[gniv]

> 99% of people in the world live in places where air pollution exceeds the WHO guidelines

Wow. I knew cities are polluted but this is extreme. In 50 years we might look at pollution as we look at smoking now, a terrible self-inflicted wound on civilization that took way too long to acknowledge and fix.

[AtlasBarfed]

This is why BEV adoption should result in a very large drop in cancer and other health problems.

EV drivers have told me after a bit of ownership, they see ICE cars as thoroughly filthy, loud, dirty, inefficient, and almost rude.

Our addiction to being able to drive places with but a mere tap of a gas pedal has blinded us to the devil's bargain of the ICE. I honestly think that a great deal of the instinctive hatred of cyclists is tied to how deeply the power and convenience and freedom of driving has ensconced itself into our subconscious.

We shall see, I guess.

[ryukafalz]

Maybe, but this is about PM2.5 emissions, and EVs aren’t that much better in that regard:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...

Don’t get me wrong, they are much better than ICEs in terms of total emissions, but not for this particular issue.

[ryukafalz]

It’s the suburbs too. Not hard to see why: we’ve reshaped our society around cars, and they’re spewing pollutants into the air everywhere.

EVs won’t necessarily improve this, by the way: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...

> The outcome is critically dependent upon the extent of regenerative braking relative to use of friction brakes on the BEV, but overall there will be only modest changes to the total local emissions of particles from a passenger car built to current emissions standards.

[DoingIsLearning]

Don't forget the fraud of the whole Dieselgate scandal.

We were all getting excess NO2 pumped out of diesel engines. Effectively shortening all our lifespans.

[_yb2s]

I'm not defending the lying here, but ultimately the dieselgate scandal was triggered by too aggressive of regulations that exceeded the possible tech. Most companies decided to just pull diesel cars from the US market, and it turns out that all of the ones that stayed were tricking the tests in one way or another.

The diesels of that era that were having to trick the test, were also orders of magnitude cleaner than previous diesels, and modern diesel tech nowadays does meet those standards that they couldn't meet at the time. Moreover, the diesel trucks and buses are held to a different standard and pollute massively more than the dieselgate vehicles.

Ultimately diesel engines are much more efficient than gasoline engines, and massively reduce CO2 emissions... arguably the biggest health and existential threat humans face today. I think modern diesel/electric hybrids running clean burning renewable diesels probably have less environmental impact than any other type of vehicle on the road today. It's a shame that dieselgate ruined this for us, because it would probably be widespread if not.

For example, the VW XL1 was sold to the public getting 260mpg with ~2013 diesel tech- about twice the 'MPGe' of the most efficient production electric cars, and it can burn carbon neutral renewable diesels. Supposedly these produced 21 g/km of CO2, or about 1/6th of the effective CO2 emissions of EVs in the USA.

[handol]

> Most companies decided to just pull diesel cars from the US market, and it turns out that all of the ones that stayed were tricking the tests in one way or another.

That's just not true. There were three options, stop selling diesels, implement a selective catalytic reduction system, cheat the test. All three were done.

[_yb2s]

> That's just not true. There were three options, stop selling diesels, implement a selective catalytic reduction system, cheat the test. All three were done.

What you are saying isn't accurate. A selective catalytic reduction system wasn't sufficient to pass the test without also cheating. Many of the affected VW cars did have selective catalytic reduction. Post lawsuit required fix these cars now use MASSIVE amounts of urea requiring constant refills, wear out the SCR components frequently on short intervals, and don't have nearly the performance they were designed to have. These companies were unable at the time to figure out how to get vehicles, even with SCR to have the performance and reliability buyers were expecting without also cheating on the tests. After the VW scandal, it was later found that BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar, Fiat Chrysler, Toyota, Nissan, and several other companies were all also cheating. I am not aware of a single diesel passenger vehicle sold in the ~2009-2016 time period in the USA that wasn't later found to be cheating on emissions tests.

[coolspot]

> Production began by mid 2013 and was limited to 250 units.

> The Volkswagen XL1 plug-in diesel-electric hybrid was available only in Europe and its 5.5 kWh lithium-ion battery delivered an all-electric range of 50 km (31 mi)

[argiopetech]

While Dieselgate was certainly a scandal, it was more significant as an example (now known to be one of many) of cheating than as an act of NOx pollution. The NOx standard for an average heavy-duty truck/bus allows (by my math) 3.8x more NOx per hour than VWs were emitting before the scandal and subsequent fixes. There are more heavy-duty trucks and busses (16 million) on the roads today in the USA than there were non-conforming TDI engines sold in the entire world (11 million), and the trucks run many more hours per day.

I'm not trying to diminish the severity of VW lying to the public, but we shouldn't hold Dieselgate up as a unique (or even particularly egregious) act of pollution.

The calculus may be different for Europe, but they still have 6 million trucks and busses on the roads.

[highwaylights]

Diesel is a scandal many orders of magnitude bigger than asbestos and smoking, and we'll look back on it with that reverence.

