VW HAS ANNOUNCED that it’s sent details of a proposed solution to the diesel engines containing software that allowed the vehicles to cheat on emissions test and show lower NOx emissions than they actually emit. The improvements are expected to take an hour to complete.
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Volkswagen is still several months away from being able to clarify who was responsible for installing emissions-cheating software in millions of diesel vehicles and plunging the company into crisis, the automaker’s leader said Monday. All 8.5 million engines in Europe, including 5.2 million 2.0-litre diesels and 300,000 1.2-litre diesels, will require software updates.
Müller reportedly said that Germany’s Federal Motor Transport Authority has signed off on a software update to fix vehicles carrying the affected 2-liter diesel motors.
The costs and complexity of the fixes, which apply to more than 90 percent of the affected vehicles in Europe, are manageable, he saidin excerpts of the speech obtained by Bloomberg.
“Our assumption that fundamental interferences with the engine are necessary have not come true”, Mueller said.
A significant unanswered question is whether consumers will bring their cars voluntarily to Audi dealers so their vehicles can undergo software revision, which likely will worsen their performance, in terms of power and fuel efficiency.
Audi America has already halted sales of the A6 Quattro, the A7 Quattro as well as the A8, A8L and Q5 models in the U.S., while Porsche has stopped selling the 2015 Cayenne models fitted with 3.0 V6 TDI engines.
Audi executives say the plans are a result of recent discussions with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and says it will install the software as soon as it is approved by the agencies. VW initially denied this. The EPA has suggested that software controlling “temperature conditioning of the exhaust gas cleaning system” (a sentence that only vaguely makes sense even to our auto-obsessed brains) is an emissions control defeat defeat device under USA environmental law. German regulators are reviewing a plan presented November 16 to fix 1.6- liter diesel motors. The goal is to shake up the company’s autocratic structure and re-focus on three topics: digitalisation, sustainability and integrity.
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We need a bit more Silicon Valley, said Mueller.
