(credit: freshwater2006)

In an e-mail to Ars on Friday, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) confirmed that the regulator was ready to begin testing hardware and software that could potentially fix pollution issues with 475,000 2.0L diesel vehicles from Volkswagen Group. The German automaker was caught last year adding illegal software to its cars in order to cheat on US emissions tests—the cars turned on their emissions control system when they were being tested in a lab and turned the emissions control system off when they were being driven under real world conditions.

According to Reuters, CARB now says there will be fixes for three generations of diesels, involving both hardware and software updates. The regulator has said that VW Group must bring its cars within 80 to 90 percent of pollution limits to have any fixes approved. CARB head Mary Nichols told Reuters that VW Group need not bring its cars to 100 percent compliance with pollution limits because the company has agreed to put up $2.7 billion in a pollution mitigation fund that will offset the damage of the still-polluting cars.

CARB is working closely with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and any fix approved by California’s air regulator stands a good chance of being approved by the EPA, too. In January, CARB rejected VW Group’s proposed recall plan by saying the company did not provide enough necessary information to the regulator. The EPA issued a quick statement after CARB’s decision saying that it agreed.