A centre-spread story for automotive media for over two months, the diesel scandal that’s plagued Volkswagen seems to be inching towards a complete solution for the affected cars. In a global release, VW said that the 1.6-litre diesel EA 189 will get a combination of hardware and software fix, while the 2.0-litre engine will be able to get within the accepted levels of emissions with just a software alteration. A solution for the 1.2-litre diesel engine was still being developed and should be delivered by the end of this month.
Volkswagen’s official statement said, “correction measures have been fixed for the majority of the vehicles affected. In the development of the solutions, the focus was on maximum customer-friendliness. After implementation of the technical measures, the vehicles will comply with the applicable emissions standards.”
The 1.6-litre EA 189 engine will be fitted with a “flow transformer” directly in front of the air mass sensor which will slow down the swirled air flow force to improve the measuring accuracy of the sensor. The air mass flow sensor channels its calculations and data to the engine ECU which, based on the results sent by the air flow sensor, then sends the optimum amount of fuel supply to the engine.
According to Volkswagen, the hardware-software combined fix for the 1.6-litre engine would take less than one hour to implement, while the 2.0-litre engine will need a software update that will need a labour time of half an hour.
Volkswagen’s target is not to have any adverse effects on fuel consumption and performance of the cars. “The objective for the development of the technical measures is still to achieve the applicable emission targets in each case without any adverse effects on the engine output, fuel consumption and performance. However, as all model variants first have to be measured, the achievement of these targets cannot yet be finally confirmed,” the company said in the release.
Meanwhile, our sources say that Volkswagen executives are going to meet with a body of government officials from the Ministry of Heavy Industries & Public Enterprises tomorrow, and it is likely that the company might issue a recall for over three lakh vehicles (the figure includes cars from VW, Skoda, and Audi) in India.