Dieselgate: US rejects Volkswagen fix
Back to the drawing board for #Dieselgate models in North AmericaThe California Air Review Board (CARB) has rejected Volkswagen’s proposed fixes to its Dieselgate cars.
The air-quality office, which found the “defeat” emissions-cheating device in the first place, said in a statement that the Volkswagen proposals were “incomplete, substantially deficient and falls far short of meeting the legal requirements”.
It also insisted Volkswagen was not moving fast enough to deliver the fix to its half-million affected owners of 2.0-litre turbo-diesel engines in the US.
Alongside the statement, CARB sent a confidential letter to Volkswagen explaining the details of why its proposals to bring into compliance the cheater cars, which emit up to 35 times more NOx than the legal limit, were rejected.
It also said it was continuing its own investigations and would maintain its dialogue with Volkswagen to find a solution to the issue, which was messily unfurled to the public just a week after the Frankfurt motor show in September last year.
In a statement of its own, Volkswagen insisted the rejection did not cover its latest engineering and software proposals, but rather a set of proposals it delivered to CARB in December.
“Since then, Volkswagen has had constructive discussions with CARB, including last week when we discussed a framework,” Volkswagen’s statement said.
Volkswagen Group CEO Matthias Müller is scheduled to meet with US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Gina McCarthy on Wednesday to cover the Dieselgate scandal, which spread to 11 million cars worldwide, across four different Volkswagen brands.
Müller was engulfed in meetings and interviews at the Detroit motor show this week, and it was the first time the company CEO had set foot in the US since the scandal broke.
In a co-ordinated statement of its own, the EPA said: “Volkswagen has not submitted an approvable recall plan to bring the vehicles into compliance and reduce pollution. EPA has conveyed this to the company previously."
Besides working to fix the Dieselgate cars, sold between 2009 and 2013, the Volkswagen Group is also working towards a February 2 deadline to deliver its plan to fix around 80,00 V6 TDI motors, which spread the emissions-cheating contagion to Porsche, as well as Audi and Volkswagen.
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