The German automaker has been negotiating with the authorities on details of a plan to deal with 482,000 diesel vehicles sold in the US that used deceptive software to duck emissions requirements for the 2-liter engine.
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The environment ministry said it found the defeat device software working in Volkswagen Tiguan Euro 5 equipped with the EA189 engine. It was also the engine of choice for the Volkswagen Touareg and the Porsche Cayenne since 2013. VW claims that neither performance nor fuel consumption will be affected by the “fix”. Software in the cars ensured that they were on their best behaviour when being tested, but allowed the vehicles to exceed emissions limits at other times.
A Volkswagen Korea spokesman could not be immediately reached for comment.
The technical fixes proposed by Volkswagen appeared to be surprisingly simple, deepening the mystery over why the decision had been made to evade pollution testing with illicit software. The company is still developing a fix for 1.2-liter, 3-cylinder engines and will propose that adjustment later this month.
The ministry is continuing its investigation of Volkswagen’s newer EA288 engines, and said it would announce its results by April next year after testing the diesel models of 16 manufacturers. Specifically, this is the software for the temperature conditioning of the exhaust-gas cleaning system.
Automotive industry expert Ferdinand Dudenhöffer of the vehicle institute at Duisburg University told the ARD German TV station news program that the relatively easy solutions for the 1.6 and 2.0 liter TDI engines should not cost VW more than 500 million euros, far less than had been originally feared.
On November 3, VW subsequently conceded that it had also understated carbon dioxide emissions, including those for gasoline (petrol) engines, for up to 800,000 vehicles.
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The world’s number-two automaker faces regulatory and criminal investigations in several countries, including Germany and the United States, and potentially billions of dollars in fines.
