Volkswagen is in talks with regulators in the United States about how to make about 500,000 diesel cars it sold there comply with clean air rules.
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In an update on the German automaker’s attempt to get to the bottom of the scandal, Hans Dieter Poetsch said “we are relentlessly searching for those responsible for what happened and you may rest assured we will bring these persons to account”.
Those managers argued that only SCR technology would allow Volkswagen to keep pace with ever stricter limits on emissions of nitrogen oxide, which have been linked to lung ailments.
Volkswagen believes that only a small number of employees were behind the emissions scandal, but its board chairman said Thursday the company is still investigating and suggested the probe does not exclude top managers. “That is the hardest thing to accept”, he said.
Meanwhile, Volkswagen said the external investigations have yet to be completed. “The situation is not dramatic, but as expected it is tense”. That method uses a urea chemical solution, sold commercially as AdBlue, which neutralizes nitrogen-oxide emissions without a penalty in fuel economy or performance.
Cars with the newer chemical technology should have been able to pass emissions tests legally.
In addition, the tank that holds the chemical must be refilled periodically.
Volkswagen was unable to put a figure on the cost of the emissions scandal yesterday as it admitted that a “chain of errors” dating back a decade were to blame. “Swift, straightforward and customer-friendly solutions are in discussion”, Stadler told a gathering of 7,000 workers at Audi’s Ingolstadt headquarters. At other companies, it is standard practice for one team to develop components and another to check them for quality.
VW’s engine-development unit remained the focus of investigations, Poetsch said.
“We have to understand how this came about”, Potsch said.
Pötsch also pledged that Volkswagen will take steps to prevent dishonest engineering from hitting the production line again.
A culture that “tolerated” rule breaking and misconduct by employees was at the heart of Volkswagen’s emissions scandal, according to the German auto maker’s chairman. But the company said it could not disclose any names until the evidence was “watertight”.
The company’s preliminary report comes almost three months after the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States said that Volkswagen had programmed diesel cars to detect when they were undergoing emissions tests, and to crank up pollution controls.
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It (Other OTC: ITGL – news) was later discovered that some of the company’s cars pumped out up to 40 times the permitted limited of nitrogen oxides (NOx). Up to 11 million cars worldwide have software installed that defeats emissions tests, and the costs to Volkswagen of fixing the cars, paying fines to environmental authorities and dealing with legal challenges are estimated in the tens of billions of euros.
