It's not just the 11 million VW diesels that the company admits to having converted to secret mobile gas-chambers; VW is now probing whether earlier models also used the "defeat devices" that detected when they were being evaluated by regulators, lowering emissions temporarily, then ramping them up to forty times the legal limit later.
If they do discover that the earlier models were also demon-haunted, I'm sure that this, too, will turn out to be the work of a few rogue engineers, acting without the knowledge of VW management.
It said in a brief statement on Thursday it was examining whether the software might also be in earlier versions of its latest EA 288 diesel engine.
That could add millions more to the number of affected vehicles, said Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer, head of the Center of Automotive Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen.
The more vehicles that include illegal software, the higher the costs Volkswagen could face for refitting them, as well as for potential regulatory fines and lawsuits.
VW examining if newer engine involved in emissions scandal
[Andreas Cremer/Reuters]
(via Consumerist)
