Environmentalists are not impressed by a Volkswagen proposal to retrofit nearly 7 million vehicles yearly with filter devices that will reduce particulate pollution by 90 percent by 2022.
Ulrich Eichhorn, the head of VW’s research and development, told reporters Wednesday the company’s soot filter will “cause a significant reduction” in the vehicles’ fuel emissions.
“Following increases in efficiency and lower [carbon dioxide] output, we are now bringing about a sustained reduction in the emission levels of our modern petrol engines by fitting particulate filters as standard,” Eichhorn said in a company statement.
The device will be in use starting in June 2017 with the 1.4-liter TSI engine in the VW Tiguan and in the 2.0-liter TFSI engine in the Audi A5. The scheme will be in full force by 2022.
Green groups are skeptical of the company’s promise, which is due in part to the VW scandal.
“They blatantly broke the public’s trust, so I’m a little skeptical of any their plans for reducing emissions and pollution,” Andrew Linhardt, an associate Washington representative for the Sierra Club, told reporters.
VW acknowledged in September to installing so-called defeat device in many of its most popular vehicles, including the Beetle and Porsche Cayenne, expressly to curb smog-producing nitrous oxide emissions. Nearly 585,000 vehicles in the U.S. had the software, with roughly 11 million vehicles worldwide.
A lawsuit filed in July claiming VW affixed the so-called defeat devices to cars to dupe the public into believing their vehicles were greener than they otherwise were.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed a lawsuit in July claiming VW’s top U.S. official, Michael Horn, misled the House Energy and Commerce Committee in 2015 when he testified that software engineers were responsible for the scandal.
“Rather, it was the result of a willful and systematic scheme of cheating by dozens of employees at all levels of the company regarding emissions, after Volkswagen was unwilling to manufacture diesel vehicles that would meet federal and state standards in the United States,” Schneiderman’s lawsuit says.
The New York attorney general said VW engaged in the fraud because it wanted to increase market share in the U.S., and make the company seem more environmentally friendly than was otherwise true. It would also allow them to cover up engineering deficiencies.
Linhardt did leave open the possibility that VW and environmentalists could find common ground.
If VW were willing to replace its fossil fuel burning vehicles with a fleet of electric cars, for example, then environmentalists would take the company more seriously.
“This new particulate filter sounds good in theory … but we know the emissions from an electric vehicle are zero,” he said, which “would go a long way toward making sure they’re serious for making up for their past actions,” he added.
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