The European Commission is questioning Volkswagen’s carbon emission data, even as the German carmaker maintains its emission levels are well within the EU’s environmental rules, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
The European Commission, which is in charge of adminstering environmental rules throughout the Eueopean Union, has haggled with VW ever since November, when it was first discovered the giant automaker might have understated levels of carbon emissions in hundreds of thoudsands of cars.
The commission can impose fines on vehicle producers that violate legal caps on carbon emissions — a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. The commission initially asked VW to disclose its carbon emission data shortly after the company announced that data inaccuracies spread beyond nitrogen oxide emissions.
Climate and Energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete gave VW ten days to comply with demands the company release data showing its carbon emission levels. The company has received extensions ever since, saying Germany’s motor transport authority (KBA) needed more time to weed through data showing supposedly underrepresented carbon emission levels in 800,000 vehicles.
More than a half a year later, officials say they are getting frustrated with what they think is VW’s slow-stepping the process.
Volkswagen Chief Executive Matthias Müller notified Cañete in a one-page letter that KBA was finished assessing the CO2 emissions from VW vehicles and ordered adjustments to the fuel consumption of six models in the 2016 production line. Those adjustments will apply to 36,000 cars, Müller wrote.
“Concerns that earlier model years could have been affected haven’t materialized,” he added.
The KBA followed up with a second letter confirming the information mentioned in the first one, adding that it is still waiting for data from another VW mode. The transportation authority said the adjustments increased CO2 emissions for the affected cars by one to six grams per kilometer.
Still, Cañete thinks VW is playing fast and loose with the data. He doubts the German automaker’s CO2 emissions are what VW says they are. “The commission needs more substantiated evidence to assess the situation,” according to one of the documents.
The commission wants to know why KBA and VW claimed the carbon emission levels in the 2014 and 2015 models were not also underrepresented.
The VW is set to begin recalling millions of tainted diesel-powered vehicles in Europe Friday after Germany’s motor vehicle agency gave the carmaker permission to commence fixing 800,000 cars.
VW admitted in September to installing cheating devices in hundreds of thousands of diesel-powered vehicles, including in many high-selling models such as the Beetle and Porsche Cayenne.
“I am pleased that the retrofitting of over 800,000 of our customers’ cars can now begin,” Jürgen Stackmann, the Volkswagen brand board member in charge of sales and marketing, told reporters.
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