U.S. environmental regulators said Monday that Volkswagen also included “defeat devices” to skirt emissions rules on certain larger diesel engines, in addition to the smaller 2.0 liter engines reported earlier.
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The Environmental Protection Agency has accused Volkswagen of violating the Clean Air Act a second time as it named six late-model vehicles, including those from Audi and Porsche, with so-called “defeat device” software created to skirt federal emissions laws.
“We have clear evidence of these additional violations and we thought it was important to put Volkswagen on notice and to inform the public”, Cynthia Giles, assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, told reporters on a conference call. The CEO of Volkswagen of North America testified to Congress on October 8 just weeks after the company apologized for bypassing EPA standards.
“These events are deeply troubling”.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged carmaker Volkswagen on Tuesday to be fully transparent in clearing up a scandal over its rigging of emissions tests. The software enables a vehicle to detect when it’s being tested for emissions so that it can control its pollutant output. Previously, the automaker said 11 million cars worldwide, including about half a million in the United States, were affected. The cost of the scandal could balloon into the tens of billions, analysts say. In real-world driving, the controls are turned off, making the vehicles far more polluting than EPA standards.
VW responded by denying the claims, saying the cars referred to by the EPA “had a software function which had not been adequately described in the application process” but did not “alter emissions characteristics in a forbidden manner”. The EPA said it cited only those vehicles and model years that it had recently tested.
The affected models are the 2014 Touareg, the 2015 Cayenne and the 2016 Audi A6 Quattro, A7 Quattro, A8, A8L and Q5.
The global crisis has already spawned a U.S. Justice Department criminal probe, a cascade of consumer lawsuits, the EPA’s ongoing investigation and various probes in Germany.
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EPA said this latest violation was discovered as part of its expanded testing of all diesel models sold in the U.S.to see if they also were cheating when they had their emissions tested.
