Just like Volkswagen’s scandal, diesel cars perform to standards in lab testing, but not on the road. Real-word driving produces up to 16 times more emissions according to MIT study.
In September 2015, the German automaker Volkswagen was found to have illegally cheated federal emissions tests in the United States, by intentionally programming emissions control devices to turn on only during laboratory testing. The devices enabled more than 11 million passenger vehicles to meet U.S. emissions standards in the laboratory despite producing emissions up to 40 times higher than the legal limit in real-world driving conditions.
Now a new MIT study reports that Volkswagen is not the only auto manufacturer to make diesel cars that produce vastly more emissions on the road than in laboratory tests. The study, published this month in Atmospheric Environment, finds that in Europe, 10 major auto manufacturers produced diesel cars, sold between 2000 and 2015, that generate up to 16 times more emissions on the road than in regulatory tests — a level that exceeds European limits but does not violate any EU laws.
What’s more, the researchers predict these excess emissions will have a significant health impact, causing approximately 2,700 premature deaths per year across Europe. These health effects, they found, are “transboundary,” meaning that diesel emissions produced in one country can adversely affect populations in other countries, thousands of kilometers away.
“You might imagine that where the excess emissions occur is where people might die early,” says study author Steven Barrett, the Raymond L. Bisplinghoff Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. “But instead we find that 70 percent of the total [health] impacts are transboundary. It suggests coordination is needed not at the country, but at the continental scale, to try to solve this problem of excess emissions.”
The 10 manufacturers’ excess emissions may not be a result of unlawful violations, as was the case with Volkswagen. Instead, the team writes that “permissive testing procedures at the EU level and defective emissions control strategies” may be to blame.
The researchers report a silver lining: If all 10 auto manufacturers were to improve their emissions control technologies to perform at the same level as the best manufacturer in the group, this would prevent up to 1,900 premature deaths per year.
“That’s pretty significant in terms of the number of premature mortalities that would be avoided,” Barrett says.
Barrett’s co-authors at MIT are Guillaume Chossière, Robert Malina (now at Hasselt University), Florian Allroggen, Sebastian Eastham, and Raymond Speth.
Tuning the knobs
The study focuses on emissions of nitrogen oxides, or NOx, a type of gas that is produced in diesel exhaust. When the gas gets oxidized and reacts with ammonia in the atmosphere, it forms fine particles and can travel for long distances before settling. When these particles are inhaled, they can lodge deep in the lungs, causing respiratory disease, asthma, and other pulmonary and cardiac conditions. Additionally NOx emissions cause the formation of ozone, a pollutant long associated with adverse health outcomes.
“There are many times the number of diesel cars in Europe compared to the U.S., partly because the EU started pushing diesel for environmental reasons, as it produces less carbon dioxide emissions compared with [gasoline],” Barrett says. “It’s a case where diesel has probably been beneficial in terms of climate impacts, but it’s come at the cost of human health.”
Recently, the EU started tightening its standards for diesel exhaust to reduce NOx emissions and their associated health effects. However, independent investigations have found that most diesel cars on the road do not meet the new emissions standards in real driving conditions.
“Initially manufacturers were able to genuinely meet regulations, but more recently it seems they’ve almost tweaked knobs to meet the regulations on paper, even if in reality that’s not reproduced on the road,” Barrett says. “And that’s not been illegal in Europe.”
Life exposure
In this study, Barrett and his colleagues quantified the health impacts in Europe of excess NOx emissions — emissions that were not accounted for in standard vehicle testing but are produced in actual driving conditions. They also estimated specific manufacturers’ contributions to the total health impacts related to the excess emissions.
The researchers considered 10 major auto manufacturers of diesel cars sold in Europe, for which lab and on-road emissions data were available: Volkswagen, Renault, Peugeot-Citroën, Fiat, Ford, General Motors, BMW, Daimler, Toyota, and Hyundai. Together, these groups represent more than 90 percent of the total number of diesel cars sold between 2000 and 2015, in 28 member states of the EU, along with Norway and Switzerland.
