Today’s big automotive news was that the US federal allegations claimed that VW have been installing softwarde silently and illegally on around 482,000 diesel vehicles in the United States to ensure that they would not receive ubstandard results on government emissions tests. This is obviously a massive allegation. To find out more details about the government’s allegations you can read them here.
A former AutoblogGreen editor, Sam Abuelsamid, who now works as a senior research analyst at Navigant Research’s Transportation Efficiencies program, spoke to me and informed me that there have been some clues that VW’s diesel emissions strategy had problems a while ago. The vehicles that today’s announcement affected were the ones fitted with the 2-liter, 4-cylinder TDI, he said. They all come with the lean NOx (nitrogen oxides) trap, whilst urea is used by all other current models to treat NOx. “When VW launched those vehicles, I went to the TDI launch program in Santa Monica and asked them if they were going to put the diesel engine into the Tiguan because that would be an ideal application,” he states. “They said no, because it would be too heavy. Turns out, the NOx trap was enough to meet the emissions standards in the smaller cars, but not the Tiguan. That seems to be where the problem is, in the NOx trap. All the other big VW and Audi diesels, they use urea, just like BMW and Mercedes do.”
He went on to say that to perform an enmissions test in California, testers don’t just shove a probe up the exhaust like you would expect them to. They actually do a visual test to ensure thatnothing has been tampered with and then plug a scanner into the OBD-II port to read the codes. Today’s news pretty much claims that the vehicles have been programmed to read out false codes and give testers reading that they are looking for rather than accurate ones. “That’s the background, as far as I know at this point,” he said.
At the AltCar Expo in Santa Monica, just hours after the news came out this morning, Edmumds.com’s John O’Dell said the Fed’s allegations were “stunning.” To think that VW may have played the system, he said, “underscores how important EPA clean air numbers are, that a company would allegedly stoop to this to try and meet them. Obviously, people are paying attention to that sort of thing. If indeed [VW] did what they are accused of doing, it is a black eye on the auto industry.”
Zach Vlasuk from Kelley Blue Book stated that it is “really too early to speculate,” however he did go on to say that if theearly reports of a fine of up to $35,000 per car would actually take place, that it would total up to about $18 billion. Such a massive amount that it could crush an auto company in the US, he said, and so, “I don’t see that happening.” Nonetheless, this, “just goes to show the competitiveness in the auto space when it comes to alt fuels.”
Not only people in Santa Monica have picked up on this story. Just an example, VW’s stock went down by 3.2 percent today. We questioned Wayne Gerdes, who is a big lover of the Volkswagen Group’s TDI engines and also the owner of CleanMPG, on what he felt about the news and he stated that he was disappointed with VW that they let this happen in part as it could invalidate his newest Guinness World Record, which took place in a 2015 VW Golf TDI. He went on to say that, “the end result will be a cleaner VW/Audi TDI program going forward, which is good for everyone.”
Abuelsamid went on to say that the vehicles that have been affected are the best-selling diesel vehicles available to the US, so this news may possibly influence disel populairty here. “Hopefully it won’t,” he said. “It’s a unique situation with these specific vehicles and doesn’t affect other diesel models.” But, “VW is saying these are clean diesels and in reality they’re not.”
When we asked Abuemsamid where we go from here he said there are more questions than we currently have answers for. The main question is whether VW will be able to resolve the problem with a software update or whether urea injectors will be needed to replace the NOx trap, which will cost a ridiculous amount of money. “I don’t know if that’s even practical” said Abuemsamid.
The only thing that VW is saying at the moment is that it is “cooperating fully with the EPA and CARB investigation and has no further comment.” Gerdes’ full statement is given below.
