Downsizing is no longer the answer, apparently.
Of engines, that is.
You may have noticed.
Even big vehicles come – increasingly – with startlingly small engines. Two-point-oh liter fours, for example, have become the go-to engine in mid-sized cars like the BMW 4, the Cadillac ATS and Mercedes C. These cars used to come standard with sixes in the 3-liter-ish range.
Several new cars (Ford Fiesta, Mini Cooper) come with three cylinder engines of less than 2 liters’ displacement.
All have turbos to increase displacement (on demand) in order to maintain the power/performance levels car buyers want while also delivering the higher mileage and lower emissions the government demands.
Whoops, scratch the latter.
It turns out that small, turbocharged engines are producing more politically incorrect emissions in real-world driving than expected – and allowed. Because they are pressurized (a turbocharger is an exhaust-driven device that compresses the incoming air, resulting in a more energy-dense air-fuel charge and thus, more power when the mix is burned) they tend to run hotter – and hotter-running engines tend to emit higher percentages of compounds called oxides of nitrogen (NOx).
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They pass the government tests – were designed (and tuned) to pass the government tests. But when actually out on the road, driven the way people actually drive them, their NOx output apparently exceeds the allowable threshold.
Higher-than-permitted NOx emissions out on the road (as opposed to hooked up to a test rig) are also what got VW in trouble.
Now it appears everyone is in trouble.
Times two.
Because the only technically (and economically) feasible way to reduce NOx to within what the regulators are demanding in real-word driving is to nix turbos and the high pressure/heat they create… and bring back the displacement that the turbos were intended to replace. But the problem then become carbon dioxide “emissions” (in air quotes for a reason, bear with) which necessarily go up the larger an engine is because a larger engine necessarily burns more gas, all else being equal – and that results in more gasses exiting the tailpipe.
But carbon dioxide is not an “emission” in the way that NOx or carbon monoxide and unburned fuel remnants (volatile organic compounds) are emissions. They are all byproducts of internal combustion – but carbon dioxide, unlike the others, is an inert gas.
Not reactive, like NOx emissions are.
It doesn’t create or even contribute to smog. It doesn’t aggravate respiratory problems.
C02 is, in a word, harmless … unless you buy into the religious doctrine of unnatural (and man-made) “climate change.” Then it is considered an emission subject to regulation, the same as the others. Not here in the United States (yet) but in Europe, which all but assures it will be here as well.
Hillary is champing at the bit – and the election is just three weeks away.
And even if by some miracle she is bound and gagged and rendered inert, we will still feel the effects – because car companies are global and have to design cars for more than just the U.S. market, which is no longer the world’s largest market for cars.
Thus, what occurs in Europe concerns us very much, like it or not.
Hillary or not.
