According to the article the EPA cannot force owners to have the repair. Some states require owners to carry out any emissions recall repairs.
For other states, probably nothing would happen as long as the car passes emissions tests. The illegally rigged cars presumably would do so if they have in the past.
The article mentions the possibility of VW offering some incentive that would make it desirable to have the repairs done. It doesn’t say if VW would be required to do so.
…and just when the scandal seemed to be quieting down, VW’s problems just got bigger. They’re cheating with another engine as well, their 3.0 L, 6-cylinder diesel. Previously, they’d only admitted it with their smaller 4-cyclinder engine.
Jesus, I want to smack these guys on the head and ask:
The EPA, California Air Resources Board and Environment Canada discovered the additional cheating while testing Volkswagen’s vehicles. They have found nothing similar while conducting tests of other car companies.
With all the apparent corporation wide lack of integrity that seems endemic to VW, this scandal could really tarnish the legacy of Hitler and the Nazis.
Does anybody know if Opel (owned by General Motors) or Ford’s European division have been caught cheating? We’ve already established that European emissions tests allow for an absurd amount of gaming the system, but has outright cheating been found with any other companies?
Wow, and these larger-engined cars include Porsche and Audi.
Oh, man - this is historic in its stupidity. There will be books written, Harvard Business Review cases developed and argued, and maybe even a law or two affected.
How is VW going to survive this? Germany will figure something out, but they are have damaged their reputation for a long, long time.
If you have to admit wrongdoing, do it big, get everything out, and say you were sorry.
VW fired their CEO within a week - an attempt to do it big. But the guy taking over was the head of Porsche, so they didn’t come close to getting everything out, and likely ruined the new CEO’s chances for coming across as credible.
Harvard Business School case on poor crisis management…
Somehow they must have minimized the number of people who were in on it. Maybe one or two engineers added a patch to the code after it went through all of the code review and testing. Maybe there was some kind of test mode in the code that everyone, except a select few, assumed was turned off for production.
But a number of engineers, etc. had to know that it was possible at least in theory to turn off the pollution controls via software, right? Wouldn’t someone have questioned that?
Maybe it has something to do with the nature of diesel engines. Maybe it’s necessary, legitimate, and possible to turn off the controls temporarily at some point, like when the engine is started. If so, then it would be designed to allow software control, and then it would just be a matter of patching the code, either by patching the binary or simply replacing it with code that was recompiled with a different or additional class or whatever.
As far as I can tell, on the cars without SCR (the ones using the “lean NOx trap”) the PCM calls for WAY more EGR pull during the test cycle, inhibiting the formation of NOx by the engine and ran a different fuel map to keep the catalysts and DPF hot to also keep particulate formation low. Outside of the test cycle- on the road- EGR use was cut way back and the engine’s NOx output was simply too much for the trap to handle.
With the latest accusation on cars with SCR, it sounds like they used more DEF dosing and a different fuel map during the test cycle, but reduced dosing on the road. Probably so they could advertise a longer fill interval for the DEF.
