D3 sooty exhaust. OK or not?
 

Hi all, I've got a 2010 C30 with a D3 engine, I do 370 miles a week on an hour long commute which is 70:30 split county A roads to dual carriageway, so you'd think ideal for normal dpf regen.
My issue is my tail pipes are getting covered in black soot in a week. Surely soot shouldn't even be coming out, let alone in that volume.
No warning lights, running on std Shell diesel.
Any thoughts, should I be worried?

Ta

Karl

Some engines seem to be more prone to sooty tailpipes than others. Along with my XC90 I have an Audi and neither of them have any soot on the tailpipes, my previous Subaru was always covered in soot. I don't know if it was a fault with the Subaru but it annoyed me every time I looked at it

Its the possibility of an MOT fail that bothers me, and an expensive one at that.

My MOT station has a new piece of equipment for the smoke test. I took a 13 year old diesel last week for its annual MOT and he put it on the new machine so it was interesting to see just what was going on

According to the MOT tester the limit for my 13 year old non DPF turbo diesel vehicle is 1.5m-1 (but looking at the DVLA website (see second image below) it seems that I should be allowed 3.0m-1).

However the actual reading came as a surprise and upon further research it seems my old diesel would pass the 2014 smoke test of 0.7m-1 as it came in at 0.38m-1 almost half the maximum allowed limit for newer diesel engines

The annoying thing for me is even though I have a clean vehicle, it is going to be lumped into the category of being banned from city centres in a few years time, yet a 2014 vehicle spewing out 0.7m-1 will be allowed in...

This was my test results
https://www.volvoforums.org.uk/attac...1&d=1529244293

This is from the DVLA website giving the maximum readings according to vehicle age
https://www.volvoforums.org.uk/attac...1&d=1529244293