Undated photo showing LA smog in the late ’40s or early ’50s. (Source: pbssocal.org)
One of the significant contributors to what is sometimes referred to as the “Malaise Era” in automotive history was the industry’s need to comply with increasingly strict exhaust emissions standards.
A bit of background may be in order here: California’s first modern recorded “smog event” occurred in Los Angeles during the summer of 1943, reducing visibility to a reported three blocks and causing various health-related issues. By the early 1950s, Caltech chemistry professor Dr. Arie Haagen-Smit found that gasoline-based hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen produced by internal combustion engines were the major constituents of smog (a term combining the words smoke and fog, coined not by Haagen-Smit, as is popularly thought, but by Dr. Henry Antoine Des Veaux in a 1905 scholarly paper presented at a Public Health Congress meeting in London).
Caltech professor Dr. Arie Haagen-Smit in a 1956 photo. (Source: library.caltech.edu)
In 1966 California established the nation’s first tailpipe emissions standards, and one year later the California Air Resources Board (CARB) was established. Two years later, Germany’s Robert Bosch GmbH began to use elements of lambda-sensing technology to measure the oxygen content in lead smelters used in battery production –Stay with me here, and we’ll see how these disparate threads eventually come together.
Back in the U.S., the Federal Clean Air Act of 1970 placed pollution control under the purview of the Federal government, rather than the individual states. Moreover, it also authorized California to set its own separate, stricter vehicle emissions regulations to address that state’s climate, topography, population, and auto-centric lifestyle, all of which combined in the L.A. Basin to generate the nation’s worst air quality.
Two years later, speaking at an environmental conference in Stockholm, Sweden, Volvo’s then-CEO Pehr Gyllenhammar admitted that the automobile was a major contributor to increased air pollution. By the conference’s end, the Swedish automaker set out an environmental declaration that “Volvo is responsible not just for ensuring that its products are modes of transport that work well but also that they work in a broader context – in our environment.”
Volvo engineers found that the oxidizing catalytic converter, which was soon to be launched with the advent of unleaded gasoline, could also be modified to treat hydrocarbons (HC), carbon monoxide (CO), and nitrogen oxides (NOx) much more effectively than previously thought. This realization occurred not a moment too soon, as California introduced stricter auto emissions standards for 1977, mandating HC limits of 0.41 grams/mile, a CO limit of 9.0 grams/mile, and a NOx limit of 1.5 grams/mile.
In the SAE paper “Bosch Fuel Injection and Engine Management,” by Charles O. Pobst, the key supplier working on control systems for the so-called three-way catalyst explained that “…the three way catalytic converter works best when the air-fuel ratio is near stoichiometric, when lambda (the excess air factor) is within a very narrow range around lambda = 1. Fuel injection systems…cannot hold the air-fuel mixture within the required range. The necessary precision…requires a closed-loop control system. The source of this [additional] feedback is a lambda sensor (or oxygen sensor) installed in the exhaust system…The lambda sensor signal provides feedback to the fuel injection ECU, indicating …whether the air-fuel ration needs to be corrected. The system can then adjust its fuel metering so…the exhaust remains as clean as possible.”
A schematic showing the Lambda sensor’s location in the exhaust manifold. (Source: Volvo)
When the system, designed “Lambda Sond” (sond being the Swedish word for probe, or sensor) was introduced on the California-market 1977 model year Volvo 240s beginning in late 1976, Tom Quinn, then CARB chairman, called it “the most significant breakthrough ever made in the control of vehicle exhaust emissions.” Indeed, test results showed the Lambda Sond-equipped cars registered 0.2 g/mile of HC, 3.0 g/mile of CO, and 0.2 g/mile of NOx emissions, handily beating the standard.
Volvo engineer Stephen Wallman, developer of the Lambda Sond oxygen sensor. (Source: Volvo)
My own small contribution to the Lambda Sond story started with a request to design a grille emblem for Volvos equipped with the technology. After some consideration and a number of idea sketches, I settled on a depiction of the Greek letter lambda, presented in Volvo blue with a bright outline, above the words “Lambda Sond”.
Realizing in the mid-seventies that the lambda symbol had taken on some newer connotations that might not have been on the radar of some of my colleagues (not to mention our department’s Swedish chief), I presented my design concept and hesitatingly noted the additional meanings the symbol had acquired, feeling my cheeks turning a slight shade of red in the process.
The big boss, silent at first, also began to turn crimson as he grasped the implications of my explanation. Nevertheless, he waved away any potential concerns, and the design was approved, eventually gracing the grilles of countless Volvos. I have to admit that I felt a distinct sense of accomplishment whenever I happened to notice that small badge in traffic on the road back in the day.
