Volkswagen on Thursday said
the installation of software in diesel vehicles designed to cheat U.S.
emissions standards first happened all the way back in 2005. The German
auto maker was rocked by the September revelation
that it rigged its cars to fool American testers about the nitrous
oxide (NOx) emissions produced by several VW models running at standard
settings.
VW has been ordered to recall some 500,000 TDI-branded
vehicles in the U.S. market. The good news for the car maker is that a
simple fix may get the bulk of them ready to pass emissions testing on
the up-and-up, according to VW executives. The bad news for the German
automotive giant, which faces a criminal probe by U.S. authorities into
its actions, is that its NOx cheating had been going on for a decade
before VW was caught.
For
some perspective, here’s what the world looked like back when VW first
started gaming emissions tests with its TDI-branded cars:
– Barack Obama was a newly elected Senator from Illinois;
– Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith was the highest-grossing film of the year;
– Intel was a year away from releasing its first Core-branded microprocessor;
– Myspace was busy turning down Mark Zuckerberg’s offer to sell Facebook for $75 million;
– Tesla was three years away from producing the Roadster and seven years away from rolling out the Model S.
The TDI software cheat was designed to detect when a VW diesel model was being tested for NOx emissions and switch on performance-sapping pollution scrubbers
to pass the test. When a car was unhooked from a testing machine, the
software then toggled the scrubbers off, and models like the Jetta and
Passat would begin pumping out noxious fumes at rates of up to 35x the limit set by U.S. regulators.
VW
CEO Matthias Müller said Thursday that the company would present a
“comprehensive report” on the findings of an ongoing investigation into
the scandal at its shareholders meeting on April 21, 2016, Car and Driver reported.
In
the meantime, Müller and other top execs shared some tidbits about the
probe, including the news that VW installed the software cheat in cars a
decade ago, when it “had proven technically impossible to meet U.S.
emissions targets.” Despite later developing a fix for new diesel
vehicles which might have allowed them to legitimately passed emissions
tests, VW instead updated the software to continue gaming the system,
the car maker admitted.
The company is promising to turn things around in a corporate culture that allowed the scandal to occur. Muller was quoted by Car and Driver
as saying VW needed “a little more Silicon Valley” and no more
“yes-men” in its ranks, while pledging “a new way of thinking” and “more
open discussions, closer cooperation, and a willingness to allow
mistakes … if they are understood as an opportunity to learn.”
While
more details about its recall plan in the U.S. may still be
forthcoming, VW did sketch out how it plans to fix affected TDI models
in Europe. Throughout 2016, 2.0 liter TDI (January), 1.2 liter TDI
(second quarter), and 1.6 TDI (third quarter) models will be recalled
and fixed, according to VW. The 1.6 TDI model is the only one that needs
a hardware fix in addition to software modifications, Car and Driver noted.
12/11/2015
VW spent an entire decade cheating on diesel emissions
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