 260,000 miles the automatic transmission failed and I wasn't going to sink $6000 into a car that would be worth $2000 if it had a perfectly good transmission so it went off to the salvage yard and they gave me $350 for it.
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(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Friday May 08 2015, @06:08PM
In theory, cars with On-Board Diagnostics (anything from the last 20 years) don't go out of tune without a "check engine" light coming on.
Even if everything is working as designed, there's still going to be one group of vehicles that are worse than others. I don't see in TFA where this is quantified. Are these 25% vehicles anywhere near as polluting as something from the 1960s? I would guess not, and ignorance is bliss. This looks like a non-story.
(Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Monday May 11 2015, @02:59PM
That doesn't mean that people aren't plenty of driving down the road with the check engine light on. Especially since every minor thing like not screwing the gas cap on tight enough will trip the light most people just ignore it as they have been trained that it is bullshit, that is until it isn't.
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