A mid-80s Volvo with my handiwork still attached. (Source: www.bringatrailer.com)
(Featured image: New old stock (NOS) Volvo Lambda Sond emblems)
Stephen! You’re famous! Amazing to “meet” the person whose work has graced the grill of my car for as long as I’ve had it. Here’s a mid-70s Volvo with your handiwork still attached.
Very nice and concise overview of the lambda system on these old K-jet cars too 🙂
Jeff,
Thanks for posting the photo. Back in the day, I asked my west coast Volvo colleagues to send me a few of the emblems for reference. If anybody needs a NOS Lambda Sond badge, I’m your guy…
When we lived next to Long Beach CA in the late 60s, there were a few days when the smog/fog was so dense, the police put road flares in residential intersections. You’d think proximity to the sea would have kept the air cleaner, but it just hemmed the air in against the mountains. I didn’t return to CA until a business trip in ’85, and the air was so different from my memory–and the DC pollinated haze I then lived in.
Long Beach is south facing vs most California beach towns facing west. The Palos Verdes hills block the sea breezes, hence stagnant air near the coast. Long Beach area also was home to several oil refineries and oil fields. While this article is specifically about tailpipe emissions, lots of hydrocarbons leaked from industrial sites, contributing to the problem. That has also been dramatically cleaned up.
Alas, I don’t think your fine artwork reached the antipodes, probably because we continued to ingest the crystalline purity of leaded exhausts until ’86. (“Mmm! Smell the stupidity!”)
I had to look up what was awkward about the symbol – had absolutely no idea of such connotations. Sheltered life, perhaps, but then, I was always the last to understand hidden languages known by everyone else (and, relatedly, the last to get fine plot points in a film, but I digress).
Whenever folk get over-lyrical about the days that once were, I try to remind them (and me) that it is just a the ghost of a young brain’s trick upon an old one: many of us in middle age would not even have reached it in those once-days, such are the advances in health, and such (for some) are the advances in the way we treat people about whom we were once shamefully barbaric.
I had to look that one up too. The only pop culture reference to Lambda that I recall was in a movie – I had to look that one up as well to refresh my memory, and it turns out the fraternity in Revenge of the Nerds was Lambda Lambda Lambda.
As a car-crazy kid in the late 1970s, I remember these grille badges, and I’m pretty sure that’s how I learned that Lambda was a Greek letter.
I love this story – Stephen thanks for posting it!
Tom Doerr chose the lambda, a lower-case Greek letter, as a symbol for the New York chapter of Gay Activists Alliance in 1970, one year after Stonewall. In 1974, the International Gay Rights Congress held in Edinburgh, Scotland adopted it as a symbol for lesbian and gay rights.
It’s shorthand for gay liberation/rights.
Wow, how funny to find that the designer of one of the multiple emblems that I find attractive enough to grace one of my (car-related-stuff) bookshelves is no longer anonymous and in fact a fellow contributor at CC! For some reason I actually have two of them despite never having owned a Volvo that carried it as original equipment.
I should send it to you to have it signed…. the icing on the piece is the wire bracket on the back that allows it to stand up by itself. Nice work.
We visited Xi’an (and other parts of China) about 15 years ago and the pollution was as bad or worse as you describe Long Beach having been. Having lived in L.A. (The Valley) for a number of years in the early 1980s it was bad there then but nothing like Xi’an and L.A. in decades past. You literally could not see more than a block ahead and the burning sensation when breathing was…breathtaking. Never mind the results after blowing one’s nose.
Jim,
Thanks for posting the photo. Those pins made the emblem essentially a single-use piece if one wanted to remove and reuse it for some reason, as the pins were just bent over the grille bars.
I hope you’re not holding your breath waiting for them to become collector’s items. I still have a few of them in a box sent to me by my west coast Volvo colleagues back in 1977…
It’s amazing how much the SoCal air quality has improved since my student days there in the 1970s, despite the massive increase in the number of vehicles on the roads there.
I guess we shall have to wait and see once I have the market completely cornered. Anybody can buy a new one (or beg one from your stash), but mine have gen-u-ine patina! Two down, how many more can there be left out there? 🙂
And yes, SoCal is once again quite breathable. Progress actually works.
Wow, that’s a fantastic thing – and thank you Stephen, for your contribution!
It’s actually amazing in retrospect to recall the awful air pollution in the LA basin decades ago compared with today.
To reference another comparison that Jim Klein noted in Xi’an, China, Beijing has long had pretty awful air pollution as a global city. It seems to have improved in the last few years where you can check the AQI on your iPhone for time and weather – thanks to the advent of stricter pollution standards enacted, and dare I say, electric cars there.
