In September, VW admitted it had installed software that allowed 482,000 diesel cars with 2.0L sold in the United States since 2009 to emit up to 40 times allowable emissions by only activating emissions controls during laboratory testing.
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On November 20, VW and Audi officials told EPA and CARB that all 3.0-liter diesel engines from model years 2009 through 2016 are equipped with auxiliary emissions control devices, including one that is regarded as a “defeat device” to skirt USA emissions rules.
The latest allegation means that more Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche owners could face recalls of their cars to fix the software, and VW could face steeper fines and more intense scrutiny from USA regulators and lawmakers. Addition of the 3-litre engine takes the total of affected vehicles to 85,000 vehicles in the U.S. alone.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says that additional six-cylinder Volkswagen diesel engines have software that cheats on emissions tests.
Volkswagen AG’s emissions scandal is still widening more than two months after its cheating became public, undercutting the carmaker’s argument that only a few rogue engineers knew of the manipulations. The bad news is that Volkswagen Group still needs a solution for the bulk of their millions of emissions-cheating vehicles.
He also said the software is legal in Europe.
The use of the “defeat device” is a violation of the Clean Air Act.
And a statement from the EPA obtained by industry paper Automotive News combined with comments from Audi of America spokesman Jeri Ward, suggests Volkswagen has given the Agency no reason to avoid such investigations.
The company has stopped selling all of the diesel cars and SUVs accused of having the illegal software. Those models included the 2015 and 2016 Volkswagen Touareg, and Audi’s A6, A7, A8 and Q5.
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Those vehicles corresponded to the model years 2014 through 2016. 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.
