Business

Volkswagen’s recall plans rejected by USA environmental regulators

The EPA said it agreed with California’s assessment.

VW CEO Matthias Mueller met privately on Wednesday with EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy. Sales in the second half of 2015 dropped by as much as 25% in some regions of the country, in large part because without EPA approval the company was forbidden to sell new and certain certified used diesel cars – which typically account for about 25% of overall sales.

“We didn’t lie”, said Mueller. “Volkswagen will continue to fully cooperate”.

In rejecting VW’s plans, the automaker finds itself under the gun to find a way to fix the cars while facing hundreds of lawsuits in a California courtroom.

The exact contents of the rejected plans were never made public, so it’s unclear what VW hadproposed. “VW has mistakenly thought it could resolve this on the cheap”. These vehicles contain the diesel emission deceiving software. Nichols continued, “they need to make it right”.

“There is no doubt about it. Second, we have to apologize on behalf of Volkswagen for that situation we have created in front of customers, in front of dealers and, of course, to the authorities”.

CARB did not assess any immediate penalties, but it issued a new notice that VW had violated California air quality regulations. “It was a technical problem”, Müller said to NPR on Sunday night. This is not a major setback. He said he hopes to reach an agreement at the meeting, which was requested by VW.

Though the EPA hasn’t formally issued its own denial of Volkswagen’s proposed fix plan, the fact that agency officials have said that they concur with CARB’s decision doesn’t bode well for the automaker.

The interviewer suggested to Mueller that VW was dealing with an ethical problem in the US, to which he responded, “Frankly spoken, it was a technical problem”. Murphy, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee’s investigations subcommittee, said that he urged Mueller to deliver documents that he said have been tied up by German privacy rules. “I can’t get into the details”, Grundler said. Volkswagen faces enormous fines and lawsuits globally as a result. It says that Volkswagen’s proposal doesn’t adequately explain how the repair will actually fix cars and what effect those fixes will have on emissions.

In Europe, the company’s proposed fix for 8.5 million diesel engines was approved a month ago. VW estimated that fix would take less than an hour to complete. The proposal for fixing the 3.0-liter diesel engines also affected, is not scheduled for evaluation by the CARB until February 2016. The scandal – dubbed dieselgate – led to the dismissal of VW CEO Martin Winterkorn, as well as several high-ranking engineers.

United States environmental regulators turned down Volkswagen’s initial recall plan for its diesel cars equipped with illegal emissions cheat devices Tuesday, a day before its chief holds high-level talks on the scandal in Washington.

 

 

California regulators reject Volkswagen recall plan

Previous post

BHP Billiton counts cost of shale oil

Next post

EPA Rejects Volkswagen's Proposed Diesel Emissions Fix