VW is scrambling to receive US regulatory approval for fixes to almost 500,000 diesels fitted with illegal emissions software created to manipulate nitrogen oxide emissions measurements on government tests.
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“I find it frustrating that despite public statements professing cooperation and an expressed desire to resolve the various investigations, Volkswagen is in fact resisting cooperation by citing German law”, Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen said in a statement Friday. “The intrusion into the auto will be quite significant”, Diess said.
The company is in the midst of negotiating a massive mandatory recall with USA regulators and potentially faces more than $18 billion in fines for violations of the federal Clean Air Act.
On Monday, the US Justice Department filed a lawsuit against VW for the use of the emissions devices, which involve computer software that can detect when cars are being tested. The findings of that review have not yet been made public. The scandal has affected the VW brand, Audi,NSU 0.01 % Porsche, Seat, Skoda and Commercial Vehicles brands.
Quoting sources inside the company, the newspaper said that VW expected to have to buy back around one fifth of the affected cars in the U.S., which totalled around 580,000. Under the law, automakers are required to disclose any such devices to regulators.
“Our patience with Volkswagen is wearing thin”, New York’s attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, told the newspaper “Volkswagen’s cooperation with the states’ investigation has been spotty – and frankly, more of the kind one expects from a company in denial than one seeking to leave behind a culture of admitted deception”.
Late in December, the California Air Resources Board had announced that it would extend a deadline to consider a possible technical solution presented by the automaker for approval as it received addition data that VW had provided during that month, in a sign of the complexity of a fix for USA models. A statistical and computer analysis by the Associated Press estimated the extra pollution caused somewhere between 16 and 94 deaths over the last seven years, with the annual toll increasing as more of the diesels were on the road.
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BBC reports that Volkswagen is being investigated by regulatory agencies in different parts of the world including United States, the United Kingdom, France, South Korea, Canada, Germany and, now, Australia.
