Audi develops fix for 3.0-liter TDI diesel engines

Audi vehicles with the large diesel engine number about 85,000 in the U.S. Once they are repaired, the fix should cost VW some $53 million.

The confession marks the conclusion of a slow, 180-degree pivot by Volkswagen.

The CEO warned clearing up the emissions scandal would still take several months, though VW plans to publish intermediate results of the investigation next month.

The 3.0-litre V6 engine is installed in various models, from various marques, including Audi, Porsche and Volkswagen. Audi said Monday that it would install updated software in about 10,000 vehicles that the EPA said were also programmed to deceive regulators. The affected models include the A6, A7, A8, A8L, Q5 and Q7 models from the 2009 through the 2016 model year, along with the Porsche Cayenne Diesel and the Volkswagen Touareg TDI.

In a piece of good fortune for the automaker, vehicles in which its three-liter diesel engine is installed will need no more than a software update to fix this piece of the Dieselgate scandal. Volkswagen AG put stop sale orders on all the models possibly affected by the V6 TDI software following the company’s admission.

“The strategy of revealing only a little bit at a time is not what regulators want to see, and it’s unsettling for customers”, Holger Schmidt, a Frankfurt-based analyst with Equinet told Bloomberg. “At present, they still don’t seem to have the situation under control”.

Audi fitted the engines with a software that would detect when the vehicle is having an emission test and reduce emission levels during the test. Later they said that 95,000 petrol cars were also hit but that could go up to 8 lakh cars.

CARB has up to 20 business days to review all elements of the plan. That’s in addition to the smaller cars that VW admitted in September were rigged to pass emissions tests. The Environmental Protection Agency found that certain diesel engines made by Volkswagen were fitted with a so-called defeat device.

“We are fully cooperating with the environmental authorities and working on concrete measures that will resolve this situation”, Ward said. Volkswagen is under pressure to shore up its finances as it faces potential costs of tens of billions of euros in fines and litigation in the wake of its admission that it deceived regulators and consumers about emissions of nitrogen oxide on millions of its vehicles.