The Environmental Protection Agency is putting automobile manufacturers on notice that it will impose more stringent emissions testing after the Volkswagen scandal, but so far it isn’t giving up any clues as to what that entails.
The warning, in the form of a letter sent to car companies and a call with reporters Friday, comes in the wake of the discovery that Volkswagen was using software to get around emissions testing on its “clean diesel” vehicles. The so-called “defeat device” involved about 100 million lines of code that would allow vehicles to tell when they were undergoing laboratory emissions testing by the EPA.
That allowed those vehicles to spew 40 times the legal limit of nitrogen oxide into the air during normal driving conditions, EPA officials said.
“We won’t tell them what these tests are. They don’t need to know that,” said Chris Grundler, director of the EPA’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality. “They only need to know we’ll be keeping their cars a little bit longer and we’ll be driving them a little bit more.”
Last week, the EPA announced that more than 482,000 Volkswagen and Audi vehicles in the United States may contain the defeat device software. Volkswagen admitted to installing the devices on its vehicles and announced about 11 million vehicles worldwide may be affected.
The scandal has caused Volkswagen’s stock to plummet 25 percent since the close of trading on Sept. 18, when the EPA announced a notice of violations against the German manufacturer. Martin Winterkorn resigned his position as chief executive officer of the company Wednesday.
The company does not have the necessary certificate from the EPA to sell model year 2016 four-cylinder “clean diesel” vehicles in the United States.
Grundler said the EPA would begin using 23 portable emissions testing systems to test light diesel vehicles. Those machines have been in use for years, but to this point have only been used on heavy trucks, he said.
Grundler was slightly defensive about the decision to not use these machines to test the “clean diesel” vehicles before the scandal came to light.
“That’s where most diesel emissions are. It’s also an area where we have seen industry employ defeat devices in the past,” he said. “Every year we make decisions about where to prioritize our limited testing resources, and we prioritize based on, among other things, where the emissions are greatest.”
Grundler declined to answer questions about specifics of the investigation, such as how long it will take to determine if a recall will be necessary, what kind of timeline the agency is working on to determine penalties for Volkswagen, and if the EPA should have known about the defeat devices sooner.
The EPA will be partnering with Environment Canada and the California Air Resources Board to investigate and test vehicles, Grundler said.
The Clean Air Act allows the EPA to issue a fine of $37,000 for each vehicle that cheats emissions tests. If applied to all 482,000 Volkswagen and Audi vehicles that have the defeat devices in the United States, the German automaker could be facing more than $18 billion in fines.
“That will all be done as a result of our ongoing investigation,” Grundler said, when asked about the possibility of high fines.
It’s unknown how much nitrogen oxide has been released into the atmosphere as a result of Volkswagen dodging the emissions tests, said Janet McCabe, acting assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation.
“These cars have been able to emit up to 40 times the legal amount of NOx and there are many thousands of these cars on the roads,” she said. “Clearly this is a concern for air quality and public health.”
