VW EXTENDS DEADLINE
U.S. court gives automaker another month to resolve emission-cheating issues
Automaker says it is making progress on getting polluting diesel vehicles off the road,
Six months after he learned that his Volkswagen-made car was illegal, Tony German is still waiting to learn what to do about it. After a court ruling Thursday, he may have to wait even longer.
“I haven’t heard anything” from the automaker about a solution, said German, owner of a 2010 Audi A3 diesel compact wagon in Ithaca, N.Y. “Are they just lying low and hoping this whole thing goes away? It’s a little bit strange.”
German, executive director of a health administration program at Cornell University, is among almost 600,000 Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche owners in the United States who are stuck in limbo by the carmaker’s deliberate cheating to violate air-quality rules.
Volkswagen missed a court deadline Thursday to present a plan to bring the cars in line with clean-air rules, but Judge Charles Breyer at U.S. District Court in San Francisco gave the company an extension until April 21.
“The issue of what must be done with these cars must be done by that date,” Breyer said during the brief hearing. If no agreement is reached with the federal government, customers and dealers, a trial would be held this summer to determine what measures Volkswagen should be compelled to make and how much owners would be compensated.
Lawyers trying to reach a settlement said during the hearing that they had made “substantial progress” toward a solution. “The engineers are working around the clock,” Robert Giuffra, a lawyer for Volkswagen, said during the hearing.
As more details have emerged about the hardware and software inside the cars, it increasingly looks like Volkswagen manoeuvred itself into a technological cul-de-sac when it rigged vehicles to cheat on emissions tests, beginning with 2009 models. Although the main culprit is software designed to deceive emissions tests, simply correcting that software would not solve the bigger set of in-
“There’s no way to fix these noncompliant cars.” BOB LUTZ FORMER GENERAL MOTORS EXEC ON ILLEGAL VOLKSWAGEN DIESELS
terconnected problems.
Some experts question whether it is even possible to make the cars in the United States street-legal for a reasonable price. Those experts also cast doubt on the company’s assertion that only a few low-level employees were responsible.
“There’s no way to fix these noncompliant cars,” Bob Lutz, a former vice-chairman of General Motors, said in an interview. Lutz said he had long badgered his engineers to match Volkswagen’s apparent diesel efficiency and now understands why they never could.
People who have closely examined Volkswagen engine technology say that one reason the company cheated in the first place was that its engineers were unable to resolve a fundamental conflict in emissions technology, at least not at a price that fit their budget.
Measures that reduce output of ni- trogen oxides, which can cause lung ailments, automatically increase production of soot particles, which can cause cancer.
If Volkswagen had turned up the equipment that reduced the nitrogen oxides, the additional soot output would have increased the need for the engine to periodically flush the particle filter by spraying diesel fuel into the exhaust system. That in turn would increase fuel consumption and raise the chances the car’s particle filter would become overburdened and break down.
That trade-off between soot and nitrogen oxides remains difficult and costly to resolve despite advances in technology since the diesels in question went on sale in the United States. In Europe, it was not as big a problem because limits on nitrogen oxides are not as strict. The few rival companies who sold diesel in the United States addressed these challenges with more expensive pollution-control technologies.
Volkswagen, however, was intent on producing lower-cost, small cars and was in a major push to rebuild sales in the U.S. The company could not afford customer complaints about faulty emissions equipment.
In the six months since the Environmental Protection Agency exposed the cheating, outside experts have also analyzed more closely how Volkswagen manipulated the software to evade emissions controls.
Among them is Felix Domke, a selfdescribed hacker who lives in Lubeck, Germany, who, on eBay, bought an example of the computer used by Volkswagen in its vehicles. He also examined the computer that came with his vehicle, a VW diesel van.
Domke first demonstrated his findings at a hacker’s conference in Hamburg in December and elaborated on them by email this week.
He showed how the software adjusts variables such as the amount of exhaust gas that is recycled back into the engine, one of the methods used to minimize harmful emissions. The software was precisely calibrated to track the simulated city, rural and highway driving that cars undergo during official tests on rollers in laboratories.
Outside the cycle — in other words, under actual on-the-road driving conditions — the computer turned down the emissions controls in a way that eased the burden on the particle filter, while also saving fuel.