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| Emissions cheating in trucks is rampant and getting harder to detect (AFP Photo/ Christoph Schmidt) |
Frankfurt am Main (AFP) - German authorities have identified hundreds of trucks "manipulated" to save their operators money by shutting off exhaust treatment systems, saying many more cheating vehicles could be at large on Europe's roads.
Of around
13,000 trucks whose "AdBlue" filter system was checked on German
roads last year, 300 were "defective", a government answer to a
parliamentary question from the Greens party seen Tuesday by AFP showed.
Of 132 such
defects spotted since August last year, 84 could be traced back to deliberate
manipulation rather than a technical fault, the government added -- a
distinction not drawn in statistics collected before then.
Electronic
devices available for around 100 euros ($112) allow users to deactivate the
exhaust treatment system, allowing some trucking firms to make massive savings,
daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) reported after revealing the scheme.
But with
their catalytic converters switched off, the trucks spew far more harmful
pollutants.
"The
fact that we are finding more manipulated systems than faulty ones is an alarm
signal," Greens MP Stephan Kuehn said.
With time,
"the parts needed for the cheating are becoming smaller and smaller and
more sophisticated, and therefore more difficult to find" during spot
checks, the government added.
The SZ
reported that operators can save up to one-third of the costs of running a
truck supposedly meeting the Euro 5 or 6 emissions standard by installing one
of the boxes or modifying software -- an even harder-to-detect option.
Devices or
software changes can enable cheating in a number of ways.
Some fool
the engine control software into thinking the catalytic converter is still
working, preventing a warning to the driver or an automatic reduction in
performance.
Others
produce fake readings for the outside temperature, triggering a system that
deactivates exhaust treatment at below -11 Celsius (12.2 Fahrenheit).
Clusters of
similar rule-breaking have been identified elsewhere in Europe, especially in
Spain.
Without
exhaust treatment, trucks emit far more nitrogen oxides (NOx), which studies
have shown is linked to various respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.
Since
Volkswagen admitted in 2015 to cheating emissions tests on 11 million vehicles
worldwide, alarm has spread in Germany about levels of the gas in city air.
Federal,
state and local governments are battling to prevent drivers of older diesel
vehicles being banned from city centres as courts order a growing number of
exclusion zones.
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