California rejects Volkswagen Group V6 diesel fix
Car giant still awaits closure on 3.0-litre TDI engines used in Porsche Cayenne, Volkswagen Touareg and Audi A8The Volkswagen Group’s latest proposal to fix its emissions-cheating V6 turbo-diesel engines has been rejected by California’s chief air quality regulator.
The California Air Review Board (CARB) said the group’s plan to fix about 16,000 rule-cheating 3.0-litre diesels fitted to Audis, Volkswagens and Porsches in the US didn’t go far enough.
Fresh from its US$15.3 billion settlement with US regulators concerning nearly half a million four-cylinder “cheater” engines, the group had pinned its hopes on getting clearance to start selling the more profitable V6s again. The settlement with the US lawmakers to cover the 2.0-litre engines included more than US$10 billion to buy back the vehicles it couldn’t fix.
But CARB has given Volkswagen a firm “no” to its plans to apply a software fix to the Audi-developed and engineered V6 engines that were sold between 2009 and 2016.
"Volkswagen’s and Audi's submissions are incomplete, substantially deficient, and fall far short of meeting the legal requirements to return these vehicles to the claimed certified configuration," CARB said.
It insisted it would need until December to understand whether the Volkswagen Group proposals would work for all the covered models and insisted Volkswagen should reserve a pile of cash to buy back the cars it couldn’t fix. The engines concerned are mostly spread between Porsche Cayenne, Volkswagen Touareg and Audi A8.
The statement from CARB came as a shock to Volkswagen. The company’s US lawyer, Robert Giuffra, suggested the fix for the 85,000 cars involved would not be complicated.
CARB’s stance has received the backing of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The engines, all of which are built by Audi, included what the EPA defined as a “defeat” device, which switched off the peak emissions control systems when it detected it was not in a laboratory.
Volkswagen insisted it would continue to work with both CARB and the EPA to find a permanent solution.
An Audi spokesman yesterday insisted the CARB announcement was not definitive, but rather a “procedural step under California State Law”.
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