Renault Diesel Scandal?

Unlike VW, they already have a plug in program with cars on the road

 

Eh, Renault's plug-ins are the Fluence, Kangoo, and Zoe with 22 kWh batteries, a new 41 kWh Zoe, and the 6.1 kWh Twizy quadricycle (all BEVs).

For comparison, Volkswagen's got the 18.7 kWh e-up!, the 24.2 kWh e-Golf, soon to be replaced by a 35.8 kWh battery, and the (now being discontinued) 92 kWh Audi R8 e-tron for BEVs. For PHEVs, they've got the 8.8 kWh/1.4T gas Golf GTE/Audi A3 e-tron, 9.9 kWh/1.4T gas Passat GTE, 17.3 kWh/3.0 TDI Audi Q7 e-tron quattro, the 9.4 kWh/3.0SC gas Panamera S e-hybrid (being replaced with a 14.1 kWh/2.9TT gas model), and the 10.8 kWh/3.0SC Cayenne S e-hybrid. Oh, and if we're counting the R8 e-tron, might as well count the 5.5 kWh/0.8 TDI XL1, and the 6.8 kWh/4.6 gas Porsche 918 Spyder.

Of those, the US gets the e-Golf, A3 e-tron, Panamera S e-hybrid, Cayenne S e-hybrid, and 918 Spyder.

 

Renault had them out before VW.
Being part of Nissan.

 

imagine if diesels were eventually banned, not because they couldn't be cleaned up, but because of the bad rep due to cheaters?

 

I think it was a 'scale' problem. Trucks have a fairly limited power and gas flow range. You don't get 60,000 lbs rolling without using the same amount of power needed to cruise on the highway. But that is not the case with the smaller diesels.

To be 'sporty', the smaller diesels had a much wider range of gas flow and power output. The problem being to handle the peak power / gas flow range, it had to have a relatively larger treatment assembly. It can be done, BMW has show that to be the case, but the others ... cheat-diesel.

Bob Wilson

 

And one problem is actually, when the hardware is sized for peak acceleration emissions, you actually have problems with it cooling off below optimum at steady state emissions...

 

This resolves a problem that had been bothering me for years, descending a hill in "B":

• Prius - the engine continues to burn fuel which maintains the exhaust temperature. So the catalytic converter continues to work. I've long suspected the engine is actually generating power counter to the loss of altitude. In effect, trying to run the car in a weak reverse.
• Diesel - descending a hill, the fuel is cutoff only this means the air charge compressed to ignition simply cools on expansion to the original intake value and that chills the downstream converters. It may be possible to inject fuel to heat the engine exhaust but . . . that is a hard problem.

Bob Wilson

 

Modern gasoline cars are aggressive with fuel cut off to meet CAFE targets, and face the same issues for downstream emission controls.