About 16,000 of the vehicles with polluting 3.0-liter engines are in California. The letter also said the automaker wasn’t fixing the cars fast enough; data for the fix wouldn’t be complete until December.
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The board explains that the lack of full disclosure from the company is making it hard for them to determine if the proposed plans would actually work.
Late Wednesday evening, the California Air Resources Board rejected Volkswagen Group’s plan to fix 3.0L diesel Volkswagens, Audis, and Porsches that were discovered a year ago to be illegally circumventing the cars’ emissions control systems.
The California regulator will continue talks with Volkswagen and the Environmental Protection Agency to reach a solution that “fully mitigates the excess emissions”. An analyst at Kelley Blue Book said that a buyback is a definite possibility if there is no solution that makes the vehicles street legal. VW’s lawyer Robert Giuffra said last month that Volkswagen was working on a fix for the impacted TDI engines, and he believed the process would be rolled-out easily.
A spokesman for Audi, which designed and assembled the V6 diesel engines, called CARB’s announcement a “procedural step under California state law” that affects recall plans for all 85,000 larger diesel vehicles with illicit software that are on us roads. The settlement included a $10 billion buy-back for up to 475,000 impacted vehicles.
A spokeswoman for Volkswagen said the rejection had been anticipated by the company.
CARB has been in talks with the German company over the 3.0-liter engines since at least February 2, when the manufacturer filed its first “single, incomplete recall plan”, according to the agency’s letters. In fact, they have not lost hope after the board has canceled the proposal.
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Roughly 80,000 cars have VW’s V-6 diesel and have been affected by the automaker’s diesel scandal. In the negotiations for the 2.0-liter diesel settlement, an early VW proposal was rejected as well. Penalties are loom from criminal probes in the US, Germany and South Korea.
