[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.