Dieselgate: EPA investigates Bosch

The world’s biggest automotive supplier is being investigated by the US Department of Justice over its role in the Volkswagen Dieselgate emissions-cheating scandal.

Prosecutors have launched the investigation to find out whether Robert Bosch GmbH knew about or participated in the software-controlled Volkswagen cheat, which turned off emissions controls in real-world driving conditions.

A Department of Justice spokesman said they had so far found no evidence of Bosch breaking the law, but admitted the investigation was at an early stage.

To bring charges against Bosch, he said, investigators would have to prove it knew Volkswagen was using its technology to cheat the US (and EU) emissions tests.

While Bosch declined to comment on the investigation, it released a statement in the early stages of the Dieselgate scandal, insisting it only made components to the specifications delivered by car-makers.

“How these components are calibrated and integrated into complete vehicle systems is the responsibility of each car maker,” Bosch said at the time.

Bosch’s defence might be made more difficult by an admission to German Sunday newspaper, Bild am Sonntag, that it warned Volkswagen eight years ago that the cheat was illegal.

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.

Bosch still supplied Volkswagen with more than 11 million control modules fitted with the illegal software code.

Another German Sunday newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, said one of Volkswagen’s own engineers also blew the whistle on the cheat code in a 2011 internal communication, but was ignored.

Bosch, the world's biggest automotive supplier, refused to comment, insisting only that its communications with Volkswagen were confidential, as they were with any other car company.

Bosch has insisted throughout that it was not to blame, even though it supplied the complete fuel delivery and metering systems for treating the exhaust gases for the 2.0-litre TDI, plus its common-rail fuel-injection systems. In a statement, Bosch insisted the responsibility for configuring the system “lies with Volkswagen”.

At the heart of all the affected cars is Bosch’s EDC 16 and EDC 17 engine control module, which also regulates the emissions clean-up on turbo-diesel engines from Fiat, Mercedes-Benz and BMW.

Each car company has its own specification and software to manage the engine’s operation, with the control module providing the base.

One car company engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, insisted Bosch had to know the code was active in production models.

“I’ve had many arguments with Bosch, and they certainly own the dataset software and let their customers tune the curves. Before each dataset is released it goes back to Bosch for its own validation.

“Bosch is involved in all the development we ever do. They insist on being present at all our physical tests and they log all their own data, so someone somewhere at Bosch will have known what was going on.

“All software routines have to go through the software verification of Bosch, and they have hundreds of milestones of verification, that’s the structure,” he said.

“The car company is never entitled by Bosch to do something on their own.”

Where Volkswagen used modified software code to turn the full emissions controls on only when it recognised it was being tested in a laboratory, both Mercedes-Benz and BMW insist they don’t use a similar strategy.

The Dieselgate scandal involves 11 million EA 189-series four-cylinder turbo-diesel engines made by Volkswagen and fitted to Volkswagen Group brands, including Volkswagen itself, Audi, Skoda and Seat. The four-cylinder engines range in capacity from 1.2 litres to 2.0 litres and were sold between 2009 and 2015.

The US Environmental Protection Agency has since fingered around 85,000 of the Volkswagen Group’s 3.0-litre V6 turbo-diesels fitted to Volkswagen’s Touareg, various Audis and Porsche’s Cayenne.

Bosch has been at the heart of the car industry for more than 100 years, being the first company to adopt the magneto to cars to spark the air-fuel mixture in 1987, the first to deliver a commercially practical spark plug in 1902 and sold the world’s first diesel fuel-injection system in 1927.

It employs more than 110,000 people in Germany with more than $1US billion in annual sales and has an unusual corporate structure, which is privately held and donates its profits to charity.

The Robert Bosch Foundation charity owns 92 per cent of the shares in the company, but has no voting rights. The Bosch family owns seven per cent of the shares and has eight per cent of the voting rights, while other leading industrialists own just 0.01 per cent of the company and have 93 per cent of the votes.

Its unusual structure sees about 95 per cent of its profits ploughed back in to research and development, while about four per cent is disbursed in charitable payments with the rest going to the Bosch family.

Full run down of Dieselgate stories here on motoring.com.au