Mercedes Bluetec on a Mercedes E250
In my last post My Mercedes E250 is Greener Than a Toyota Prius, I song the praises of my diesel Mercedes Benz and included a whole paragraph on how clean the car’s emissions were. The post however pre-dated the news that Volkswagen had cheated on its Clean Diesel vehicle emissions. So I felt compelled to come to the defense of Diesel Vehicles and offer a solution to this whole mess. Stay tuned for my Volkswagen diesel solution but first my paragraph from my prior post on how clean the emissions on the Mercedes E250 BlueTec are:
The Mercedes Benz E250 comes standard with run flat tires. The spare tire which would normally be in compartment accessible from the trunk has been replaced by a reserve tank containing AdBlue, a water urea solution, which when injected into pre-cleaned exhaust gas causes ammonia (NH3) to be released, converting nitrogen oxides into harmless nitrogen and water in the car’s catalytic converter. Per Mercedes Benz, this Selective Catalytic Reduction (SAR) process creates the most effective method of exhaust gas after treatment currently available. The Mercedes Benz E250 meets exhaust regulations in all 50 States. The AdBlue liquid is only added during regular service and if you run low the car will warn you. I’ve never had the AdBlue warning come on and service is only every 10,000 miles. I can tell you that there is no smoke out the back of my car. There is barely any smell at all. On occasion you can smell what I call a “sweet smell” in the back of vehicle but it isn’t often. I’m not being sarcastic about the “sweet smell”. It’s a pleasant smell and much better than regular exhaust smell from a gasoline engine. I’m not sticking around to take deep breaths but there isn’t any diesel smoke or smut on the car’s bumper. Remember this car passes California emissions without breaking a sweat. Erase from your memory, the old picture of a diesel car going down the road and replace it with a picture of a vehicle that you can’t even see the vapor coming out the exhaust pipe as it moves down the road.
I am upset at Volkswagen for setting back the adoption of diesel in the United States with such a childish deception. I guess the engineers who could not design an engine that met EPA standards were to embarrassed to admit that they had failed and to proud to use a competitors technology. I guess they hoped that their software trick wouldn’t be discovered until they retired or hoped it was caught by one of their supervisors and the deception would have been caught early on before it got out of hand. Ironically, some guy in coal producing West Virginia was asked to assist in testing Volkswagen diesel cars on the roads of West Virginia and he confirmed that the vehicles were in fact designed to deceive EPA pollution testing.
Volkswagen has an opportunity to make things right and setting the record straight that Diesel can be clean and its benefits in terms of miles per gallon combined with clean emissions is a benefit not a detriment to the environment. Diesel done right is in fact Clean as Volkswagen marketers emphasized.
Volkswagen executives simply have to turn to Mercedes Benz and Bosch, two German companies, and ask for their help. Volkswagen, according to a New York Times Article As Volkswagen pushed to be No.1 Ambitions Fueled a Scandal by Danny Hakim, Aaron M. Kessler and Jack Ewing, scrapped an agreement to use the BlueTec technology developed by Mercedes and Bosch in their vehicles in 2007.
Volkswagen’s decision to go it alone and not use Mercedes’ technology has come back to haunt them. Indirectly, Volkswagen has affected the entire diesel car market in the United States. Can Volkswagen survive this scandal? I think it can. It simply has to accept blame and start installing BlueTec technology in its cars. All it takes is installation of a Blue Tec urea tank in the trunk of it’s vehicles paired with a new catalytic converter and some software adjustments (they are good at that for sure).
The German government should assist them financially with loans because if they purchase the component parts off of Mercedes and Bosch they will boost the German economy. General Motors survived a far more egregious lapse in judgment when it failed to stop production of vehicles with faulty ignition switches that turned off the vehicles engine while the vehicle was moving. Nobody is directly loosing their lives in Volkswagen because of increased emissions while waiting for recall repairs. In the General Motors vehicles teenagers and adults lost their lives needlessly while General Motor ignored or moved very slowly to correct the defect. General Motors is still around and going strong.
One of the things that I’d also like to see is the EPA force bus manufacturers to install the BlueTec technology on buses, in particular, school buses. The day the Volkswagen story broke I went outside to get in my car and a brand new school bus went up the slight incline on my street and I got to breath School Bus Diesel fumes. I’m not giving Volkswagen any excuses or condone their devious ways, but there were more deadly pollutants coming out of the new school buses tailpipe than twenty rigged diesel Volkswagens going down my street at the same time. Food for thought. Why are we exposing children, parents, teacher and innocent Mercedes Benz owners like myself to deadly pollutants spewing out the back of school buses when we have the technology that can reduce and/or eliminate those emissions. Maybe the West Virgina EPA tester can start looking into that. Maybe he can come to New Jersey and start with the school buses going up and down my street.
