Volkswagen’s (VW) top-of-the-range automaker Audi yesterday said that 2.1 million of its diesel cars worldwide are fitted with the sophisticated software enabling them to cheat emission tests.
In Germany alone, 577,000 vehicles were affected and 13,000 in the US, an Audi spokesman said. In western Europe as a whole, the number was 1.42 million.
The models concerned were the A1, A3, A4, A6, Q3, Q5 and also the TT, the spokesman said.
Photo: AFP
VW sparked global outrage last week when it admitted that 11 million of its diesel cars are equipped with so-called defeat devices that activate pollution controls during tests but covertly turn them off when the car is on the road.
Volkswagen has suspended the R&D chiefs of its core VW brand, Audi and sports-car maker Porsche, sources familiar with the matter said yesterday.
The carmaker’s supervisory board on Friday agreed to put a number of employees on leave until the details of VW’s emissions cheating scandal were cleared up, without providing names.
Audi, VW and Porsche declined comment on the suspensions.
Meanwhile, prosecutors in Germany yesterday said they have started an investigation against former Volkswagen chief executive Martin Winterkorn.
The investigation will focus on “allegations of fraud in the sale of cars with manipulated emissions data,” the Braunschweig-based prosecutor’s office said.
Winterkorn resigned on Wednesday last week, saying he had no knowledge of manipulation of emissions results.
In related news, an environmental campaign group yesterday said that new European cars are spewing out on average 40 percent more carbon dioxide than laboratory tests show, indicating that Volkswagen’s rigging of emissions tests was only part of much wider cheating.
The new report from Transport & Environment (T&E), which works closely with the European Commission, said its data did not prove other carmakers were using such devices.
However, it said that the gap between lab results and road performance had grown for emissions of carbon dioxide, as well as nitrogen oxides, to such an extent that further investigation was needed to discover what carmakers were doing to mask carbon dioxide emissions.
Their analysis found some new EU cars, including Mercedes, BMW and Peugeot vehicles, were using about 50 percent more fuel than manufacturers claimed.
T&E has worked for years to publicize the gap between lab results and real-world driving, producing an initial report in 1998.
In a statement yesterday, it said the gap was too wide to explain through well-known practices that have been tolerated in testing, such as taping up car doors to reduce wind resistance and using special driving surfaces and tires.
T&E’s analysis found the gap between official test results for carbon dioxide and the real world rose to 40 percent on average last year from 8 percent in 2001 for EU cars.
For some models it was higher. Mercedes cars had an average gap between test and real-world performance of 48 percent and their new A, C and E-class models more than 50 percent.
“The Volkswagen scandal was just the tip of the iceberg,” Greg Archer, clean vehicles manager at T&E, said, adding the carbon dioxide gap costs a typical driver 450 euros (US$504) per year.
Only Japan’s Toyota would have met the industry’s EU target of 130 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer this year without exploiting test flexibilities, T&E said.
The European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, which represents top carmakers, has said there is no evidence the use of defeat devices, illegal in the EU, is an industry-wide issue.
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