A little more on the New ford trickeling out

philh wrote:

EPA has mandated the PCM's be "locked", meaning it's no longer able to accept an overlay program.

OEM's extensively test vehicles in ways customers will use them. They test for longevity and meeting govt mandated requirements. It's like a three legged stool, everything is in balance. Increase power, and the leg for product reliability and/or the leg for emissions is suddenly shorter and the stool is no longer in balance.

The ECM on my Ram was "locked" and it took about a year to crack it. The same with the new L5P Dmax, but they recently found a way around that. I worked for one of those OEM's(Cummins) and meeting government mandated emissions requirements trumps all else even longevity. Emissions devices such as EGR's are added to these engines to meet emissions requirements at the expense of engine longevity.

If longevity was the utmost concern, then Cummins or the other makes would not have added the very invariable CP4 pump(or even common rail), but they had to sacrifice reliability to meet emissions. Same goes for the failure prone VG turbos. The only reason they are used over more reliable fixed geometry turbo is for NOx emissions.

This is not just a diesel thing either. Gas engines also have reduced longevity and reliability in order to meet emissions as well. My old Ecoboost was a prime example of that. The stock made for emissions tuning had considerably more knock events due to the programming to keep NOx emissions lower than my tuning that removed this programming, and increased power and efficiency.

The EPA standards are a joke. Have you actually looked at them in comparison to other emissions standards? The US CO and CO2 standard is over ten times less restrictive than the EU standard allows while the US NOx standard is over thirty times more restrictive while the PM is the same. Not only that, but the US dyno test favors gasoline engines which is why gas engines generally receive a higher EPA mileage rating than the real world and most diesels receive a lower EPA mileage rating than they do in the real world.

Most people think that the US emissions standards are in place to protect the environment. They are not because if they were then they would look more like EU standards with more restrictive greenhouse CO and CO2 gas requirements which are harmful everywhere regardless of where they are emitted. Even a tuned gas engine is well within the high US CO and CO2 standards, but will be over NOx standards as they run at higher power levels so they are cut back to meet NOx limits.

US standards are more restrictive on emissions that mostly come from diesels that may cause health issues in large metro areas like NOx and PM. Both of which are essentially harmless in less populated areas where NOx has time to dissipate into the stratosphere and become good for the ozone since it is an ozone gas. It is bad in the lower atmosphere in highly populated places because it stagnates causing health issues(smog). So I am inconvenienced and forced to abide by these laws because some yahoo doesn't want to spread out to a less populated area because it is too convenient for them to live in the city.