Volkswagen’s recall plan for emissions vehicles rejected by US regulators

“We are in a hurry”, he said but offered no timetable for approving a fix or offering details on why VW’s initial proposal fell short.

On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board announced that VW had not yet submitted a recall and fix plan that met the agencies’ approval.

US environmental officials said on Wednesday that no agreement with Volkswagen had been reached on how to fix almost 600,000 diesel vehicles that emit up to 40 times legally allowable limits after a meeting with the company’s chief executive officer.

VW CEO Matthias Mueller has gone on the record saying that the German automaker didn’t lie to EPA regulators regarding the diesel emissions scandal.

Although Volkswagen settled its European recall plan in December, the United States is a tougher nut to crack due to its heightened emissions standards.

Volkswagen’s recall plan for 2.0-litre diesel engines covers 500,000 vehicles.

Volkswagen told regulators previous year that it had installed software on its 2009 to 2015 diesel engine models to bypass government emissions tests.

The company might be able to fix about 430,000 of the vehicles by adding a newly-developed component to neutralize the smog-inducing nitrogen oxides in the emissions, Mueller said on Sunday.

Grudler said this was because, at the time, the EPA tested only passenger cars in the lab. It did have the technology to test emissions in real-world driving situations, but it only did those tests on heavy-duty diesel trucks. The Air Resources Board lists a number of reasons why Volkswagen’s proposal was rejected, but it specified that among the most important reasons for the rejection was the fact that “the proposed plans do not sufficiently address impacts on the engine, the vehicle’s overall operation, and all related emissions control technologies, including the OBD [On Board Diagnostics] system”.

The state agency also issued a formal notice against the German automaker, alleging its deception and failure to propose a timely solution had violated the state’s clean air regulations and “fundamentally undercut” efforts to protect residents from harmful pollutants. “And we’re going to make it right”.

When challenged with questions about ethical decisions by Volkswagen, Mr. Meuller said he couldn’t understand why people thought it was an ethical problem.

Not only CARB but the federal EPA has also claimed that Volkswagen plan was unacceptable.

Last week, Volkswagen chairman Herbert Diess said that he is optimistic that the automaker will explore the solution soon.

The rejection of the recall plan is certainly not good news for Volkswagen, but it isn’t as serious as you might think. “The rejection was on technical grounds, and because the answers we received from VW lead us to believe that the process for resolution will take too long”, he says. The EPA is pursuing its own enforcement actions against the company. “The company will try to resolve these investigations as coherently and collectively as possible, but they will have to be more transparent to achieve that goal”.