The agency will begin road-testing vehicles instead of relying exclusively on laboratory assessments.
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“The EPA may test or require testing on any vehicle at a designated location, using driving cycles and conditions that may reasonably be expected to be encountered in normal operation and use, for the purposes of investigating a potential defeat device”, the letter reads. Volkswagen said 11 million vehicles globally are fitted with the 2.0-litre diesel engine which has the “defeat device” – of which the 482,000 in the United States will have to be recalled – but also said that its vehicles comply with European emissions standards.
Chris Grundler, head of the EPA’s office of transportation and air quality, indicated the agency would add on-road testing to its regimen. It already has on-road testing ability but it has only been used to check manufacturer’s petrol mileage estimates and diesel trucks, two situations in which they had uncovered emissions cheating in the past. Its stock price tanked, its reputation has been damaged and its CEO resigned on Wednesday. “And then after that, when we were getting the data we were like ‘OK, we’re going to write a lot of journal papers, and we’ll be happy if three people read these journal papers.’ That’s our happiness at that point”. It shut off the controls when the cars were back on the road, allowing more pollutants to escape from the tailpipe.
An American institution, the Center for Alternative Fuels, Engines and Emissions (CAFEE) at West Virginia University, was eventually hired to perform emissions tests on several German cars.
The Deutsche Umwelthilfe group said Friday it had information that nearly all German manufacturers of diesel cars exceed emissions limits and speculated that the cars were declared road-worthy by regulators because of cheat devices. “I am convinced that the Volkswagen Group and its team will overcome this grave crisis”.
The EPA said this could slow down the certification process of cars for sale in the USA, and is putting others on notice. EPA and California regulators confronted VW with those findings in May 2014. VW also faces billions of dollars in fines.
But it seems like that’s not the end of the trouble for Volkswagen.
As the Volkswagen supervisory board met Friday inside the company’s vast complex in Wolfsburg to choose a new leader, members of Greenpeace arrived to protest, along with three black Volkswagen Golfs. Part of the problem is that there is no fix that won’t negatively impact vehicle performance. “We never did and do not now use a defeat device”, Daimler said in a statement.
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Information for this article was contributed by Matthew Daly, Tom Krisher, Lorne Cooks of The Associated Press; by Jerry Hirsch of the Los Angeles Times; and by Jack Ewing and Melissa Eddy of The New York Times.
