Narrowing my Focus

Paul D'Ambra "Formula 1" July 27, 2013 via Flickr
non-commerical reuse with attribution no-derivs

In this blog post, I will choose several (2-3) questions from the ones I developed in the previous post, to focus on more specifically.

Where is this an issue? Is it only in the United States with our hyper-strict NOx emissions standards?I think this question is particularly important because it allows me to expand on why this happened in particular as well as the fact that when the diesels are on the more polluting cycle, they are in fact much more powerful and much more efficient. This also allows me to talk about how these same hyper-strict regulations the EPA enacts on diesel cars are optional on diesel trucks. This is a classical example of regulatory capture and trade protectionism that I really want to paint as unreasonable and unfair.

How did the defeat device work?This is very interesting to more technically minded people because, though Volkswagen resorted to cheating instead of facing a difficult technical problem, the cheating was still very sophisticated and this lends itself also very well to a discussion about why it was so difficult for the EPA and CARB (California Air Resources Board) to discover what was going on in the first place. From that, I can segue into how all cars in fact pollute much more on the road than they do in labs and how testing procedure can and should be adjusted to reflect that. From here, I can even move on to estimated gas mileage and how that is tested for in a similar ineffective manner.

Who is at fault?An answer to this question is always very interesting to readers. People have an intrinsic desire to be able to blame someone for a problem. However, as I greatly admire many of the engineers who suffered for this scandal, this section also allows me a platform to pontificate about how those engineers were treated unjustly and most likely had no part in the scandal.