Yeah, it looks like the 2015 model year lots of manufacturers made the jump.

Looking at the EPA site though, Tier 3 regs don't kick in until model year 2017: https://www.dieselnet.com/stan...
There's probably more to the story that a quick search isn't turning up.

-Rick

Go try buying a 2015+ TDI and see if you can run it without a DPF and DEF.. legally.

Good catch, I hadn't seen that the 2015's now include AdBlue. It's a huge step up from the 2007 Diesels that required monthly fillups. At 10k miles at least I'd only have to worry about it with oil changes. Unfortunate, but not a massive impact.

the next generation TDI Golf lost its IRS rear axle

Unless you have one of the mythical Aussie 4 wheel drive Golf TDIs, there isn't a rear axel on the Golf. More correctly, there are two very short axels that so far as I can tell have not been impacted by the addition of DEF.

It does look like they switched from the multilink independent suspension to a solid rear bar and torsion rods. I'm so-so on that. Performance tuning is out the window, but for a daily driver it should be fine, and maintenance is way cheaper.

Not sure on your fuel pump issue or how that would take out the engine. I could see possibly taking out the injectors if you wind up with particulate crap getting rammed into them at 1500 psi. But how are you losing an engine to a fuel pump "explosion"?

-Rick

At 200 feet, the spread on a horizontal shot is ~100". If this is 9 pellet buck shot with a perfect spread that means you have a bit over 4 feet of air between each of those pellets. The drone is what, 20" wide? Even a perfect shot has better than eve odds of missing at that distance.

Given a vertical shot where gravity is pulling each pellet even further out of the pattern and it would be a miracle to hit anything.

So switch to bird shot. Figure just over 1.5 oz of lead bb shot in a 12 gauge 3" shell, that's ~80 pellets. Significantly more likely to hit, but at 200 feet, the .56 grams of a pellet is moving at roughly 600 fps between air resistance and gravity, which is just over 9 newtons (2 pounds) of kinetic energy hitting the drone.

This is also assuming that the guy is using the largest commonly fielded bird hunting combo. If he's using a 2.5" or 2" shell, the numbers drop even more.

I would be quite surprised if someone pulled off a 200' vertical shot, hit, and did substantial enough damage to take a drone out of the sky. Yeah, commercial drones are wimpy, but not /that/ wimpy.

-Rick

Actually, I don't benefit. Thanks to the EPA, car makers can't engineer diesels to run with significant reliability.

That's pure BS right there.

I've got an '06 VW Golf TDi that has been running on ULSD since '08 with over 160,000 miles on it. I haven't had a single drive train failure on it.

I've replaced the glow plugs (Wisconsin winters are brutal), the timing belt (at ~100k miles), and regular oil changes at 10k miles. And I still pull 44mpg highway.

No vehicles have required DEF since 2008. It was a short term solution to meet EPA bin requirements in 2007/2008 while still running on low sulfur diesel fuel. Ultra low sulfur diesel, ULSD, does not require DEF to meet EPA requirements.

The EPA hasn't cost any jobs. It increases costs insignificantly, but the quantity of jobs is entirely dependent on demand. The few bucks that EPA regs add to the price of a car do not meaningfully impact demand.

-Rick

Hey, I think I saw that in a movie once. It was called "Wanted." Angelina Jolie could curve bullets around obstacles.

That law is similar around the world. It has some interesting implications. I fly hang gliders and, since they're unpowered, we're effectively always "landing."

It actually does make a difference. 200 feet is potentially debatable. 500 feet + is explicitly public airspace.

If the drone was under 500 ft, in the US there is a potential case for criminal trespass. It's not a slam dunk, because under 500 ft, AFAIK you're really dealing in the realm of common law and precedent. If the drone was over 500 ft, the landowner would be guilty of downing an aircraft flying in navigable public airspace. I believe that's taken pretty seriously.

They're not even suggestions. They're rules to be broken so you can feel like a good radical.

Even an Ebola vaccine that was only effective for a short period of time would be wonderful. Ebola isn't a subtle disease, and outbreaks tend to start in fairly isolated villages, perhaps because the reservoir is an animal. When someone in a village starts bleeding out of every orifice, administer the vaccine to everyone in the village. That stops the outbreak in it's tracks.