Over 90,000 Australian Vehicles Affected By Volkswagen Emissions Scandal

Own a recent diesel Golf, Polo, Skoda Octavia or one of a variety of Audis? Your engine could be producing a lot more harmful emissions than it should. Volkswagen has made a tool available online so owners can check if their cars is affected.

While many of the 90,000 are commercial vehicles, there are still around 55,000 passenger cars producing extra pollution.

The main cars facing a recall are 2009 to 2013 Golfs, 2009 to 2014 Polos, 2009 to 2013 Skoda Octavias and a range of Audi vehicles such as the Q5.

You can check your vehicle online via the Volkswagen tool.

If your car is one of the unlucky ones, you don’t have to do anything just yet and you can keep driving it.

Volkswagen has said, all affected vehicles are safe and able to be driven. As soon as the technical solutions to service the vehicles are identified and available in the various markets, all customers will be notified by Volkswagen Group Australia.

We reached out to the NRMA for their comment on the issues. They are concerned with the delay in Volkswagen providing information, and the potential for a delay into next year for the recall.

“Volkswagen has not met expectations and customers have lost trust. They need to work hard to rebuild trust by ensuring the recall happens as openly, yet quickly and smoothly as possible”.

The whole shemozzle came to light when university testing of diesel cars found that certain models produced a lot more emissions than they should.

It turns out that the car’s engine management software was turning on emissions controls for testing, but leaving it off for normal driving.

While bad for the environment, the reason behind this choice was to improve engine performance, reliability and reduce fuel consumption.

Worse, unless Volkswagen comes up with a clever solution, recalled and ‘repaired’ cars are likely to see significantly higher fuel consumption and potential ongoing maintenance costs.

Volkswagen has said that a recall could begin at the start of 2016 and take all year.

Australia is not that affected compared to other countries, with 11 million vehicles around the world with the cheating software.

Volkswagen faces what could be billions of dollars of fines, not to mention a lot of angry customers (and no doubt lawsuits) if the recall results in lower performance and worse fuel consumption.

Does anyone have an affected car? Tell us in the comments.

[ABC]


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