For each manufacturer, the team calculated the total amount of excess emissions produced by that manufacturer’s diesel car models, based on available emissions data from laboratory testing and independent on-road tests. They found that overall, diesel cars produce up to 16 times more NOx emissions on the road than in lab tests.
They then calculated the excess emissions associated with each manufacturer’s diesel car, by accounting for the number of those cars that were sold between 2000 and 2015, for each country in which those cars were sold.
The team used GEOS-Chem, a chemistry transport model that simulates the circulation of chemicals and particles through the atmosphere, to track where each manufacturer’s excess NOx emissions traveled over time. They then overlaid a population map of the EU onto the atmospheric model to identify specific populations that were most at risk of exposure to the excess NOx emissions.
Finally, the team consulted epidemiological work to relate various populations’ NOx exposure to their estimated health risk. The researchers considered four main populations in these calculations: adults with ischemic heart disease, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and lung cancer.
Overall, they estimated that, each year, 2,700 people within these populations will lose at least a decade of their life due to exposure to excess NOx emissions from passenger cars. They broke this number down by manufacturer and found a wide spread of health impact contributions: Volkswagen, Renault, and General Motors produced diesel cars associated with the most yearly premature deaths, each numbering in the hundreds, while Toyota, Hyundai, and BMW were associated with fewer early deaths.
“The variation across manufacturers was more than a factor of five, which was much bigger than we expected,” Barrett says.
“There’s no safe level”
For each country, the team also compared the excess emissions that it produced itself, versus the number of premature deaths that its population incurred, and found virtually no relationship. That is, some countries, such as Poland and Switzerland, produced very little NOx emissions and yet experienced a disproportionate number of premature deaths from excess emissions originating in other countries.
Barrett says this transboundary effect may be due to the nature of NOx emissions. Unlike particulate matter spewed from smokestacks, such as soot, which mostly settles out in the local area, NOx is first emitted as a gas, which can be carried easily by the wind across thousands of kilometers, before reacting with ammonia to form particulates, a form of the chemical that can ultimately cause respiratory and cardiac problems.
“There’s almost no correlation between who drives [diesel cars] and who incurs the health disbenefits, because the impacts are so diffuse through all of Europe,” Barrett says.
The study ends with a final result: If all 10 manufacturers were to meet the on-road emissions performance of the best manufacturer in the group, this would avoid 1,900 premature deaths due to NOx exposure. But Barrett says ultimately, regulators and manufacturers will have to go even further to prevent emissions-associated mortalities.
“The solution is to eliminate NOx altogether,” Barrett says. “We know there are human health impacts right down to pre-industrial levels, so there’s no safe level. At this point in time, it’s not that we have to go back to [gasoline]. It’s more that electricification is the answer, and ultimately we do have to have zero emissions in cities.”
###
THE PAPER: “Country- and manufacturer-level attribution of air quality impacts due to excess NOx emissions from diesel passenger vehicles in Europe.” https:/
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Ammonium nitrate is a fertiliser and widely used in agriculture. I’d expect particulate ‘pollution’ from that source to be much larger than from the diesel powering the tractors.
Why didn’t the article identify the 10 new car companies?
They are identified in the paper.
ooops. thanks.
Or there is no correlation between who drives and who incurs because one is not directly the cause of the other!!! If there was “no safe level”, wouldn’t the ones exposed to it daily suffer more than the ones that get the “diffused” version when the wind blows from the offending region? How about if your prevailing wind blows in off the ocean. You should see almost no cases of “premature deaths”. Is that the case?
Do these people understand how stupid they sound?
I always suspected that VW were really the ‘Lance Armstrong’ of the industry: Cheats, for sure. But still probably just much better cheats than the rest of them.
