VW Told to Prepare Plan for Recall of 3-Liter Diesel Engines

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has now extended its investigation into the scandal-ridden vehicle manufacturer to include all VW and Audi models fitted with 3.0 litre diesel engines manufactured between 2009 and 2016.

The federal agency issued its statement after Volkswagen and Audi officials said in a meeting Thursday the technology in the newer cars was also in models dating back to 2009. Volkswagen will be forced to recall all the affected cars worldwide.

Whatever solutions VW has proposed, the EPA and CARB will review the provisions and decide if any elements must be revised before the company can move forward with its recall program.

Audi estimated costs of the fix to be in the “mid-double-digit millions”.

While the fix covers most of models affected by the Dieselgate scandal, the company intends to present the “final technical solution” for vehicles equipped with 1.2-liter diesel engines later this month.

Volkswagen acknowledged this fall that it had installed “defeat devices” in roughly 11 million diesel vehicles around the world.

VW submitted an initial proposal to the EPA and California air regulators for potential remedies in its diesel-emissions scandal on Friday, but the details are not being disclosed to the public, the automaker told Edmunds. A software update will fix the largest, 2.0-liter engines, VW said.

The VW supervisory board, says it would cap spending property, plant and equipment at around 12 billion euros next year, down about 8% on its previous plan of around 13 billion euros. It also powers the Porsche Cayenne and Volkswagen’s Touareg off-roader.

The plans appear to be quite different, though: while the 3-liter engines can allegedly be brought into compliance using nothing more than a software update, more complex changes will be required on the 2-liter vehicles, necessitating a more hard, time consuming, and expensive recall. The EPA has suggested that software controlling “temperature conditioning of the exhaust gas cleaning system” (a sentence that only vaguely makes sense even to our auto-obsessed brains) is an emissions control defeat defeat device under US environmental law. “The company has committed to continue cooperating transparently and fully”, Audi said in a prepared statement.