Dieselgate: Bosch says VW knew
A new CEO, dumped execs everywhere so things must be looking up for Volkswagen by now, right? Err, not so muchKey electronics supplier company Robert Bosch warned Volkswagen eight years ago that its cheat code software was illegal, influential German Sunday newspaper Bild am Sonntag reported yesterday.
But even so, Bosch still supplied the “defeat” code EDC 16 engine management system at the heart of the #Dieselgate scandal for 11 million Volkswagen Group cars.
The paper said its sources had uncovered an internal communication between Bosch and Volkswagen, with Bosch insisting that the “defeat” code emissions test-cheating software was for test purposes and that to use it on production road cars would be against the law.
Another German Sunday newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, said on of Volkswagen’s own engineers also blew the whistle on the cheat code in a 2011 internal communication, but was ignored.
Bosch, the biggest automotive supplier in the world, refused to comment, insisting only that its communications with Volkswagen were confidential, as they were with any other car company.
Volkswagen headquarters has also refused to comment.
If the German carmaker had hoped that the installation of a new CEO would give it a honeymoon period in the battle to save its brand credibility, it was sadly mistaken.
Bosch last week admitted that it supplied many of the key components at the heart of the issue, which saw independent testers find three Volkswagens, all fitted with 2.0-litre, EA189-series four-cylinder diesel engines, register NOx emissions levels many times the EPA-mandated US limit.
Since then, the crisis has engulfed Volkswagen, with shares crashing nearly 40 per cent in two days, with sales of diesel cars shuddering to a halt globally and with the admitted number of affected cars ballooning from almost 500,000 in the first day of the crisis to more than 11 million.
It has leapt beyond Volkswagen’s control, with a Congressional hearing scheduled to examine the fraud, plus virtually every US state launching its own investigation. The crisis has grown in the information vacuum out of Wolfsburg, which can’t confirm the exact numbers or models of each of the involved brands (Volkswagen, Audi, Seat and Skoda), or how many were sold in what country.
Meanwhile, Volkswagen’s Italian arm has ordered it dealers to stop selling affected vehicles (as the US operation did in the first day of the crisis) and Switzerland has withdrawn compliance certification on a range of Volkswagen products.
Bosch, though, insisted that it was not to blame, even though it had supplied the complete fuel delivery and metering systems for treating the exhaust gases in question, plus the common-rail fuel injection systems. In a statement, Bosch insisted the responsibility for configuring the system “lies with Volkswagen”.
The cars involved in the crisis were sold between 2009 and 2015, though the roots of the engine development program go back to a 2005 proposal by Volkswagen’s then brand CEO, Wolfgang Bernhard, for a new 2.0-litre, four-cylinder engine.
Conceived to tackle the US market, where Volkswagen has long struggled, the prototype engine from Bernhard and ex-Audi engineer Rudolf Krebs met all emissions laws, but used an AdBlue urea-aftertreatment system, similar to what Volkswagen used on the Touareg.
Yet the €300 cost per car for AdBlue, which could be absorbed in a Touareg, was more significant in smaller cars like the Golf, and German magazines report that Volkswagen’s finance department kyboshed it.
Long before the engine went into production, Bernhard moved to Daimler and Krebs had been shifted, too, and the engine’s development was handed to Volkswagen’s diesel engine group.
Dieselgate related reading:
Müller locked in as Volkswagen CEO
BMW forced to deny emissions rigging
Volkswagen boss Winterkorn to go as crisis spreads
Dieselgate worsens, 11m vehicles could be affected
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