Now, internationally, the major city with the worst air pollution is Delhi. Hopefully things will improve there in the future.
I vividly remember reading about the development of the 3-way cat and first seeing these emblems on the front of Volvos. I was very impressed by the technology, as it was such a critical breakthrough. Everything that came thereafter in terms of reduced emissions from IC engines was just a further refinement. It realy was more important than the cat itself, which was something that had been known for quite a long while, but whose limitations were also all-too obvious.
Congratulations on the design of such an iconic emblem.
Wow, you make the second person I have met who has designed some well-known vehicle badges. My first was a guy named Don Butler, who was a longtime details designer for Chrysler until he retired in the mid 70’s. And who happened to be a cousin of my mother.
I remember the air pollution in the LA basin – and the Inland Empire, which was possibly worse at times. Its amazing going down there now and seeing the air clear. We did a lot of coughing after any kind of exercise in the summer in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.
I didn’t know the Lamda-sensor was an oxygen sensor until reading this article, nor was I aware of the social implications of the Lambda symbol, by the time I might have been aware of that other symbols had taken precedence.
Congratulations on the design of the Lambda-sond logo. For years I thought it might have been a kind of impressive Swedish sound system featured in certain Volvo cars, then kinda later I figured out it must have something to do with the electronic controls. By that time, the symbol had disappeared from Volvos, for no discernible reason.
Spent a month in Palos Verdes Estates in August of 1966 while visiting a friend (who went to Loyola) who’d just moved there from Towson, when his Dad went from Martin Marietta to Aerospace Corp. I recall how bad the air was on forays into LA, awful, much worse than humid Baltimore in the summer. Had an amazing Japanese dinner at the Imperial Gardens in Hollywood, and better yet saw my very first 911 on that trip near Long Beach, in muted orange!
PS had that Lamda Sond badge on 2 of my 240s! Thanks Steven!
Amazing to know that you were the designer of the Lambda Sond emblem! My ’80 242 had it proudly displayed on its grille, with its blue matching the color of the car.
Count me in as another person who had no idea of the other meaning of the lambda symbol, despite being of that era. As I mentioned in of Stephen’s recent posts, I test drove a new 1977 242 with this system. I didn’t buy the car (nor the V8 Monza Spyder nor a Saab 99 EMS that I also drove, that’s when I bought my used Alfetta Berlina) but I do remember excellent drivability which wasn’t a given at the time. And that Lambda Sond technology was a big deal then.
Even as a Certified Volvo Nut™ who has owned and parted countless 240s, I was completely unaware that the system was developed by Volvo. I’d always assumed everything was developed by Bosch because most of the bits had Bosch branding on them. I appreciate you helping me know the truth of it.
I remember that we drove from Tucson to Redlands, CA in the late 1980s, going through Hemet to visit my now-husband’s great aunt. That was my first and worst exposure to southern California smog. The air was hazy and made my eyes burn and my throat feel scratchy, and triggered a dry cough. I wasn’t in clear-air Arizona anymore! This was all familiar to my husband, because his family went every year to visit Redlands-area relatives. He told me of having once seen mountains from the Redlands house; he had never seen them before because of the smog.
The lambda symbol had long been familiar to me in association with gay liberation/rights well before the rainbow flag came into being. I never saw the lambda in those terms, though, in connection with Volvo; I knew it had something to do with their emissions control system.
I spent two years working in the LA area 1982-1984. The smog was still quite bad back then. Stage one smog alerts were common. I return to LA every couple of years since then. I have noted the much cleaner air, a great improvement. It took years of incremental steps to achieve this. It didn’t happen overnight and some people adopted the attitude that if it can’t be fixed quickly, it can’t be fixed at all. Just like the tortoise, slow and steady wins the race. As long as something is being done.
Stephen, I salute you for an iconic design! That badge really did become well recognized, as did the contribution Volvo made to not only cleaner running, but more driveable IC motors.
Wonder how many of those ’emblems” I’ve seen without even observing. (or is it “observed without ever seeing”?)
I vividly remember riding up the PV Penn. on my ’69 Honda CL 350 one mid day morn in 1969. I got stopped at a red light @ 1/2 way up and turned around to look back over the L.A. Basin: all I could see was a roiling “sea” of red-brown with mountains poking thru in places! That was what I was inhaling everyday down in Torrance! YUCK! OTOH on the occasional clear day I could see all the way out to the mountains around Banning thru my east facing apartment windows!! However, those were very rare days at that time.