Logic behind these emission limits is dose extrapolation models and computer modeling. Sound familiar as in climate science. Here is an example from personal experience. Around 1990 in New Jersey there was a scare about radon levels in homes. The EPA recommended remediation to a max 4 picocuries . My basement tested at 11. In reading the science journals they were using eg Swedish mine workers expose to 50,000 on a daily basis as a baseline for epidemiology. They then extrapolated down to 4 as a safe level. It’s all total nonsense
Delightful. And scientific, to boot.
When you create unattainable standards of course people are going to “cheat”. They are going to buy your wife a boob job, your kids braces, your mom a condo, you viagra. That is why you create unattainable standards, to line your pockets with ill gotten gains. That is why you fuckbags are IN THE GOVERNMENT. F*ck you.
Does the use of the f-word improve your argument ?
…….I didn’t think so.
BTW how many death are “attributed” to viagra?
The rise and rise of the absolutists who can’t even pronounce tradeoff let alone spell it. Excellence in this life and perfection in the next leaving that to God chaps? Yeah yeah I know the Fearless Leader thing and Heaven on Earth again.
We’re told “…the researchers predict these excess emissions will have a significant health impact, causing approximately 2,700 premature deaths per year across Europe.”
Followed by “If all 10 manufacturers were to meet the on-road emissions performance of the best manufacturer in the group, this would avoid 1,900 premature deaths due to NOx exposure.”
Do the unaccounted for 800 premature deaths result from the emissions performance of vehicles manufactured by the “best manufacturers” in the group not achieving the legally mandated standard?
It would be delightful to see the prognostications on how many people would die of heart attacks, dog bites, train-crossing events, and so on and so forth, were all Europeans legally mandated to walk to work.
How does an oxide of nitrogen reacting with ammonia produce a solid (and presumably insoluble) particle? Sounds improbable.
Something the Greens seem to overlook is that hypochondria is a very real problem and causes people to literally become ill. By putting out this fearmongering stuff, how many lives are being ruined by self-induced bouts of asthma?
“How does an oxide of nitrogen reacting with ammonia produce a solid (and presumably insoluble) particle? Sounds improbable.”
It doesn’t. NiOx is an oxidizer and ammonia is a fuel. When they react you get water and N2.
There can be other reasons why vehicle emissions produce premature deaths. Alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency (A1AD or AATD) is a genetic disorder that may result in lung disease or liver disease. Onset of lung problems is typically between 20 and 50 years old.This may result in shortness of breath, wheezing, or an increased risk of lung infections.
People of Northern European and Iberian ancestry are at the highest risk for A1AD. Four percent carry the PiZ allele; between 1 in 625 and 1 in 2000 are homozygous & are PiZZ………….
Another study detected a frequency of 1 in 1550 individuals and a gene frequency of 0.026. The highest prevalence of the PiZZ variant was recorded in the northern and western European countries with mean gene frequency of 0.0140……………I have A1AD, although at 76 & symptom free, I am 16 years above the average death rate for non-smokers. I own & drive diesel cars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_1-antitrypsin_deficiency#Epidemiology
I would interpret their data another way. If there are entire countries that they think have attributable deaths yet little production of the chemical, that means their method is wrong, not that there is no safe level of NOx.
It doesn’t work that way!
Little production and a lot of people ill will be interpreted as: low exposure produces even more effect than high exposure (because endoctrine system or something).
I was always bemused by this example of human hubris-
https://www.cancer.org/latest-news/world-health-organization-outdoor-air-pollution-causes-cancer.html
and wondered how the very clever folk ever separated out smoking related cancers from those due to general air pollution when Blind Freddy can see now that smoking was really just an intense concentrated form of air pollution for the smoker and perhaps some close passive smokers around them. Now apparently they can parse out all sorts of developed world pollution sources and sources from the developing world with their wood and dung smoke, etc. Deja Vu again with the thorny old CAGW and warming due to CO2 having to make massive leaps of faith about culpability of one particular element amongst many possibilities.
