The California Air Resources Board (CARB) on Tuesday rejected a proposal by Volkswagen Group to fix the defeat device on the company’s 2.0-liter turbo-diesel vehicles.
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Regulators in California who have been empowered to conduct auto pollution emission tests have rejected a proposal from Volkswagen to fix vehicles that were involved in the company’s efforts to circumvent federal air quality standards.
Though the EPA hasn’t formally issued its own denial of Volkswagen’s proposed fix plan, the fact that agency officials have said that they concur with CARB’s decision doesn’t bode well for the automaker. “The result is thousands of tons of nitrogen oxide that have harmed the health of Californians”.
“CARB received VW’s December 15, 2015, letter requesting substantial additional time to submit complete recall plans”.
An estimated 60,000 of the vehicles were sold in California.
“We made a priority decision to focus on heavy-duty diesel trucks at the time, and that’s why we didn’t catch it”, he said. The EPA said it agreed with California’s assessment.
“We are really anxious to find a way for that company to get into compliance, and we’re not there yet”, McCarthy said.
During his trip, Mueller said he believed a new catalytic converter system could be fitted to most affected US vehicles that would satisfy regulators.
CEO Matthias Mueller, on his first USA visit since the emissions-cheating scandal erupted in September, is meeting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Washington, D.C.in an attempt to begin drawing a line under the crisis. This rejection only applies to 2.0-litre diesels, not the 3.0-litre ones.
He blamed his answers on the stress of the day and went on to say Volkswagen will take responsibility for its actions. It was previously reported that VW AG executives were considering the measure for approximately 50,000 of the affected vehicles in the US for which a recall process and hardware update would be more complicated and more expensive than simply buying the cars back from owners. This rejection won’t necessarily throw a wrench in the conversations between the automaker and the EPA or CARB, but it is yet another setback in what is already a protracted debacle.
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“Volkswagen is committed to working cooperatively with CARB and other regulators, and we plan to continue our discussions tomorrow when we meet with the EPA”, company spokesman Darryll Harrison said. “And we had some targets for our technical engineers, and they solved this problem and reached targets with some software solutions which haven’t been compatible to the American law”.
