The really interesting stuff all happened as this week drew to a close – yesterday Volkswagen ‘fessed up over the ‘dieselgate’ scandal and, today, Tata Motors’ English luxury vehicle unit Jaguar Land Rover finally confirmed the location for its new manufacturing plant.
VW admitted – as many industry observers had suspected and speculated – that pressure to launch ‘clean diesel’ models in the US led to it deliberately designing engines to meet NOx emissions on test while knowing that real-world driving would greatly increase tailpipe pollution. Top executives – supervisory board and management board chairmen, no less – then went on to tell a packed press conference in Wolfsburg how the automaker was making good progress with its investigation, vehicle modifications and group restructuring, including management changes.
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Today’s passenger car diesels are a far cry from the complex-to-start, noisy, underpowered, vibrating, black smoke-spewing nightmares I first sampled at the end of the 1970s when some makers would shove a small ‘derv’ engine designed primarily for light commercial vehicles, forklifts and marine applications into a car, add lots of extra soundproofing, cross their fingers and hope to sell a few. Even a decade later, when I was launch deputy editor of Britain’s Diesel Car magazine (still going), starting, economy and refinement had improved quite a bit but diesels were still slow, unrefined and not always as economical versus petrol as you might have thought. It was not until from about 1988, when PSA, VW, BMW and others specifically developed ‘high speed’ engines, adding first a turbocharger and then an intercooler, that acceleration you could measure with a stopwatch rather than an egg timer, a decent all-day motorway cruising ability, autobahn top speeds and fuel consumption low enough to acceptably offset the extra cost of going diesel became reality.
Subsequently, of course, environment concerns kicked in – carbon dioxide being a particular focus here in Europe (our cars are taxed on CO2 emissions) and nitrogen oxide under the even stricter US emissions rules. And diesels needed work to meet ever tighter mandates, particularly the exhaust systems. Selective catalyst reduction, urea injection, diesel particle filter and other technologies have all found their way into the engineer’s toolbox along with common rail injection, direct injection, exhaust gas recirculation (long used to reduce petrol engine NOx emissions, too) and so on. And, more recently, the petard that has hoisted Volkswagen: electronic controls and software.
“Initially, it proved impossible to have the EA 189 engine [TDi] meet by legal means the stricter nitrogen oxide requirements in the US within the required timeframe and budget,” VW said this week. “This led to the incorporation of software that adjusted nitrogen oxide emission levels according to whether vehicles were on the road or being tested. Later, when an effective technical process was available to reduce NOx emissions, it was not employed to the full extent possible. On the contrary, the software in question allowed the exhaust gas treatment additive ‘AdBlue’ to be injected in variable amounts such that the NOx values were particularly low when vehicles were in the test bay, but significantly higher when vehicles were on the road.”
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A European fix has been agreed with regulators and an apparently much more difficult fix for the US is in the works with talks ongoing between the automaker and regulators EPA and CARB. A separate investigation of CO2 emissions has turned up a better result than expected and the threat of a EUR2bn hit to VW’s bottom line has receded somewhat. VW aims to recall and modify all affected cars in Europe by the end of next year and details of what it’ll do in the US are still awaited. Meanwhile a top-down scrutiny of how the company is managed, and operates day to day is also ongoing and yesterday’s announcement included a key conclusion: VW’s testing practice “must undergo comprehensive changes” and future emissions testing will be evaluated both externally and independently.
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By GlobalDataToday’s news from Jaguar Land Rover will be very welcome in a city called Nitra (cue Google Maps) in western Slovakia. Prepare to be home to a shiny, new factory which will make “a range of new aluminium Jaguar Land Rover vehicles” with first cars due off line late in 2018. The factory will have initial capacity of 150,000 and construction starts next year. This eastern European country already has form as a place to make automobiles – VW in Bratislava and Hyundai’s Kia Motors in Zilina already have plants there producing vehicles to the standard of Audi’s top Q7 luxury SUV. The quality of several Slovak-built Kias I have sampled over the years (parent Hyundai has a plant in the neighbouring Czech Republic) is as good if not better than Korean made cars and the country has clearly ticked the right boxes for JLR – available land and infrastructure, good education and workforce availability, established supply chains and, I suspect, the odd city, state or central government (ahem) subsidy. Look for new alloy models, stamped ‘Made in Slovakia’ ,from 2018.
Have a nice weekend.
Graeme Roberts, Deputy Editor, just-auto.com
