California demands fixes for 16000 more VW cars

The ministry said it had not yet determined whether VW vehicles with the newer “EA288” engine – mainly Euro 6 models – had manipulated emissions, and could announce results after it completed testing the diesel models of 16 manufacturers by April.

Engines from Volkswagen AG’s luxury brand Audi AG have been implicated in the German auto maker’s emissions crisis, leading the unit to suspend two engineers suspected of rigging engines to cheat emissions tests.

Volkswagen was ordered to recall 125,522 diesel vehicles equipped with the same EA189 engines sold in South Korea between 2008 and 2015.

“We checked six cars of the five Volkswagen diesel models that were sold in Korea”, Hong Dong-gon, a spokesman for the Ministry of Environment, said at a press briefing held in Sejong City.

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) is demanding the fix for Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche models from the 2009 model year on, the agency said this week in a statement.

“Audi, Porsche and VW all independently certified their products and, therefore, individually responsible for their violations and future recall actions”, it said.

Volkswagen initially denied the hardware was programmed to cheat in lab conditions, but then last week told American regulators 85,000 Audi-built vehicles were running the cheatware.

In September, the U.S. Environment Protection Agency announced that Volkswagen had used stealthy software to fabricate emissions results of some of its diesel models in order to pass strict environment standards in the U.S. VW developed the smaller diesel engine that accounts for most of the non-compliant vehicles, however the larger non-compliant 3.0-liter V6 engine was engineered by Audi. Later, the company admitted that it had fitted 11 million cars with the device to evade pollution tests. It also fined the German carmaker a total of 14.1 billion won (US$12.3 million).

The defeat device was meant to deactivate an emissions reduction device during road driving to allow the vehicle greater fuel efficiency. The affected popular brands include Audi, Skoda, Seat, apart from Volkswagen. In Germany, it will recall 2.8 million vehicles.

The technical patch that Volkswagen presented at company headquarters here is valid only for Europe, where it will be installed beginning next year.