The giant automaker has been thrown into its worst ever commercial crisis after it was caught cheating emissions tests for diesel vehicles in the U.S. The German government says the company was cheating in Europe too. Horn said Volkswagen takes full responsibility for its actions and is “working with all relevant authorities in a cooperative way”.
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He said the notion that a group of individuals could put the deceptive software into such a large amount of cars while also suddenly beating emissions tests, means the company is either “incompetent” or “complicit in a massive cover-up”.
A half million Volkswagen diesels spewed 40 times the legal level of pollutants, and Volkswagen got away with it because software code built into the cars switched to a clean mode when being tested.
Volkswagen executive promises to straighten things up amidst emission test scandal.
“We do not believe a software only solution will be possible”, Horn said.
Director of the Office of Transportation and Air Quality at the US Environmental Protection Agency Christopher Grundler on Thursday told a panel of United States lawmakers that the German automaker’s cheating measures had serious effects.
“At that point of time, I had no understanding what a defeat device was”.
Horn had told a Congressional hearing on Thursday (9 October) that the company should have disclosed the software and sought regulators’ approval before installing it. It had however failed to do both.
Has Volkswagen installed a second computer software in its diesel vehicles that also affects the operation of its emission controls in its 2016 models in the US?
The minister said he believes that even if the scandal causes a drop in production, the Hungarian plant will be less affected by repercussions because the facility is “one of the Volkswagen Group’s most modern plants”. “Until Volkswagen comes forward with a few answers – and provides assurances that we can trust what they’re saying – the American people, the regulators, and Congress are left in the dark”.
It confirmed the existence of “defeat devices” in the engines of 77,149 Volkswagens sold between 2008 and 2015, and in 14,028 Audi cars in the country.
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Horn’s remarks provided no further details and offered House investigators little new information about what led to the scandal and how Volkswagen intends to resolve it, as the company conducts its own external investigation.
