Today’s main automotive news was the US federal have accused VW of illegaly and quietly installing software on around 482,000 diesel cars for sale in the United States to make sure they would not give back substandard results on government emissions tests. It goes without saying that this is a very big deal. You can read up on all the details of the government’s allegations here.
Sam Abuelsamid, who used to be a AutoblogFreen editor and is now a senior research analyst at Navigant Research’s Transportation Efficiencies program, informed me that there were a number of suggestions that VW’s diesel emissions strategy had problems a while ago. The cars that have been affected by this news have all been fitted with the 2-liter, 4-cylinder TDI, he said. They all include the lean NOx (nitrogen oxides) trap, whilst all other current modern diesels treat NOx emissions with urea. “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 added. “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.”
Abuelsamid went on to say that to perform an emissions test in California, testers don’t stick a probe into the exhaust like you would expect them to. What they actually do is a visual test to ensure that nothing has been tampered with and then insert a scanner into the OBD-II port to read the codes. Today’s news is telling us that the behicles have been programmed to give out false codes making sure that testers are given the readings that they want to see rather than accurate ones. “That’s the background, as far as I know at this point,” he said.
Edmunds.com’s John O’Dell spoke at the AltCar Expo in Santa Monica only hours after the news first came out this morning and said that the Fed’s allegations were “stunning.” The thought that VW could have played the system he stated, “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 did say that if the earlier reports to impose a fine of up to $35,000 per car did happen, that added up this would amount to a total of around $19 billion. He went on to say that an amount this large would be able to put an auto company in the US out of business, and therefore “I don’t see that happening.”
Even so, this “just goes to show the competitiveness in the auto space when it comes to alt fuels.”
It’s not only in Santa Monica that the story has had people talking. VW’s stock was down by 3.2 percent today, for example. We spoke to Wayne Gerdes, who is the owner of CleanMPG and an enthusiast of the Volkswagen Group’s TDI engines, and asked him what his opinions were on the news and he stated that he was desappointed with VW for letting this happen, partly due to the possibility that it could nullify his most recent Guinness World Record, which took place in a 2015 VW Golf TD. He stated that “the end result will be a cleaner VW/Audi TDI program going forward, which is good for everyone.”
Abuelsamid stated that the vehicles which are affected are the top-selling diesel vehicles available in the US and so therefore this news could influence the popularity of diesel here. “Hopefully it won’t,” he stated. “It’s a unique situation with these specific vehicles and doesn’t affect other diesel models.” Still, “VW is saying these are clean diesels and in reality they’re not.”
When it comes to what happens from here, Abuemsamid stated that people have more questions than we have answers at the moment. The main queston is if the issue can even be fixed with a software update or whether the NOx trap will have to be replaced with urea injectors, which would be incredibly costly. “I don’t know if that’s even practical,” he added.
At this moment in time all that VW are saying is that it is “cooperating fully with the EPA and CARB investigation and has no further comment.” You can read Gerdes’ complete statement below.
