Reported by AFP, on September 18, 2015 the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported that VW had installed illegal 'defeat device' devices in hundreds of thousands of 2.0-liter engines sold in the United States since 2009. Devices were installed on VW, Porsche, Audi, Seat and Skoda.
The device is said to be able to help cars meet exhaust emission standards during emission tests. In fact, their exhaust gas did not pass the emission test.
Four days later the company admitted that as many as 11 million diesel engines spread worldwide, including 8.5 million in Europe, and 600,000 in the US had the fraudulent device installed.
Investigations found that some of the cars were spewing nitrogen oxides that were 40 times more dangerous than permitted. Exhaust gases can trigger respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.
In May, Germany ordered Porsche to recall as many as 60,000 vehicles across Europe after they were caught installing the 'evil' device. A month later, Audi made a similar move.
The European Union pays greater attention to the issue of motor vehicle emissions. Since the early 1990s, the European Union has issued regulations to reduce pollution levels in motor vehicles, thus the Euro 1 standard which requires gasoline-fueled cars to use a catalyst. Over time, these emission standards continued to be tightened so that the EURO 2 (1996), Euro 3 (2000), Euro 4 (2005), Euro 5 (2009), and most recently Euro 6 (2014) standards emerged.
This emission scandal is nothing new. In 2013, an EPA investigation of Volkswagen (VW) cars circulating in the United States found a mismatch between exhaust emission suppression devices in test labs and in-vehicle devices already released to the market.
Two years later, VW admitted it had used sophisticated software to trick its emission test kits. The software is capable of monitoring steering, engine usage and barometric pressure to determine whether the car is being tested for emissions or not. The emissions scandal affected five million VW cars, including 1.2 million cars in the UK.
