[T3] battery woes...

[Keith Park]

I hear the fixes involve considerable reduction in the power that 
the engines can produce, so you get your cars manhood removed.
Is this true?  Id be leery of letting anyone touch a car I love
if the reduction in emissions isnt that much...

Keith


Topnotch Restorations
topnotch at nycap.rr.com
http://www.a383ina68.addr.com/radiorest/main.htm
71 Squareback  "Hothe"
65 Notchback  "El Baja Rojo"
93 RX7  "Redstur"
87 Golf  "Winterat" RIP
01 Sentra SE "Boremobile"

I'm planning to wait as long as I can to sell it back to VW, but if they can

come up with a reasonable fix, I'll seriously consider it. I love the car;
it's 
been great except for this flaw. While it's clear that what VW did was
illegal 
and they should not have done it, the end result is a car that emits more
than 
the legal limit of NOx (but probably not as much more, overall, as the news 
stories state) but a lot less of other pollutants, like CO2 and
particulates.

Personally, I think the EPA made a mistake in 2009 when they declared that 
all cars (diesel and gas) should meet the same fixed limits. This is a
problem 
because each design has its own strengths and weaknesses, but the current 
limits don't allow diesels to take advantage of their strengths. The result
of 
this change in 2009 is that 2008 diesel cars are allowed to emit 92x as much

NOx as 2009 diesel cars. That was a 98.9% reduction on top of what was 
already a low limit compared to diesel cars made a decade or so earlier.

My suggestion would be that there should be (higher) hard limits on each 
pollutant, including CO2, which is not considered now, along with a formula 
that sums up each pollutant, with weighting factors for each, and a total
limit 
for that sum. Something like this:

L = a(CO2) + b(NOx) + c(part) + d(CO) + e(HC) + ...?

Where L is the overall limit and the figures in ( ) are the avg PPM/mile of 
each pollutant over a test course. L would be low enough that you could not 
emit the hard limit of each pollutant. The a b c coefficients are weighting 
constants, different for each pollutant and subject to tweaking by the EPA 
over the years, as experience accumulates.

That would allow different engine designers and different manufacturers to 
explore different clean engine approaches, encouraging research into 
different clean engine designs. Experience with different approaches might 
lead to options that could be combined for even lower emissions in the 
decades ahead.

As experience accumulated over the years, the adjusting factors, a b c, 
could be tweaked and the total sum limit, L, could be slowly brought down. 
That would help us find a path to better future solutions.

-- 
*******************************
Jim Adney, jadney at vwtype3.org
Madison, Wisconsin, USA
*******************************

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