European Commission urges all member states to investigate defeat devices

Volkswagen has said 11 million of its diesel cars around the world could be implicated after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency revealed VW had been using software to mask pollutants.

Lax regulation in Europe, where half of cars sold are diesels, may have given VW confidence that its deception would go unnoticed in the United States.

It isn’t yet clear to what extent the scandal affects other brands in the Volkswagen Group, which has 12 brands in all – including Seat, Audi, Skoda and Porsche.

Germany’s motor vehicle administration “will concentrate its investigations not only on the Volkswagen models in question but will also do spot checks of other auto manufacturers”, transport minister Alexander Dobrindt told reporters in Berlin.

French carmakers on Tuesday backed a call for a European probe into the monitoring of vehicle emissions systems in the wake of the scandal rocking Volkswagen.

He said some lawmakers also lamented that Europe lagged on enforcement, leaving USA regulators to take on such cases. But the cruellest thing the industry did was to lobby the European commission and national governments to weaken and delay the adoption of tighter emission tests.

In the United States, automakers conduct their own emissions tests and submit the results to the government. “The job of the engineer overseeing the test is ultimately dependent on the next contract from the carmaker”.

European politicians on Wednesday voted to speed up rules to tighten compliance with pollution limits on cars, adding to pressure for reform after U.S. regulators caught Volkswagen AG rigging the performance of vehicles in tests.

According to Cynthia Giles, assistant administrator at the EPA, “using a “defeat device” in cars to evade clean-air standards is illegal and a threat to public health”.

We don’t yet know how many of those cars are on our roads but – great though the scandal may be – it is only part of a much bigger problem. “There are several thousand vehicles we test”, said Vincenzo Lucà, a spokesman for TÜV SÜD, the Germany-based global certification organization.

“We call on the Commission to update as soon as possible the European test procedures so that they correspond to real driving conditions, as is required by existing EU legislation”.

All of the current noise about rethinking the European Union emissions tests – including the industry saying that it has seeking agreement on a test that is more representative of real-world conditions – is actually old news and has little, if anything, to do with VW cheating in the American NOx test. The data won’t immediately be used to enforce emissions standards but is intended to help policy makers determine how to handle discrepancies between these measurements and lab tests when it comes to approving new vehicles.