Hi Peter

Nothing has changed, its just taken 9 years for the USA to realise they have been duped due to their own inefficiency, I expect that fact is hurting them just as much as VW are hurting

Back in 2008/2009 California lowered their Diesel emissions to help combat pollution much the same way we introduced Euro 5 and now Euro 6

The problem being that the TDi engine has been around for a long time, emissions have got tighter so how do you comply with lower emission output without re-inventing the diesel engine?

In the laboratory at VW I expect they use far more sophisticated test equipment than your regular testing station. They can have an engineer tweak the MAP until the emission come into the required limit. They can then write this into the ECU software or add a little black box that kicks in when a static test is done

VW can then submit these figures to the USA and they are then allowed to export their vehicles. The problem being did the USA carry out the same testing before they are allowed in?.......possibly but they would have got the same result

Problem arises when these cars are out in the real world with 20K / 80k miles on the clock, they revert back to the dirty diesels they really are. Their annual or bi annual smog test is only visual so was never going to trip them up (this was proven a while back by a University in a real word test)

Our own diesel emission test is only slightly better in the fact the we check for particulate output, but is a million miles away from verifying the manufacturers claims........our emission test cannot even detect a missing DPF I think it proves that this is a global issue in the fact that when the diesels are out of the lab and in the real world the emissions are far in excess of the manufacturers static test claims

The other problem of course is the fact we are now adding Bio to the Diesel which is just exasperating the problem for manufactures. I do not believe you can burn diesel fuel and expect clean emissions no matter how many devices you bolt on or tweak software

More manufacturers will need to come clean about their emission figures, not to say they have been cheating, but that there is a vast difference between lab conditions and real world conditions

There is not going to be cheap fix for VW, software tweak is not going to work on its own......fit more anti pollution bits? The fix may cost more than the value of some older vehicles. VW will end up buying them all back

Peter