“Regulatory Logic” is the new religion of regional bureaucratic governing structures. It pits one traditionally self governing area against another in order to tax them both. Then to make the case, they sacrifice logic and mathematics, to drive emotional triggers that allow the taxing body to act as a parasite on the productive elements in society, and enslave the non productive elements in a net of entitlement. Unskilled labor is sent to third world countries and the bureaucracy is entrenched by the millions of dependent people that require entitlement checks for survival.
Man has used fire for survival for over 100,000 years, and probably several times that amount. Real logic implies that we have many systems in our bodies adapted to adjusting to survival in sheltered areas that contained fire and smoke. If you could not do that, you would not survive long enough to reproduce.
The “NOx kills at small doses” speculation (not enough evidence to grant it higher status) is also unlikely due to the production of it naturally in the environment by lightning. We have been exposed to these compounds for thousands of generations, and the idea that it is suddenly lethal, because your neighbor is producing it instead of a thunderhead, is unlikely.
Occam’s Razor tells us the more likely cause is a thirst for money and power by bureaucratic elements that like to disguise their motives in “public health and safety” wrappers for public consumption.
You’re not wrong and here’s a lady really sticking her neck out questioning the powers that be-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/anti-vaccination-activist-turns-expert-witness-in-family-court-immunisation-brawl/ar-AAAtA7w
I think most on balance would agree that vaccination for some of the terrible diseases makes sense but there are worrying signs that Pertussis vaccination may end up a lot like antibiotics. In Australia the Federal Govt recently passed legislation (usually by regulation?) to penalise parents of unvaccinated children with family Tax Benefit-
https://avn.org.au/2018/05/family-tax-benefits-vaccination-requirements-from-01-july-2018/
and you can see how selling the benefits of vaccination based on science quickly moves to compulsion and do as you’re told or else we’re going to punish you-
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-12/government-pushes-to-ban-unvaccinated-children-from-childcare/8347040
Now whilst you didn’t have to sell the benefits of Polio immunisation to mothers back in the 50s there’s a creeping dead hand of Govt pushing more compulsion with more marginal afflictions like the common flu, firstly with health and aged care workers, teachers, etc and eventually whole populations. Do as we tell you or else!
Except when the polio vaccine CAUSES polio.
“The solution is to eliminate NOx altogether,” Barrett says. “We know there are human health impacts right down to pre-industrial levels, so there’s no safe level.”
This is the creeping influence of the LNT model ( Linear no Threshold) in all areas of environmental science. As with radiation, I suspect there is little empiric evidence to support it: The precautionary principle masquerading as science.
With radiation, there is overwhelming evidence that LNT is false. Even more than the huge evidence showing the hep B vaccine causes MS!
There is simply no other medical observation of statistical nature that is more firmly established, IMNSHO.
I have to wonder how many lives would be saved by making it illegal to run/jog next to a major thoroughfare. When I lived in California – and now witness here in Nevada, joggers seem to seek out major highways to jog next to. Many of them compound their risks by running with traffic with earphones plugged in. The numbers are significantly greater than 1900 people performing this activity. Only a few die from from getting hit by automobiles (that I know of), but i always wondered the wisdom of about exercising next to sources of carbon monoxide.
Especially when at every intersection there are almost always miles and miles of low traffic streets – many with sidewalks. Of course, running on concrete is not as pleasant as running on asphalt.
The pity of it is that if the Green Loony Brigade hadn’t indoctrinated and induced our politicians and other elites into a change to diesel, based on the dogma that diesel was far less pollutant than petrol – given adequate emission filters, and that CO2 was a deadly pollutant, we could have had a programme of phased change over to Liquified Natural Gas fuelled cars, lorries, trains, ships and even aircraft.
LNG motors, which have been around for 50 years or more, very largely only emit water vapour and CO2. Not only would the air have now been cleaner and sweeter, particularly in urban areas, but crop yields would have significantly increased and the effects of droughts would have been far less severe on agriculture in arid and semi-arid areas of the world.
