Liang, of Newbury Park, Calif., pleaded guilty today to one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, to commit wire fraud and to violate the Clean Air Act.
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Upon moving stateside, Liang held the position of Leader of Diesel Competence at the company’s Oxnard, California testing facility. He also could be forced to pay a fine of up to $250,000. The resultant emissions may have led to at least 60 premature deaths in the USA alone, according to a peer-reviewed study published last October in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
While Exane estimated the cost to VW of not installing the correct emissions reduction technology at the time was about $630 million, Mr Pearson added there could be a “wide interpretation” of the costs the company avoided through its cheating. Justice investigators have targeted other, unnamed co-conspirators, and an ongoing question is how far up the chain of command the probe might reach. Liang’s plea bargain reveals that during the said meeting, they lied about meeting emission standards and complying with the Clean Air Act. By 2014 he was working at VW’s Oxnard, California, facility as part of VW’s effort to hide from US regulators the fact that the defeat devices did not work as described, spewing emissions well above legal limits. Sales fell sharply in the USA, where the company heavily marketed its “clean diesel” vehicles.
James Liang helped develop emissions test-cheating software. In June, VW agreed to pay $15 billion to settle customer and government lawsuits in the USA, including spending up to $10 billion to buy back or fix the cheating diesels. The plea by the VW engineer suggests that the Department of Justice is trying to pursue charges against other higher-level executives at the company. As new model years came out, he says they continued to falsely cetify the vehicles met US emissions standards. They also hid the defeat device’s existence from US regulators during these meetings. So they designed and implemented software to cheat the tests.
Liang’s cooperation could accelerate the U.S. criminal probe into VW, resulting in a large financial penalty, according to a person familiar with the government’s thinking. The software then calibrated the engine to run cleaner than it would in real world driving, according to the indictment.
In fact, the update altered the cheat software to use the angle of the steering wheel to more easily detect when it was undergoing official testing, “thereby improving the defeat device’s precision” as a way to reduce stress on the emissions control systems, according to the indictment. Higher-ranking VW officials will face increasing pressure, according to the Automotive News story.
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More on this as we get it.
