Grab the popcorn, Louise. Volkswagen’s diesel drama is turning into an epic miniseries. (Side note: Do networks even make epic miniseries anymore? Remember Molly Ringwald in The Stand? Sigh.)
It appears that the Volkswagen Beetle, Golf, Jetta, and Passat aren’t the only models loaded up with sinister, emissions-test-cheating software. According to Car & Driver, the code was also installed on some 2.1 million vehicles made by VW’s upmarket sibling, Audi:
More than two million of the 11 million cars fitted globally with Volkswagen’s emissions-cheating software code were Audis. The Volkswagen Group’s premium brand today admitted that 2.1 million of its vehicles were caught up in the scandal, with more than a quarter of them having been sold in Germany. Fewer than 15,000 of the cars were sold in the U.S.
The software, engineered to rig the NOx emissions of the Volkswagen Group’s EA189 2.0-liter four-cylinder diesel engines during laboratory testing, was installed in diesel versions of the A1, A3, A4, A5, A6, and TT, as well as the Q3 and Q5 crossover SUVs. None of the affected vehicles have the 3.0-liter V-6 TDI engine offered in several U.S.-market models.
I have a pretty good hunch that this isn’t the end of it.