READER'S BLOG: Emissions tests found 'wanting'

WARNING: ACERBIC SOCIAL COMMENTARY

A book written 55 years ago could be a blueprint for the way the automotive industry has collectively circumvented current emissions legislation.

Even the title of the book – 'The Theatre of the Absurd' – is a neat encapsulation of the matter.

Writer Martin Esslin had this to say about the state of the world as it stood at the time:

"Ours is an age of transition," he said. "Old beliefs have been shattered, overlaid by volcanic eruptions of devastating truths and unsettling realities. The certitudes of our tests have been found wanting, they have been discredited as cheap and somewhat childish illusions."

What's interesting about this little intro is that despite being written in 1961, it paints an incredibly accurate picture of something that's going on right now in the automotive industry – something itself quite absurd.

Here's the background. In a few short weeks, what was a relatively contained 'known' – the Volkswagen emissions debacle – turned out to be anything but. Now, the tops have blown off emissions-testing discrepancies all throughout the industry. Major industry players from Japan, Germany, Italy and France have been caught out in what is being called a global regulatory crisis.

The scale of the unravelling allegations is staggering. Mitsubishi in Japan has been caught out deliberately understating fuel consumption and CO2 emission figures for a number of models in their home market. Mercedes-Benz is being investigated on behalf of the US Department of Justice because it is believed their in-house emissions tests might not meet US legal standards.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Fiat is under ongoing investigation by German authorities after it was alleged that some of their cars contain software that turns off the pollution reduction system 22 minutes after the engine starts – meaning they're kept on just long enough for the car to pass the 20-minute-long European emissions test.

And in Germany, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Opel, Porsche and Volkswagen are voluntarily recalling more than 630,000 diesel vehicles because their lab-tested NOx emission ratings were found to be erroneous after some real-world testing was conducted by the German government.

Another 11 manufacturers have been called upon to explain discrepancies, but are not recalling cars because they argue their models meet all the current legislation.

From this unravelling debacle, debate has raged about the balance of legality and morality, with questions being asked about what constitutes cheating, or merely 'designing-for' the system.

But what has become clearer than ever in the past few weeks is the absurdity of the system itself. For years, official fuel economy and emissions testing worldwide has been laboratory-based, to ensure that objective results can be produced in perfectly repeatable conditions for every test on every car. In essence, the lab levels the playing field. None of the variables that could produce inconsistent results in the real world – different traffic, weather, driver and road conditions – can corrupt the subjective data provided by tests done on a rolling-road.

But it's the lack of those very variables that drivers experience every day, which also make the lab tests highly unrealistic. In the real world, cars rarely get close to the figures the manufacturers claim for their models.

So, inevitably, the by-product of this quest for objectivity is that manufacturers have long been able to 'design-for' the testing regimen. Torque curves and throttle mapping are optimised with sweet spots so that the car shows itself off best at the predetermined speeds and engine loads required for the certification process. In the EU, the legislation even allows the manufacturers to bypass certain pollution control systems at low temperatures, which helps to improve the engine's performance.

In September that loophole will be closed. But the damage has already been done: by virtue of regimes like this around the world, cars have for years been stamped with environmental credentials they are never likely to deliver.

So if the system globally has long been accepted as meaningless, why are we surprised? By testing cars only in laboratories, and not in the real-world, the manufacturers have been given licence to play the system completely to their advantage. That's not to say that what they've done is morally acceptable, but it's hardly shocking that some have taken to exploiting a standard of testing that is somewhat blind and naive.

Yet what's fascinating about this whole saga is where the industry now appears to be headed as a result. In Europe, the UK regulatory body NEDC is spending £650,000 to lead the way in implementing an EU-wide Real Driving Emissions test, which will be formally introduced as legislation by September 2017. Early iterations of these tests have revealed that many manufacturers will have to make significant improvements to their vehicles' real-world emissions if they are to meet these incoming standards. Currently, such testing has shown that the average output of harmful NOx gases across a spread of the EU's most popular diesel models is approximately 4.5 times higher than what had previously been determined by official lab results.

Questions remain though. Many manufacturers have demurred at previous efforts by independent firms to accurately quantify vehicle economy and emissions in real-world conditions. Ford and Fiat publicly rejected recent real-world testing in the UK that suggested their cars emitted approximately 12 times the legal EU limits for NOx gases, on the grounds that the tests were not, "completely repeatable or consistent."

There is, undoubtedly, a higher level of subjectivity that is associated with testing emissions in the real world. But it is naive and facile for the industry, and for customers, to continue accepting lab-tested efficiency and emissions results when the events of the past few months have all but confirmed they are truly meaningless, regardless of what the manufacturers think or say about it.

Yes, there are obvious concessions that have to be made in terms of the repeatability and absolute scientific objectivity of the tests, but the advent of real-world testing as the new legislative standard will take us some way towards ensuring that the manufacturers have to deal in a far more 'real' reality when it comes to making their products comply.

And after all, we shouldn't forget that the debate about objectivity and subjectivity has raged far longer than this debate about economy and emissions testing. Maybe it's better, then, to leave it to Martin Esslin to summarise why a little bit of subjectivity is always a great way to find a whole lot of reality.

"Is a painting of a sunflower by van Gogh," he asked, "less real, less objectively true, than a picture of a sunflower in a textbook on botany? Yes. But remember, the van Gogh will have a higher level of truth and reality than any scientific illustration, even if van Gogh's sunflower has the wrong number of petals."

Happily, there's nothing absurd about that at all.

Guest reader: Harrison Boudakin