Dieselgate: Volkswagen given March deadline to find diesel emissions fix

Volkswagen AG now has less than a month left to come up with a way to fix 600,000 diesel vehicles still on the road. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ordered the German carmaker to produce a solution before its next court date on March 24, according to a transcript of Thursday’s hearing in San Francisco.

“Certain decisions may have to be made by the company that will not be the most advantageous economically,” Breyer said while setting the deadline. “But it’s a decision that they must make in what I will call the very near future.”

Volkswagen AG has been under heavy fire since it admitted last September that it had installed software on diesel cars that allowed them to cheat on pollution tests. With the software, the diesel cars can meet America’s strict pollution standards while in the laboratory, even though the cars continue to produce excessive pollution – up to 40 times the allowed amount of nitrogen oxides – on the roadways. Some 11 million cars are affected worldwide, with 600,000 in America.

The judge said that Volkswagen already had enough time to come up with a fix for dirty cars and it was time to move forward, even if the solution was not perfect.

“Six months is long enough to determine whether or not there is an engineering process that would be accepted by Volkswagen,” Breyer said, adding: “There is a deadline, and the deadline is before March 24th.”

VW lawyer Robert Giuffra told Breyer at the hearing that the automaker is making progress in trying to reach a settlement with the Justice Department, the Environmental Protection Agency and California Air Resources Board. He, however, declined to offer specifics on the settlement talks, saying the Justice Department had asked VW not to discuss any aspect of the negotiations.

Volkswagen is still reeling from the blow dealt to it by the scandal. In its wake the carmaker has appointed a new CEO, fired multiple staff members after launching an internal investigation, began overhauling its corporate culture, brought in the lawyer who last managed the British Petroleum Gulf Oil Spill case, as well as former FBI Director Robert Mueller to manage its government and consumer settlement.