Volkswagen officials told the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) on Thursday that they installed defeat devices in all Volkswagen and Audi vehicles equipped with three liter diesel engines for model years 2009 through 2016, Xinhua quoted the EPA and CARB as saying in a statement.
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Investors seem to be focusing on a report by a German magazine that says, without identifying its sources, that fixing the diesel engines that were identified to have test-cheating software could be done with a cheap piece of hardware in Germany.
Authorities in California and Washington are calling for a recall of Volkswagen diesel cars.
Earlier this month the agencies accused VW of installing the so-called “defeat device” software on about 10,000 cars from the 2014 through 2016 model years, in violation of the Clean Air Act.
Volkswagen is struggling to cope with the biggest crisis of its history over its admission in September that it had fitted more than 11 million vehicles worldwide with devices created to cheat pollution tests.
When those same vehicles were being driven under normal conditions, the controls were turned off and they spewed up to 40 times the legally allowable amount of nitrogen oxide, which contributes to the formation of smog and acid rain.
The maximum fine the EPA could hand out for each vehicle with a defeat device is $37,500, meaning Volkswagen could face a fine of about $18.5 billion with the additional vehicles caught up in the latest round of testing.
In addition, VW was shown earlier this month to have also understated carbon emissions for 800,000 vehicles.
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The disclosure widened the VW scandal, which had previously focused mainly on smaller-engined, mass-market cars, and raised the possibility that engineers at both the Audi and VW brands could have been involved in separate emissions schemes. “Everything that is not necessary will be dropped or postponed”, he said.
