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Handelsblatt GmbH reports

A German government task force has now discovered the same devices designed to cheat emissions tests were found in two of luxury carmaker Audi's models -- the Audi A8 Automatic with V8 and V6 engine, built from 2009 to 2013. A total of some 24,000 Audi vehicles are affected by the cheat, with around half of them having been sold in the carmaker's home market Germany and the rest throughout Europe.

Germany's Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt, who announced the findings on Thursday, has demanded a recall of those vehicles and set a June 12 deadline for the carmaker to come up with a comprehensive plan to refit the cars. On Friday, state prosecutors in Munich confirmed to Handelsblatt that they would investigate the new disclosures.

The findings mean that Audi cars sold in Europe will also now be investigated, according to Ken Heidenreich, a spokesperson for the Munich state prosecutors office. Until now, prosecutors had only been looking into some 80,000 cars sold in the United States, where Audi admitted at the start of 2017 that cars had been manipulated to cheat emissions tests. Europe wasn't part of the investigation because Germany's automotive authorities believed there was no manipulation on this side of the Atlantic.

Further, Ars Technica reports A year of digging through code yields "smoking gun" on VW & Fiat diesel cheats

For more than a year, researchers studied 926 firmware images from the VWs and Audis identified by the EPA in 2015, and they found a potential defeat device in 406 of those firmware images. All the cars studied had Engine Control Unit (ECU) systems developed by Bosch.

Interestingly, Volkswagen may not have written any of the code that enabled its scandal, although it may have requested certain functions from Bosch. The researchers note: "We have found no evidence that automobile manufacturers write any of the code running on the ECU [Engine Control Unit]. All code we analyzed in this work was documented in documents copyrighted by Bosch and identified automakers as the intended customers."

[...] The researchers [...] discovered that Volkswagen's defeat devices were far more nuanced than anything found previously. [Team leader, computer scientist Kirill Levchenko of the University of California San Diego said] told Eurekalert that the "Volkswagen defeat device is arguably the most complex in automotive history."

The researchers found that the cars assumed they were being tested in a lab until a sensor reading ruled out a lab test. At that point, "the vehicle can switch to an operating regime favored by the manufacturer for real driving rather than the clean regime necessary to pass the emission test," the research paper noted (PDF).

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