"rbowman" wrote in message
...
On 07/20/2018 06:40 AM, NY wrote:
I like my 08 Peugeot. It still goes well, and hopefully having had its
mid-life crisis (big bills for cambelt and diesel particulate
filter/cat) will continue to run for a long time yet. In fact it may
only be replaced if/when its emissions become too great for some cities'
anti-pollution rules that they may introduce. Certainly I have
absolutely *no* incentive to replace it with petrol (puny low-end engine
torque) or electric (tiny range before a lengthy recharge). (*)

That was the sad end of my brother's Toyota Tercel. It ran fine but could
no longer pass the emissions test.

So far, the MOT (annual safety and emissions test in the UK) only looks at
carbon monoxide (bugger-all in diesel exhaust) and particulates (hopefully
not too many if the car's new enough to have a DPF). If they ever start
looking more stringently at NOx, diesels will be doomed (*). The emissions
rules were tightened up a month ago, ironically the day before the earliest
date I could have my car tested, and I was apprehensive about whether it
would pass, after all the doom-and-gloom scare stories in the press.
Thankfully it passed those tests comfortably, and only had an "advisory"
(might be an idea to get it fixed sooner rather than later) about exhaust
pipe mounting. The scary thing, and the reason I took my car to a main
dealer for its MOT test this time rather than a small non-specialist garage,
was the announcement that there would be more reasons for a test centre to
ban a car from being driven away to be fixed elsewhere, with the implication
that even for things that are not safety-critical like no brakes (!) the
only way to get it to a garage to be fixed is to have it towed - which may
not be covered by normal breakdown coverage like RAC and AA. I thought "if
it's going to fail, at least it's in the best place for it to be fixed on
the spot".

He could have given it to me. This state considers high emissions an
efficient way of mosquito control.

LOL


(*) The reason that oxides of nitrogen are more of a problem with diesel is
that the actual burning of diesel fuel takes place at a higher temperature
than for petrol, even though the engine as a whole runs cooler because it
burns less fuel. And it's the higher combustion temperature which causes
more oxidation of the nitrogen that's in the atmosphere. I wonder how you
filter out nitrogen from the air intake? :-) I bet it can't be catalytically
converted back to N2 and O2 :-( I wonder whether extreme chilling (to near
absolute zero!) would cause nitrogen to liquify and drip away while oxygen
remains a gas? It would have the advantage that the very cold oxygen would
be much denser so you'd get a much greater mass of it on each intake stroke
so you could burn correspondingly more fuel, which is what a turbo does,
though using pressure rather than temperature. An extreme intercooler ;-)
(only joking - I sound like Daedalus in the famous "impossible engineering"
column of that name which used to run in New Scientist some decades a go)