That in the UK most diesel drivers remove their particulate filters to increase fuel efficiency (meaning that essentially every white van on the road is rolling coal like a Texan), makes it all the worse.

It's not even the lung damage, the brain damage that's been caused (there's ongoing research that may yet associate the spike in autism and neurodegenerative diseases in Europe with diesel exposure since it was incentivised) could be even more prevalent.

Margaret Heffernan did a willful blindness Ted Talk about this just about ten years ago that really rings true on this topic.

https://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_heffernan_the_dangers_of_...

[flakeoil]

> in the UK most diesel drivers remove their particulate filters

Are you sure about that? Sound quite crazy to me.

> to increase fuel efficiency

How much would that save?

> Diesel is a scandal

Yes, what the car manufacturers did is horrible and it is also horrible that governments did not find it out or enforce it. An even bigger scandal is that UK diesel drivers remove their particulate filters to save a few bucks. How insane and selfish do you have to be to do that?

[highwaylights]

There’s plenty of blame to go around, diesel filters aren’t checked for at MOT and (as an example) it’s quite easy to buy a passing result as the garages responsible for servicing your car are the same one carrying out the test (and offer guaranteed pass packages so they would also bear the cost of putting anything right that failed - so they’re strongly incentivised to ignore problems).

That all said, testing wasn’t mandatory for most of Covid and emissions aren’t really tested properly even though they were supposed to be years ago (emissions tests won’t detect removed particulate filters if you don’t accelerate during the test, so the garage that just took a bribe to remove your filter can choose not to do that and wave you on through).

[radu_floricica]

Also cost. It's about EUR200 to (illegally) remove it, and quite a bit more to change it every 100k or so (numbers are not exact, been a while since I researched).

[highwaylights]

This.

It can cost up to £2k to replace the filter if it fails on an expensive model, which happens quite regularly for less reliable models.

[riedel]

This a very generic statement that IMHO does not point us in the right direction: NO2 concentration can be linked to a statistically lower lifespan. But it will affect vulnerable people over proportionally (so it does not decrease all of our lifespans) and it is also an effective statical proxy for other traffic pollution. (Also with rigged diesels concentration has been going down and life expectancy is increasing also for other reasons)

Unlike toxic stuff in food, regulations do not try to limit the exposure of an individual but to take action based and prioritize measures based on the statistical severity to the whole population. I do not really think that Dieselgate (while being deeply unethical many ppl kind of knew that the regulation had holes like a cheese) really made that much of a difference if you look at the situation globally. Access to clean air and water is a privilege and all rich nations and their citizens have a responsibility. It is far to easy to always just point at some rigged exhaust cleaning systems in cars. The problem is far more complex (also electric cars will produce emissions)

[bayouborne]

In the US there are glider kits that let old Diesel engines belch forever on highways legally.

https://www.csmtruck.com/the-pros-and-cons-of-glider-kit-tru...

https://www.fitzgeraldgliderkits.com/what-is-a-glider-kit/

[black_puppydog]

Just came back from a trip to Albania and let me tell you those NOX are still getting pumped in the air there and will be for quite some time given that "sell it to someone somewhere else" is our go-to "solution" for owning a pollutant car:

> Albania is amongst the countries in Europe with the lowest number of new cars on the road, with just 0.6% under two years old

https://exit.al/en/2022/08/26/old-cars-dominate-albanian-roa...

This right there is why in my mind every single afflicted unit should have been recalled, replaced by VW and the others, and resale banned. We're letting others suffer and die for our unwillingness to hold our own elites responsible.

[JumpCrisscross]

It’s difficult to judge this in a vacuum. On one hand, toxic emissions. On the other hand, someone who can drive to the hospital in an emergency.

[leaflets2]

Why would you judge in a vacuum? There's statistics, and traffic fatalities is (one of) the most dangerous thing (for young people). That's cars.

There's 112 and ambulanses if you need to a hospital urgently. Everyone doesn't need a spare "what if my neighbor gets a heart attack" rush to the hospital car at home

[dotcoma]

Once every 10,000 trips, one drives to the hospital in an emergency.

[goodpoint]

> In 50 years we might look at pollution as we look at smoking now, a terrible self-inflicted wound on civilization

I'm convinced in 500 years we'll look as today's civilization as barbarian.

Like drug addicts, we know we are poisoning ourselves and destroying the natural resources we depend on and we cannot stop.

[soulofmischief]

Why wait? I see modern society as barbaric right now.

[hombre_fatal]

They probably mean that it becomes the mainstream/obvious view.

We take most of the society we live in for granted as the way things just are or should be.

[elif]

Like bathrooms next to kitchens in roman plumbing, like lead pipes, like asbestos insulation, or like nonstick pans.

The course of history is full of misteps. Of course, an important distinction is that now we are all individually at varying ideological stages of incredulous reflection about these.

[dotcoma]

Why wait 50 years??