Okay, here's an interesting article that talks about other instances of EPA test failures other than Volkswagen. This one gives a little bit more detail about other EPA failures of commercial diesel trucks which I had seen mentioned in other articles.
http://jalopnik.com/how-the-epa-won-1-billion-from-diesel-cheaters-long-be-1732109485It has an interesting pull quote. Admittedly, the pull quote is second-hand and from a libertarian journal, but just thinking about the point that it raises is interesting:
In a good example of the regulatory doublespeak common at the EPA, the engine controllers were said to have “defeated” the emissions standards by ensuring that the engines met precisely the EPA standards using EPA’s tests.
Because the EPA’s engine test focused only on simulating urban driving conditions, however, meeting the test standard allowed the engine controllers to focus on mileage rather than on emissions under highway driving conditions. In effect, the EPA sued the engine manufacturers because the engine makers had not designed their engines to meet a test procedure EPA had not created.
That quote, and the rest of the article, and the other articles it links, makes me wonder if this kind of "cheating" has been an industry-wide standard practice for a long time. Where do you draw the line between "making your engine pass the test" and "cheating to pass the test"? It's a hard question. We have our own personal opinions about where that line might lie, but perhaps the auto industry in general thinks of it differently. And maybe us laypersons don't have all the information about how these engine management computers work.
Though widespread cheating doesn't make it right to cheat, and this is still a major environmental issue no matter how you slice it, it does reinforce some of the points I was making in my first post in this thread, about VW getting unnecessarily singled out in the news reports. This is clearly a battle that's been going on between carmakers and the EPA for a long time.
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