"VW admits it can't cope with new emissions test"

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https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44383226?ocid=socialflow_twitter

Germany's Volkswagen has warned its main factory in Wolfsburg faces temporary shutdowns later this year, owing to new emissions test standards.

It plans "closure days" to prevent a build-up of vehicles that have yet to be approved for sale.

From September, more rigorous EU standards apply, designed to replicate real driving conditions more closely.

Now VW says it does not have enough testing equipment to cope and fears that a backlog of cars will ensue.

At a meeting with unions on Wednesday, chief executive Herbert Diess admitted that meeting the new requirements, and getting new cars approved for sale, was proving a challenge. [h=2]Closure plan[/h]
"We will only build vehicles after the works holiday that fulfil the new standards. The deliveries will take place gradually as soon as the necessary approvals are there," Mr Diess told staff.

"But many vehicles will have to be warehoused in the meantime. To make sure their numbers don't become too large, we will have to plan closure days through the end of September," he added.

VW is still facing fallout from the scandal over its emissions cheating, which erupted in September 2015.

Last month, former chief executive Martin Winterkorn was charged by US prosecutors in Detroit with conspiring to mislead regulators.

The firm was found to have falsified diesel vehicles' emission levels by installing software "defeat devices" that allowed the vehicles to perform better in test conditions than they did on the road.
 
And in others news, VW has plans to open up a new plant in <insert Eastern European country> that totally won't eventually build cars for the EU.
 
The headline is misleading. Basically all test facilities in the country are booked solid because everyone needs to test every model. It's not just VW that had capacity problems, it's everybody.
 
That's why I bolded that section of the article and put the headline in quotes.

This is a problem of VW's own making, if they had not tried to cheat on emissions in the first place there would be a lot more trust with automakers in general and they wouldn't have this bandwidth problem for testing.
 
^That doesn't matter.

Problem is probably worse.

real-world emissions from passenger vehicles using remote sensing data

By manufacturer group, Euro 6 petrol vehicle NO[SUB]X[/SUB] emissions for even the worst manufacturers were within 1.5 times the type-approval limit. For diesel vehicles, even the best manufacturer group had Euro 6 NO[SUB]X[/SUB] emissions of more than twice the type-approval limit, and all other manufacturer groups were at least four times the type-approval limit. Four manufacturer groups had average emissions of more than 12 times the type-approval limit.

Almost no Euro 3 through Euro 6 diesel vehicle family had average remote sensing measurements below their respective type-approval standards. Euro 5 diesel families performed particularly poorly: All families had NO[SUB]X[/SUB] emissions at least twice that of the limit, and the worst families had emissions 18 times the limit.
https://www.theicct.org/publications/real-world-emissions-using-remote-sensing-data
 
Every one has been lying their ass off and it’s now become a big problem all at once causing a backlog for correction and re-testing.

And water is wet.
 
DanRoM;n3549901 said:
The headline is misleading. Basically all test facilities in the country are booked solid because everyone needs to test every model. It's not just VW that had capacity problems, it's everybody.

Well, everybody that skimped on investing in own testing capacity and got completely suprised by a regulation that was known since four years in advance I guess............. :)
 
I did not know where else to put this, but since it is somewhat related, I will drop it off here.

From the article:
William Todts, executive director of the Brussels-based clean transport group T&E, says the cheating could reduce the stringency of the 2025 CO2 target by more than half. This would result in fewer electric cars being sold because carmakers wouldn’t need them to meet the target.

“After dieselgate, carmakers promised to change and that new tests were the solution,” he says. “Now it’s clear they're using these new tests to undermine the already weak CO2 standards. They want to meet these with minimal effort so they can keep selling diesels and delay the shift to electric cars. It's a sad reminder the car industry wants to stay in the past and cannot be trusted."

The Commission documents show carmakers are switching off the start-stop function in cars during tests. They are also adjusting the gear-shift patterns and using depleted batteries to burn more fuel and emit more CO2. In addition, carmakers are declaring higher values than they actually measure, again inflating the official emission values. “As a result, the targets for 2025 and 2030 would also be weakened due to the inflated 2021 starting point - this would de facto reduce the level of ambition,” the Commission concludes.

It is unclear at this point whether these practices would be illegal, as was the case with the defeat devices in the dieselgate scandal. But in any event, they would violate the spirit of the new tests, EU Energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete said. The Commission is thinking about clamping down on the practice before it becomes more widespread and is preparing a proposal to establish independent measurements of emission levels, according to auto industry sources.

“We don’t like tricks,” Cañete told the Financial Times. “We have seen things we don’t like. We are going to do all the necessary work so that the starting points are the real ones.” Cañete sent a joint letter with EU Industry Commissioner Elzbieta Bienkowska to automakers proposing three possible solutions.

The European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA) said in a statement that they fully agree that CO2 values should not be artificially increased on purpose in any way that would undermine the post-2020 CO2 targets.

“Clearly, the issue of artificially increasing WLTP figures is not an industry-wide problem,” ACEA said. “Indeed, increasing CO2 emissions on purpose to inflate the WLTP baseline would not only be counterproductive in the current CO2 discussions but may also hinder a manufacturer’s competitiveness. In fact, the majority of EU member states have a taxation scheme based on CO2 emissions and higher CO2 emissions would, therefore, result in higher costs for the customer – making such vehicles less attractive.”

“Manufacturers are also competing directly and fairly on fuel consumption values (which are directly related to CO2 emissions). Therefore, a manufacturer that would over-declare CO2 values could dramatically lose their competitiveness and market share, which is in no one’s interest,” they added.

While this may be true in the short term, in the long term automakers may be tempted by the prospect of making their targets much easier to meet in the next decade. The Commission hopes it can work with automakers to end this practice before it becomes more widespread and spirals into a new dieselgate scandal.
 
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