It is widely known that Volkswagen Group has admitted their older EA 189 engine does not meet legal and environmental requirements. Up to 11 million vehicles worldwide, fitted with VW’s EA 189 diesel engine, are affected by one of the largest and possibly most expensive recalls in automotive history. Here in America a combination of software updates and hardware retrofit of a urea tank may have to be applied to about 325,000 of the 482,000 TDI equipped VW and Audi cars in the United States.
The hardware fix involves adding a system known as urea-based selective catalytic reduction. This exhaust treatment sprays a small amount of a chemical into the exhaust to reduce harmful emissions. Installing the extra catalytic converter and tank is not a trivial process since the affected cars were not designed to fit these pieces of hardware.
The urea-based system is widely used by other automakers to meet the strict pollution standards by the EPA and the even stricter regulations of the California Air Resources Board (C.A.R.B.). VW has been using it in the United States since introducing the revised EA 288 engine on the following 2015 models: Passat, Golf, Beetle, and Jetta.
Recently Volkswagen added a VIN lookup tool on its diesel recall information website that allows owners to check if their cars possess the emissions-cheating software and will require a fix, the details of which have yet to be announced. You can check whether your vehicle will be part of a recall here.
Below is a list of the vehicle models and model years thought to be affected by the cheating software, which include:
- VW Jetta TDIÂ (2009 — 2015)
- VW Jetta SportWagen TDIÂ (2009 — 2014)
- VW Golf TDIÂ (2010 –2015)
- VW Golf SportWagen TDIÂ (2015 only)
- VW Beetle TDI and VW Beetle Convertible TDIÂ (2012 — 2015)
- VW Passat TDIÂ (2012 — 2015)
TDI equipped vehicles with EA 288 engines meet legal and environmental requirements, VW said yesterday in a statement. The car company claims that the EA 288 diesel engine complies with the current Euro-6 European regulations, but U.S. regulators are investigating Volkswagen’s “generation 3” cars that contain the EA 288 diesel engine.
Volkswagen has been immensely apologetic and realizes the amount of trust lost with its customer base. Here is VW North American President and CEO, Michael Horn, making a full public apology a few days after the scandal broke.
