In the written testimony published on Wednesday, Horn said Volkswagen had withdrawn its USA certification application for a few model year 2016 vehicles over a software feature that should have been disclosed to regulators as an auxiliary emissions control device.
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Volkswagen has admitted that as many as 11 million diesel vehicles worldwide may have been fitted with software that allowed the cars to run much cleaner in tests than they did on the road.
Volkswagen’s US-based chief executive is expected to testify before Congress Thursday that he first learned in the spring of 2014 that the German automaker’s diesel cars were breaking USA rules on emissions tests.
Meanwhile, Volkswagen’s American boss has apologised to a U.S. congressional committee for the scandal which saw software installed in millions of cars created to cheat anti-pollution tests.
Last month, Volkswagen appointed Matthias Mueller as its new chief executive officer to help the automaker recover from the scandal over the rigging of USA vehicle emissions tests. He said that each generation of the engine requires a different remedy and that VW technical teams were “working tirelessly” to develop, test and validate each fix. Horn described the cheating as “something individuals did” and “not a corporate decision”. Barton, a Texas Republican, said that he and other conservatives have had questions about the emission standards that VW violated.
Though VW and USA regulators have not yet announced a fix for illegal emissions under a nationwide recall, Horn will say the company is “determined to make things right”.
Subcommittee Chair Timothy Murphy (R-Pa.) told Horn he found it “amazing” that the university’s testers discovered the defeat device while VW’s “army of brilliant engineers and mechanics didn’t know something was amiss”.
The prosecutor’s office in Braunschweig near Wolfsburg said the target of searches had been documents and data storage with regard to Volkswagen’s manipulations of diesel emissions. New York Congressman Chris Collins said: “VW is trying to get us to believe this is the work of a couple of rogue engineers”.
At a house hearing on Thursday, U.S. Lawmakers have attacked federal environmental regulators for not being able to catch Volkswagen’s emissions control fraud for so long.
He said the company needs to answer: “What happened, who was involved, why were these actions taken?…”
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He also claimed that nobody at Volkswagen’s USA operations knew about the usage of the defeat devices in December 2014.
