Why is this app necessary?

The Diesel Scandal of 2015 revealed that many diesel cars of several car manufacturers deployed emission cleaning systems that complied to the official government regulations only under lab conditions. Measurements on the road revealed emissions that were multitudes higher than in the lab; in particular, above the threshold that is written in the regulation.

Non-conforming behaviour is typically detected by first noticing some irregularities during normal usage, and then confirming the suspicion by scientific measurements. For example, too much fuel consumption can be noticed by too frequent visits at the gas station. Emissions leaving the exhaust pipe, however, cannot be observed, hence there is no initial suspicion that would give reason to do scientific measurements.

This app serves two purposes:

  1. It provides you with an affordable tool to „observe“ emissions of your car to potentially express an initial suspicion, and
  2. by donating your data to us, we are able to improve this tool and to do further analysis by combining emissions data of different cars.

We currently focus on nitric oxides (NO and NO2) only.