When I had first returned from Viet Nam in Spring ’68 and took my ’57 Triumph 650 on rides thru the Hollywood hills from Whittier my eyes would feel like they were on fire. I sort of got used to the smog on my liberty runs into L.A. from MCB 29 Palms out on the Mojave and then it wasn’t to bad………….uh-huh. NASTY stuff that smog. 🙁 DFO
Another great FREE SCHOOLING lesson ! .
I remember working in various automotive shops in the San Gabriel Valley in the early 70’s through the mid 0’s, taking a deep breath was _painful_ , I still have a nasty cough .
-Nate
First picture looks familiar. Moving from Catonsville MD to Canoga Park CA, in 1966, brought about many changes. Clean air was one very noticeable feature. We lived at the far end of the Valley where Roscoe Blvd. ends at Valley Circle. Cross Valley Circle and you could walk up into the hills a bit and look towards Burbank. Only you couldn’t see that far as there was a dense brown wall right about where the 405 freeway ran through the valley.
It wasn’t till September that the first Santa Anna blew all the smog away that I saw we were in a valley. The mountains to the east were visible for the first time. The Santa Anna was a double edge sword. Blew the smog away but deposited a layer of dirt on the bottom of your swimming pools which I had to clean at the age of 12. The other issues was fires and also that September the Chatsworth fire burned right up to the houses on the other side of Community Street where we lived. Some guy ran into our house and started packing our car while I was on the roof keeping it wet with a hose. That stranger was a co-worker of my father.
Then school started and there were days when we were not allowed outside for P.E. Trying to take a deep breath could and was very painful with endless coughing. Luckily we moved to San Diego in 1968 and left the smog behind. My high school looked out over Mission Bay and the Pacific Ocean so always a nice sea breeze for P.E.
Stephen, thank you for the interesting article. I can’t imagine any of Detroit’s domestic automobile manufacturers ever making such an admission of environmental responsibility as the CEO of Volvo did. Their legal counsel would probably “fix the breaks” of anyone that even mentioned a desire to be so forthcoming publicly. Such completely different mindsets with Volvo embracing the new CARB and federal regulations while the domestics fought against them in the courts for decades. Granted Volvo is much smaller and more nimble to accommodate such major changes the domestics and some european car makers continue to build separate CARB compliant emissions systems.
Although it’s tangential to the main arc of the piece, I want to make a couple of corrections to the chronology of the emissions standards development. California passed the first legislation aimed at combating smog-producing emissions in April 1959, and the first tailpipe standards were defined (by an arm of the state health department) that December.
To combat the argument that the standards were not technologically achievable, the enactment was tied to the Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Board (whose responsibilities were later absorbed by CARB) of at least two devices capable of meeting the standards within certain cost parameters. The crankcase standards were easier, so they went into effect first; the approval of tailpipe emissions control devices didn’t follow until 1964, so those standards became effective with the 1966 model year.
Some non-U.S. automakers, in particular Stig Jansson of Volvo, successfully appealed for an extension for cars with engines smaller than 2.3 liters (140 cubic inches), arguing that because the initial standards were set as a percentage of exhaust volume (275 ppm hydrocarbons and 1.5 percent by volume of carbon monoxide), they were more difficult to achieve with small-displacement engines. The California MVPCB accepted this, and the compliance date for smaller engines was pushed back to MY1968.
I frequently see the statement in European sources that federal exhaust emissions standards followed the 1970 Clean Air Act (Muskie Act), which is not correct. The first federal laws to regulate auto tail pipe emissions passed in the fall of 1965. The initial regulations, finalized in March 1966, took effect for MY1968. They were modeled on the California rules, but were not the same; they preempted the California requirements from 1968 to 1970.
For MY1970, the federal standards were revised to regulate total emissions, in grams per mile, rather than as a percentage of exhaust volume. The Muskie Act (Clean Air Act amendments) passed late that year then called for much more stringent requirements, and for the regulation of oxides of nitrogen, which were not included in the earlier California or federal rules. The Muskie Act target was 3.4 g/mi CO, 0.41 g/m HC, and 0.40 g/m NOx.
This produced an enormous battle because automakers insisted the standards were infeasible, and so the enactment of those limits was greatly delayed, but they became a model for other nations’ emissions controls. (The first to put the full Muskie Act limits into effect was actually Japan, in MY1978; even California didn’t get there until much later.)
The NOx limits were very difficult. The initial California requirement, for MY1971, was 4.0 g/mi, reduced to 3.0 g/mi for 1972 and 1973, and 2.0 g/mi for 1974 to 1976. These rules were a major driver of interest in the rotary engine, which was bad on HC, but had lower NOx emissions. Closed-loop feedback control turned out to be the most effective answer, and eventually made it possible to return to pre-emissions power levels with lower emissions and better driveability.