www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41761864
"DVSA is making further changes to the MOT manual and to the diesel emissions limits for modern vehicles, in May 2018.
"These will make the test more robust and better able to detect where emissions control equipment has been tampered with."
5 live Investigates on 29 October at 11:00 BST or listen to the podcast.
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>> "These will make the test more robust and better able to detect where emissions control
>> equipment has been tampered with."
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As it seems that the equipment has been cunningly programmed to detect when it is being tested, the testers will have to be very clever to conceal their identity.
Leaving the engine idling for ages while they test brakes etc must be a give-away. They need to take the car for some races away from the traffic lights, so it is lulled into ditching the environmental stuff and turning up the juice.
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It is aimed at the cars that have had their DPFs removed. Either replaced with a length of exhaust pipe or the filter knocked out of its casing. Old school modification, big hammer, the electronics think the filter is perfectly clean as there is no pressure differential across the filter.
Last edited by: Old Navy on Sun 29 Oct 17 at 08:17
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An old article but you get the drift. A Google of DPF removal brings up loads of info.
www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/17/diesel-particulate-filter-removal-air-pollution-department-for-transport
Last edited by: Old Navy on Sun 29 Oct 17 at 08:42
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Yes that's what I understood it as relating to.
Many of the car forums have the 'DPF delete' as an option of getting better performance from a diesel along with the EGR valve being blanked off.
Users have always boasted that it was undetectable at the MoT, maybe this will sort them out.
Although the cars with dodgy number plates just swap them at testing time.
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I wonder what happens if a car with a DOF starts a regen while the MOT emissions test is under way...I assume a fail...?
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The original provisions were a classic case of jobsworth bureaucracy. The people involved just got this off their desks and ticked a box. It is sheer incompetence.
The DPF removers haven't found a clever loophole, whoever at VOSA/DVSA wrote the current procedures either knew, or should easily have found out with the simplest of checks, that the changes would be ineffective.
A separate question is whether the entire approach to particulates using DPFs as currently designed is any good. What happens when they regenerate? The fuel used in that process is unmeasured in the (equally useless) fuel consumption and emissions measurements, and presumably there is no regulation of the particulate emission during the regen. We also have dealers and motoring pundits telling people to drive their cars up and down motorways to keep their DPFs clean - very environmentally friendly.
European manufacturers have spent fortunes producing engines to pass tests that do not achieve the objectives of the legislators in terms of achievable economy or emissions, to the point where the solutions are probably worse for real world emissions of some pollutants and CO2 in particular than they would have been without the inadequate tests. Was it ever thus?
The people driving cars that have had their DPFs removed are probably doing little harm on balance - low mileage drivers extending the life of older cars. So now we will have a new, equally inefficient design of sledgehammer to crack a largely irrelevant nut.
That's not an endorsement of DPF removal - I wouldn't do it and don't condone it. But this 'scandal' would never have happened if people had done their jobs properly in the first place, and this manufactured outcry will almost certainly lead to more ineffectual intervention.
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New MoT checks re DPFs ? - Cliff Pope