The Greenies don’t wish to know that, and won’t speak of it!
These diesels are still pretty clean. They are 5x cleaner than an F150 for example. Politicians simply want to get rid of diesel. It’s my preferred choice of fuel for the range, torque and freedom. I only have to fill up for 90 seconds once a month.
Somebody needs to dig up the papers written during this time frame concluding regulations were a cost effective method for controlling diesel particulate pollution. Great job bureaucrats. Keep it up.
Why would they risk so much by cheating? Because the regs are impossible to meet.
“There are many times the number of diesel cars in Europe compared to the U.S., partly because the EU started pushing diesel for environmental reasons,”
I don’t think the percentage op diesels on continental European roads increased due to the AGW scare, they were always popular because the fuel was so much cheaper than gas.
The UK started using diesels in greater quantities though, but I would say this coincides with the massive increase in performance of diesel cars in the early 80s.
France promoted diesel because national car makers told the government it was clean (when it was very dirty) and France was always protectionist – and extremely hypocrite about protectionism.
If you want protectionism, just say so. Don’t make up excuses, don’t invent “norms”, don’t favor a technology because you are specialized in that technology.
I have been investigating the Diesel Scandal, as it is called here in Germany, and its background for 3 years now. The global warming issue including all of its catastrophic implications are far more complex to dismantle than the dangers, political bullying and real consequences of NO2 concentrations. Meanwhile I have gathered a lot of insights and data on the NO2 issue and I would like to present some arguments and conclusions to paint an entirely different picture of the real world and this topic in the 4 following posts.
When writing c = 100 it will mean the concentration of NO2 in the ambient air = 100 microgramms/m^3. c = 100 is also the official limit that the EPA established in the USA. The limit in the EU is c = 40 because this is the WHO recommendation. Note, even the EPA is not following the WHO because it is not convinced.
Post #1: The danger of NO2, Toxicology
NO2 is the most dangerous part of the nitrogen oxide emissions coming from burning fossil fuels. In general there are two important sorts of nitrogen oxide emissions which are most related to our health. A: primary NO2, which is directly emitted by an ICE (internal combustion engine) and B: secondary NO2, which is formed through directly emitted NO reacting with O3 in ambient air to NO2. All other nitrogen oxides play no significant role in this matter.
This is, why most of the health studies refer to NO2 as the pollutant, no matter whether directly emitted or created through NO emissions. The most important studies on this subject are listed and referred to in the WHO air quality guidelines and the EPA health risk assessments. Those studies are on one hand side toxicologic studies which are short time exposure tests with human beings and long time exposure tests with animals (mostly rats) and on the other hand side epidemiological studies which are statistical investigations on health effects and death rates in the population.
It is widely accepted from toxicological studies that there is no effect at all on healthy human beings below c = 1,880. The range of effect limits is quite high, with the lowest being the 1,880 and the highest c = 9,400. This indicates that c = 1,880 seems to be quite safe in terms of short time exposure of healthy human beings. The range for asthmatics is even greater. There are 2 studies reporting small effects at c = 200, then there are quite a few studies reporting effects at c = 500 and there are also some reporting no effects up to c = 9,400.
The reported effects are also important to know: They are airways restriction and pulmonary function which basically is breathing frequency and volume. The worst effect was reported as airway inflammation in asthamtics at c = 1,880. To sum it up: Human beings react to NO2 with higher breathing frequency (healthy HB) or airway inflammation (asthmatics) from c = 1,880. Asthmatics also react on NO2 with higher breathing frequency from c = 200. The same limit was sometimes found in asthmatics for a stronger response allergenes after NO2 exposure. That means we are not talking about cancer or any severe/deadly disease but worst case of an airway inflammation at very high doses for asthmatics.
