New VW Golf fuel economy

AdrianC

Whether manufacturers are breaking the law is beside the issue, since we're talking about the requirements of the test. If those requirements aren't being followed, then the problem is the supervision of the tests, not the tests themselves.

Increasing supervision wouldn't be hard. Have a car be physically taken from the line at random into the care of an independent test body, and tested in their own labs. It'd cost more, of course, but unlikely to be sufficiently more to be an issue.

A far bigger problem, though, is the total and utter unfitness for purpose of the tests for hybrids. There is no way on this planet that a 167mph, 400bhp, 2t+ supersaloon genuinely emits less than three-quarters of the CO2 of a 1.0 850kg supermini in any realistic comparison.

Minrich

I had one of these cars as a courtesy car when mine was in for work at VW. My wife has a 1.6 diesel Mini so i was expecting a similar performance from the VW , but it was drastically slower to pick up and had to be revved alot more to get the Golf to go like i had expected it to. I spoke to people at VW about it and they said it was for people totally focussed on mpg who don't rev the engine just press the accelerator with a feather . They said you really have to rev it hard for it to perform like a "normal" car.

What makes me laugh the most is the figures given for performance cars mpg in the media when they are test driven. Never do they give a "while on test" mpg like they used to.

Remember the test on Top Gear with a gallon of fuel in some performance cars being driven hard ? Some only got like 2 miles !

bigjl

WellKnownSid wrote: »

VW have already admitted to cheating these tests by submitting cars with engine oil thinned with diesel and other modifications.

It is widely believed all manufacturers do this to some extent - especially now there has been silence from other manufacturers despite VW's obvious troubles... There but for the grace of God, etc...

Where did you read about VW thinning the engine oil with diesel?

And what other modifications did they make?

bigjl

AdrianC wrote: »

Whether manufacturers are breaking the law is beside the issue, since we're talking about the requirements of the test. If those requirements aren't being followed, then the problem is the supervision of the tests, not the tests themselves.

Increasing supervision wouldn't be hard. Have a car be physically taken from the line at random into the care of an independent test body, and tested in their own labs. It'd cost more, of course, but unlikely to be sufficiently more to be an issue.

A far bigger problem, though, is the total and utter unfitness for purpose of the tests for hybrids. There is no way on this planet that a 167mph, 400bhp, 2t+ supersaloon genuinely emits less than three-quarters of the CO2 of a 1.0 850kg supermini in any realistic comparison.

Well, unless Ze Germans engineered the car partly to perform well in the test. Probably a fairly easy thing for an engineer to do.

The way these engineers have worked round some silly EU requirements it not unlike the way NHS Trusts have spent money on ways to solely meet spurious Government target.

The target itself seems to make the thing it intends to improve worse. In the case of the Anaya's it wild be things like Orcon and A&E waiting times. Chasing both results in worse patient care which is what the spurious target intended to improve. More money was spent chasing a target in ever more inventive ways.

I wonder if that is really the case here.

The targets were such that the engineers lost track of what they should be aiming for. And got over focussed on the targets.

Consider F1, the cars are now no longer as fast as they can be.

It has become an engineering challenge. Seeing how fast you can drive before having to slow down to preserve the brakes, tyres and fuel.

Maybe a great engineering challenge.

But nothing is worse than the fastest driver losing because he pushed his tyres too hard and had to save fuel, a race has become chess!

BeenThroughItAll

bigjl wrote: »

...But nothing is worse than the fastest driver losing because he pushed his tyres too hard and had to save fuel...

I'm guessing Jules Bianchi, plus most of the Syrian population, just to name two, would disagree with that.