The company will have to recall cars belonging to its own brand along with Skoda and Audi brands across the country that are equipped with EA 189 engines. The automaker says all corrective measures have been presented to the appropriate authorities and the automaker hopes to get the recalls running in January 2016.
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For now, Audi’s Goodwill program is focused exclusively on the 2.0-liter Audi A3. It is expected that the physical implementation of the hardware system for the 1.6-litre engine will take less than one hour, and in case of the 2.0-litre engine the software upgrade will be completed in as little as 30 minutes. The recalls come after India joined a number of countries in ordering a probe to find out whether cars sold locally have been cheating on pollution controls.
Elaborating steps planned by the government to ensure that emission norms are not violated, Geete said: “Over the next six months, we will carry out checks on emission levels of all diesel passenger vehicles in India”.
Volkswagen’s emissions-cheating scandal took a serious bite out of the company’s US sales last month.
Talking about sales figures of Volkswagen Group India from 2008 till the end of November 2015, about 1.98 lakh cars from Volkswagen, 88,700 cars from Skoda and 36,500 cars from Audi have been powered with the EA189 engine.
Mark McNabb, chief operating officer for Volkswagen of America, said the company was “working tirelessly on an approved remedy” for affected vehicles.
Of the four engines from the EA 189 diesel engine family, software updates will be performed on the 1.5-litre, 1.6-litre and 2-litre engines.
Early last month, ARAI found substantial discrepancies between on-road and laboratory emission levels on some Volkswagen group diesel cars and issued a notice seeking technical explanation from the German carmaker. The EPA organization has stated that it’ll be expecting more information from Volkswagen tomorrow, alongside with the company’s plan for fixing these issues, which will be analysed for efficiency.
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“The existing installed software does not affect the handling, technical safety or roadworthiness of the cars”, the statement added. All the owners of vehicles with EA 189 engines will be informed by Volkswagen Group India and the problem would be corrected free of cost to the customers, .