The prejudice of toxic danger comes from early studies in the eighties and nineties when animals were exposed to diesel exhaust fume and developed cancer cells. Interestingly, a 2007 HEI study on rats, directly exposed to Diesel exhaust from a modern commercial truck engine driven by diesel without sulfur and equipped with a soot filter showed that the cancer cells could not come from NO2. The rats showed no sign of a disease at all although they were exposed to concentrations of up to c = 6,000 over 2 years.
At the end of the day, the toxicology assessment tells us that NO2 does not seem to be dangerous at all at very low concentrations below c = 200. And even at ten to fifty times higher concentrations the health effects seem to be still far away from a deadly risk.
Post #2: The danger of No2, epidemiology
If the clinical studies show no danger, how come that NO2 is causing so many deaths in our population? It is the epidemiology, stupid! So how does it work?
In short words: They are comparing two parts of a population (called cohorts) in terms of death rates. One cohort lives in an environment with low NO2 concentration and the other one lives in an environment with a higher concentration. To make the cohorts comparable the death rates are normalized to control for age distribution and if available for socioeconomic effects (i.e. income). That is alsready a problem of available data and uncertainties but not part of the analysis here.
The real problems of those studies start with the measurements and how those reflect the real life of the people in the cohorts. To be statistically evident the study needs several ten Thousands of participants. It is obvious that you cannot measure the NO2 exposure of so many people over decades. So, what is being done, is measure the NO2 concentration at a central station and calculate the concentration in front of everybody’s home door by a computer model (LUR Land use regression). The deviation between the calculated and the real value is the first major problem of uncertainty, but I will come back to it later again. One of the elephants (yes, there are more) in the room is the fact that even if the calculated value were 100% correct, the concentration in front of the door would never be the value, the human being behind the door is really exposed to in his life. In fact, nobody lives in front of his door. He lives in his living room, kitchen, sleeping room, car, gym, on the road, on the shop floor, in his office etc. but not even an hour/day in front of his front door. This is important, because all those concentrations can differ several hundreds of percent from the front door concentration. So, when the epidemiologists claim the exposure to a certain concentration of NO2 is associated with such or such death rate it is simply wrong. They never measured any exposure and still they are claiming to know the consequences. This obvious discrepancy is well known and documented in epidemiology, but they simply ignore it nowadays. Famous US statistician and also AGW skeptic, William Briggs, criticized that as well in terms of particle matter (PM) which is the same scam as NO2.
Now I will come back to the LUR computer models. To reach a high or even any effect in death rates (RR = relative risk) the epidemiologists need a small difference in NO2 concentration between the 2 cohorts. The smaller the difference the higher the effect will be. Thanks to the proliferation of computer modellers the epidemiologist can choose between tens of different LUR models. They simply pick the one that is giving them the result they wish to obtain. No wonder that there are studies out there that find no NO2 effect at all and others who claim that it is the source of so many premature deaths that the limit should be c = 10 which is the background concentration in nature without any traffic or even human settlements. There are also scientists who criticize that. For example, Panullo et al investigated a scottish study that claimed with every 5 micorgramms NO2 more one will find 5% more deaths. Simply with exchanging the LUR model and recalculating Panullo found no significant effect anymore. This was elephant #2.
Elephant #3 is the lack of controlling the results for other, by far more deadly influences like the habits of the people in the cohorts. They mostly do not even know who is smoker, alcoholic, takes drugs etc. Since the effect of those habits is so big, just a small difference between the two cohorts in terms of one of those factors can account for all of the measured effect.
Elephant #4 is the lack of controlling for correlated confounders. NO2 is correlated with other pollutants like CO, PM or EC (elemtary carbon) of which the effect can hardly be separated and in terms of EC and CO is not even measured everywhere.
At the end of the day, the epidemiology isn’t even able to deliver a hint what is going on with No2. It definitely delivers no correlation between exposure and death rate and thus can never associate any health risk between NO2 and anything. The causation link between NO2 and death rate that is being reported in MSM is not even a fairy tale or science fiction, it is complete fiction. What the authors at MIT are trying to do in this study, WUWT is showing, is the trial to escape these short comings. They know that the described methodology of all these studies is crap. So they try to establish a new danger through the formation of very dangerous particles after the NO2 has travelled a long distance. Then it would no longer be dependent on measurements and calculations of concentrations. That is the point where we leave the fiction area and enter the door to future fiction, still no science at all present.
