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Volkswagen Golf R 400 will come to US

If you're like us, and have been drooling over the Volkswagen Golf R 400 concept since it was first unveiled in Beijing last year, we've got some potentially good news for you. Dr. Heinz-Jakob Neusser, member of the board of management responsible for development at Volkswagen, told Autoblog that the Golf R 400 will definitely come to the US... if it gets the production green light, anyway. Neusser says that the US market has had a hugely positive reaction to the seventh-generation Golf family. The new hatch won both Motor Trend Car of the Year and North American Car of the Year, and Volkswagen has expanded the Golf range to include a bunch of new variants, including the electric e-Golf and recently released SportWagen. The Golf R 400 would "fit very well into this strategy," says Neusser. The hotter Golfs have been successful, too. When Volkswagen opened the order books for the 2015 Golf R, the yearly allocation for the US sold out in just 11 hours. Neusser says the R 400 will "show how sporty the Golf family can be." We're certainly in favor of this hottest hatch hitting our market. All we need now, is for Volkswagen to officially give it the go-ahead.

Audi, Porsche ensnared in new Volkswagen cheating allegations

The scope of the Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal that has enveloped the global automaker for the past six weeks widened Monday. Now, some of the automaker's premium brands are further ensnared in the mess. Officials with the Environmental Protection Agency issued a second notice of violations Monday, accusing Volkswagen of violating the Clean Air Act by using defeat devices that circumvent emissions testing on diesel versions of certain vehicles equipped with 3.0-liter engines. Roughly 10,000 vehicles in the United States contain the illegal software, the EPA alleges. That's a far smaller number than the 482,000 vehicles affected by the first instances of cheating, which Volkswagen confessed to in September. But this latest violation alleges the cheating occurred broadly through the Volkswagen empire and includes vehicles from the Porsche and Audi brands. Audi had one model, the A3, involved in the first round of announced violations. But the brand, which has enjoyed skyrocketing sales in the US in recent years, is more extensively involved in violations announced Monday. The 2016 Audi A6 Quattro, A7 Quattro, A8, A8L and Q5 are among the cars which contain the illegal software, which permits the cars to emit nitrogen oxide at up to nine times the allowable thresholds set in the Clean Air Act, according to the EPA. The 2015 Porsche Cayenne and '14 Volkswagen Toureg SUV are also affected. "There is clear evidence of additional violations and it's important to put Volkswagen on notice and to inform the public." - Janet McCabe. "Audi, which has been on a roll in terms of sales, reputation and image of late, now is being drawn deeper into the quagmire," said Michelle Krebs, senior analyst for Autotrader. "Previously, only the low-volume A3 was under scrutiny, but now Audi's core models are under fire." Audi officials did not respond to a request for comment Monday. In a written statement issued late Monday afternoon, a Porsche spokesperson said, "We are surprised to learn this information. Until this notice, all our information was that the Porsche Cayenne Diesel is fully compliant." Porsche said it would cooperate with authorities.

West Virginia researcher describes how Volkswagen got caught

The cheating scandal engulfing the world's largest automaker started with a road trip. In the spring of 2014, researchers from West Virginia were evaluating the tailpipe emissions of diesel cars made for the American market by European manufacturers, something never before studied in the academic realm. Excited by the prospect of breaking new ground, the team of two professors and two students wanted to gather as much data as possible. "And being academics, we went a little overboard," said Arvind Thiruvengadam, one of the students. "Being academics, we went a little overboard." Overboard included driving the cars for more miles than they needed to test and verify results. Drivers put about 1,500 miles on each of the first two cars in the study, a Volkswagen Jetta and BMW X5, along California roadways. For their final car, a Volkswagen Passat, they wanted even more mileage. So they took the car on a road trip from Los Angeles to Seattle and back again, collecting data from more than 2,000 miles of testing. The road trip was Volkswagen's undoing. When the West Virginia team returned to Los Angeles, they were befuddled by the test results. In theory, the Passat should have spewed the lowest levels of pollutants among the three cars. Equipped with the more modern selective catalytic reduction technology, the team expected to find minimal levels of nitrogen oxide. But the car, which had been certified at a California Air Resources Board facility prior to the start of the road trip, had elevated levels of NOx that were 20 times the baseline levels established beforehand. The researchers, comprised of professors Gregory Thompson and Dan Carder and students Marc Besch and Thiruvengadam, knew their on-board equipment functioned properly because, early in their research, they had double-checked its accuracy after recording sky-high NOx readings from the Jetta that showed 30 times the level of its baseline testing at the CARB facility. It was particularly noteworthy because the Jetta contained the first-generation Lean NOx Trap technology, not the more efficient SCR, yet both produced large discrepancies. The BMW, on the other hand, performed as expected. Today, Thiruvengadam is careful to say the research team never suspected Volkswagen of cheating on emissions testing, nor did the researchers report such a finding. They merely reported their findings to CARB officials who then further investigated.