2024 Cummins Inc. Vehicle Emission Control Violations Settlement | US EPA

“Today’s landmark settlement is another example of the Biden-Harris administration working to ensure communities across the United States, especially those that have long been overburdened by pollution, are breathing cleaner air.” “Today we’ve reaffirmed that EPA’s enforcement program will hold companies accountable for cheating to evade laws that protect public health.” – EPA Administrator Michael Regan

Source: 2024 Cummins Inc. Vehicle Emission Control Violations Settlement | US EPA

In case it wasn’t clear before, this is being trotted out by the Biden administration as some sort of moral victory against fossil fuels. The real problem here — and I said this about the Volkswagen “dieselgate” — is that squeamish liberals in Congress passed diesel emissions restrictions that are so restrictive that they are almost impossible to meet, and still produce a vehicle that’s worth driving. It doesn’t help that Cummins was part of the process, and nodded along with the effort, just as they’re now doing with the most recent, proposed, further California restrictions. Now they’re paying $2 BILLION dollars because they didn’t have the spine to tell Congress that their standards were absurd. I know people involved in documenting our emissions compliance, and there’s no question that they were NOT INVOLVED in some sort of conspiracy here. Whatever details come to light about this — and there was a lot after the Volkswagen scandal — they may as well just go ahead and make personal on-highway diesel vehicles illegal. The increase in the price over a similar gas-powered vehicle because of all the emissions equipment and engineering required to actually meet the emissions certification requirements will just make them unviable.

Tesla Will Build ‘GigaTexas’ to Crank Out Cybertrucks | WIRED

The site will be the first to crank out the company’s Cybertruck—the company near-dystopian all-electric pickup announced last fall— and Semi, now both set to debut in 2021. (emphasis mine)

Source: Tesla Will Build ‘GigaTexas’ to Crank Out Cybertrucks | WIRED

A certain Diesel engine manufacturer should be worried. Say whatever you want about Musk and Tesla, and hype versus reality, but there’s enough institutional money behind him and his company now to fix any problem and outspend anyone else in the electrified cargo-hauling space.

Abrams Dieselization Project: Doing the Math | Defense Media Network

“And that’s with better performance,” he added. “The modern diesel has greater torque in it than the turbine does. And you’ve got a couple of other things going for you as well. First, we’ve changed the nuclear, biological and chemical protection system, so it doesn’t operate off of the engine. On the turbine it operated off of ‘bleed air,’ so you had performance degradation on the turbine when the NBC system was on – and it’s on quite a bit. So that helps. Then, at idle, this [diesel] vehicle uses less fuel than if you put an under armor auxiliary power unit in there. And it’s quiet – it’s very quiet. The heat that comes out the back of the engine is 300 percent less than what was coming out of the back of the turbine. So there’s a significant reduction in heat signature and you can actually stand behind the tank now – when it’s running – and have a conversation.”

Source: Abrams Dieselization Project: Doing the Math | Defense Media Network (emphasis mine)

I looked up whether Cummins provided the engine for the Abrams tank, and discovered that it uses a gas turbine, not a diesel. I was gob-smacked. My engineering spider senses were tingling. On a checklist comparing a gas turbine against a diesel, in a tank, I can imagine that there are a lot of bullet points that I don’t even have a clue about, so I was willing to give the decision by the Pentagon the benefit of the doubt. However, the very next article on the search results was this one, showing a lot of compelling reasons to switch out the turbine for a diesel, and this made me feel justified in my feelings. Again, though, I am open to the possibility that other, valid constraints may still dictate this solution. Maybe it’s a mass/acceleration, or a moment-of-inertia/maneuverability thing? I don’t know, but the idea of the engineering tradeoff conversation on this topic fascinates me.