Post #3, No2 and politics
As said above, the US have c = 100 as a limit for NO2, the EU ruled c = 40. There is no limit violation in the US, firstly because there is a higher limit and secondly because there are no diesel cars on the road. In Germany we have about a third of the cars with diesel engines. Still, at the peak of the pollution, about 15-20 years ago, the average concentrations on the hot spots with high traffic load was only about c = 100, maybe slightly more. From there the concentrations fell slowly but steadily to about c = 80 at the worst case locations right now, although the penetration of the market with Diesel cars was constantly increasing.
The limit of c = 40 is valid since 2010. It was decided by the european commission (EC) in 1998 and sent out to the member states for review until 2008 when it was supposed to be implemented. This is exactly how european politics work. There is no elected politician who would be part of this commission. The EC simply can decide whatever it wants and as long as the national goverments do not reject it it will become law. Anyways, after 2008 there was no way back, the new limit was set for 2010 and nobody in Europe knew that this was going to happen or what consequences it would have. From 2015 on the EU was entitled to punish member states with fines in case of violations. Germany violated that limit from 2010 on and nobody cared. Then 2015 came and still, nobody cared. Suddenly, in Sept. 2015 the ICCT in the US reported the cheating of Volkswagen in the US and the Diesel scandal immediately spread all over Germany, not so much over the rest of the EU.
With the Diesel scandal politics, NGOs and media tried to blame the car makers for not fulfilling the limits. The excess emissions of the cars were said to be responsible for exceeding the limits. Now, the only chance to comply with the regulation was forbidding older cars to drive on those critical roads. This is why politicians tried to force the carmakers to pay for the violations and offer millions of after market repair kits to update older cars to lower their emissions and to prevent their customers from the disadvantage of driving restrictions. The carmakers refused and came away with it (so far). Subsequently there was outrageous crying and whining about the very bad carmakers in the media. Green politicians are now requesting to force the manufacturers to pay with a new law. How did all this happenHere is why:
The cars were mostly according to law because the approval process of the cars was done with an outdated test cycle, which was easy to fulfill. Politics and agencies knew that since mid of the nineties because they even founded a dedicated european organization (HBEFA) to track the differences between the official emissions and the real emissions of the cars. They needed this data to be able to calculate the immissions in the future.
Now it is getting interesting. In 2007, one year before the new european Nox regulation was supposed to be implemented, the environmental agency in Germany found out by computer modelling that the new limit will never be fulfilled, neither in 2010, nor in 2015, nor in 2020, even when every car would be according to the latest future Nox regulation. So politics not only knew that the EU regulation was never to be met, they also knew back in 2007 that there was no remedy for it. That means, even if the excess emissions of the cars related to the Diesel scandal created some extra on the immission concentration it was never a show stopper. The limit was simply to hard for this time frame and the number of diesel cars on the road. But you will never read that in any news paper. The media are government agents and they even called the carmakers serial killers. This is how media are working nowadays, political acticvism instead of unbiased investigations.
Also note, that the official limit for workers (plants, restaurants, construction, shopfloors …) in Germany is c = 950 whereas on the roads with the highest traffic in Germany the limit is c = 40. The official reasoning for that is that there are only healthy people working on shopfloors but ambient air is affecting everybody incl. asthmetics and pregnant women. But this is not true because also asthmatics or pregnant women work on shop floors or in restaurants and many of the mentioned studies do not differentiate between asthmatics and healthy people. The real reason for the difference in limits is: different government agencies are responsible for setting those two limits and the activists who tried to fight fossil fuels and car makers simply forgot the working people because the industry in general or restaurants or construction workers are not part of their political program.