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EUEUEUEUEU lies about their cars' emissions figures

Posted by Olog-hai on Sat Apr 28 15:28:06 2012, in response to EUEUEUEUEU "stability mechanism" to be immune "from every form of judicial process", posted by Olog-hai on Sat Apr 28 14:14:46 2012.

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Why car makers lie about fuel consumption

By Michael Hanlon
27 April 2012 11:16 AM

There are lies, damn lies, statistics — and official EU car fuel consumption figures. I and others have been banging on about this for years: the figures quoted by manufacturers in their ads usually (but, interestingly not always) bears absolutely no relation whatsoever to what happens in the real world.

This scandal has been highlighted in a What Car Report, which this week looked at some of the claims made for the most allegedly economical cars sold in Britain and compared them to real-world consumption figures. And, surprise surprise, some of the most ‘economical’ cars on sale actually use between a quarter and a third more fuel than their ‘official’ figures suggest, adding up to hundreds of pounds a year in extra fuel costs for an average motorist.

Although many cars achieve more than 70-mpg ‘officially’, the reality is that only a handful can crack the 50-mpg barrier in day-to-day driving, even with a light foot. This is a scandal largely glossed over by the motoring press (with the honorable exceptions of Autocar magazine and, now What Car?), and completely ignored by the manufacturers themselves.

So what is going on here? Is this simply lies and coverup on the part of Ford, FIAT and so forth? No, it is more interesting — and more complicated than that.

To get those ‘official’ figures, new cars are subjected to something called the ‘New European Driving Cycle’, a series of short runs on a ‘rolling road’ where the car is accelerated, put on a short cruise and decelerated under laboratory conditions. All the car makers have to put their cars through the same test, so on this level there is no trickery involved. The idea is that the EU has created a level playing field upon which the performance of all cars can be judged.

But it is not as simple as that. Because this is where it gets clever, and some trickery DOES creep in. Some years ago, manufacturers realized that to score well on the official tests, they could tune their engines for maximum efficiency on the rolling road cycle. This was particularly the case for small turbocharged diesel or gasoline engines, and hybrids. For instance, the engine could be set up so that the turbocharger simply does not kick in during the cycle. But take the car out onto a real road, and to get the thing to move at all, the turbo will be needed, massively increasing consumption.

This alone probably explains the shameful discrepancies seen in cars like the VW Golf turbo-diesel Bluemotion. Hybrids and engines like the clever Twinair used by FIAT can be ‘mapped’ to perform spectacularly well during the official cycle, the downside being poor performance when driven on the real road (no such thing as a free lunch). The net effect is that, bizarrely, cars are actually being made less efficient than they need be.

And now it gets even murkier. It is official figures that are used to calculate the official CO₂ ‘emissions’ of these cars, a new set of figures that have serious implications regarding company car and VED tax bands. Even Autocar falls for this, slating a car for the discrepancy between claimed and actual fuel consumption but then stating as fact that such-and-such a vehicle ‘emits’ such-and-such CO₂ based on the official figures.

No, it doesn’t. It emits what it emits (the calculation is simple — divide the number 6740 by the car’s mpg for gasoline engines, 7440 by mpg for diesel). This all adds up to taxman trickery and is, put simply, a con — a con on your wallets, on the taxman and on the environment.

Interestingly, not everyone plays this game. Larger-engined, more powerful cars often return official and actual fuel consumption figures, which more or less agree. Why? It is harder to tune big engines to fool the rolling road. Some BMWs and Porsches actually perform better in real life than the ‘official’ figures suggest.

The system needs to be changed. Anything that is forcing car makers to tune their cars to use more fuel than is needed in the alleged interests of environmental correctness is an abomination.

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