On Wednesday, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) asked beleaguered German automaker Volkswagen AG (VW) to draft a vehicle recall plan – for fixing its 3-liter diesel engines – by early January 2016.
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VW says there will be no major mechanical changes to the cars in Australia and instead they will simply get a computer upgrade.
A fix for Volkswagen’s 1.2 litre three-cylinder EA189 engine is still a work in progress, but the carmaker expects to submit a design to the Federal Motor Transport Authority soon.
The recent suspension of Audi engineers put the total implicated person to eight, six of which hold senior designations.
The Audi meeting was last Thursday, according to a letter sent the state board to Audi, Porsche and VW.
The ministry said it had not yet determined whether VW vehicles with the newer “EA288” engine – mainly Euro 6 models – had manipulated emissions, and could announce results after it completed testing the diesel models of 16 manufacturers by April.
Volkswagen Group said that the rest of its brands, including Audi, SEAT, ŠKODA and Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles are also planning corresponding measures for their affected vehicles. Mr. Stadler’s background is in finance and his lack of engineering expertise has always been seen inside Volkswagen as an obstacle to him ever becoming CEO of the Volkswagen group.
Volkswagen has been engulfed in scandal since September, when it admitted more than 11 million vehicles worldwide equipped with smaller 2.0-litre diesel engines had pollution-spoofing software.
The fix will be necessary for 1.2-liter and 1.6-liter diesel engines.
In November, when environmental regulators found problems in the larger VW engines, the Wolfsburg-based company claimed that the software in its larger vehicles was cheat-free.
In U.S. alone, Volkswagen has plans to recall around 75,000 diesel vehicles. The company added that it is trying to determine whether its employees in technical development and other departments deliberately added the emission controlling equipment.
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If so, Voelcker estimates such a fix would cost Volkswagen several thousand dollars per vehicle, possibly even leading the automaker to buy some of its cars back.
