2023 Author: Eric Donovan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 15:44
VW rejects hardware retrofitting of older diesel cars with the Euro 5 emissions standard by third-party providers. That would mean disadvantages for customers.
As VW development director Frank Welsch said, all previously known concepts would have disadvantages for customers”,“such as increased consumption and thus increased CO2 emissions, and in some cases also reduced performance,”the manager was quoted as saying in a message from the company on Friday.
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At the same time, not all Euro 5 vehicles can be retrofitted and the retrofitting would fall below a guideline value of 270 mg / km, all the more so to be exempt from driving bans. A retrofit solution cannot guarantee permanent functional reliability of the technology, according to the car manufacturer.
There is no installation space for compact models
From VW's point of view, it is impossible to upgrade a Euro 5 vehicle with an eleven-year-old generation of engines to the level of a modern Euro 6 vehicle. In addition, there would be no knowledge of the effects of subsequent interventions in the control system, the components and the vehicle architecture. As in the past, the Wolfsburg-based company pointed out that the installation space required for retrofitting solutions would not be available in compact vehicles.
From VW's point of view, there are currently no series-ready systems available on the market that have passed the corresponding manufacturer requirements with regard to development, testing and approval. At the same time, the conversions would result in additional consumption of up to six percent. “For us it is important that our customers can use a reliable and safe vehicle. A technically not fully developed retrofit solution can change important vehicle properties to the detriment of our customers,”says Welsch.
Rejection from other manufacturers too
Hardware upgrades are also rejected by other manufacturers. So also from BMW. In an interview with Autogazette, BMW Development Board Member Klaus Fröhlich rejected this. “Retrofit systems that are ready for series production could not be used until the end of 2021 at the earliest, even if the approval procedure were accelerated by the Federal Motor Transport Authority. For the customer, this would mean nothing else, that he would have to put his car in the garage when the driving bans began and could only get it out again in 2022 when the retrofit solution is offered to him. How absurd would that be? ", Fröhlich had said.
The car industry has recently been repeatedly asked by politicians to also offer hardware retrofits or to share in the costs that arise for this.
