FILE – This Feb. 14, 2013, file photo, shows the Volkswagen logo on the grill of a Volkswagen on display in Pittsburgh.
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According to a press release from the Department of Justice, Volkswagen engineer James Robert Liang pleaded guilty on Friday for his role in a almost 10-year conspiracy to defraud US regulators and the automaker’s USA customers by implementing software specifically created to cheat US emissions tests in hundreds of thousands of Volkswagen “clean diesel” vehicles.
The US Justice Department has brought the first criminal charges against a Volkswagen executive over the diesel emissions scandal. Liang is the first person to enter a plea in the wide-ranging case, but legal experts say his knowledge of the scheme means he won’t be the last.
This file photo taken on October 21, 2015 shows employees of German vehicle maker Volkswagen checking cars at a assembly line of the VW plant in Wolfsburg, central Germany.
“I knew that VW did not disclose defeat device to regulators in order to get certification”, Liang said in open court. An investigation revealed the cars would pump out as much as 40 times the allowed level of nitrogen oxides once they were on the road.
Liang pleaded guilty for his role in an nearly 10-year conspiracy to defraud US regulators and USA customers, according to the Justice Department.
The decision to develop “defeat device” software was made around 2006, when VW began development work on new engines to meet stricter U.S. “Tier 2, Bin 5” standards that would take effect for the 2009 model year.
Liang pleaded guilty to the conspiracy charge before Judge Sean Cox.
He faces five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, and he will be sentenced on January 11.
Liang and other VW employees developed a complex software system to keep emissions low when a vehicle was undergoing testing to demonstrate environmental compliance, but to allow them to spew higher emissions on the road while boosting fuel efficiency, the indictment said.
“Mr. Liang came to Detroit today to accept responsibility for his actions”, one of his attorneys said outside the court after the guilty plea was accepted.
The 62-year-old is reportedly going to cooperate in the ongoing investigation. Still, the scandal forced the ouster of the German CEO and VW’s top USA executive.
Volkswagen has engineering offices in Auburn Hills that are responsible for preparing and submitting documents for federal regulators to be able to sell Volkswagens in the U.S. The company dating back to 2008 certified with the EPA and the California Air Resources Board that several Volkswagen vehicles met emissions requirements.
As vehicles equipped with the cheat software aged, they saw elevated rates of warranty claims related to the emissions control, according to the indictment.
According to the indictment, the co-conspirators included “current and former VW employees and others”.
According to the plea agreement, from 1983 until May 2008, Liang was an employee of Volkswagen, working in its diesel development department in Wolfsburg, Germany.
Liang moved to the United States in 2008 to help launch the new “clean diesel” engine in the US market and was VW’s “Leader of Diesel Compliance” while working at the company’s testing facility in Oxnard, Calif., west of Los Angeles, prosecutors said.
As part of the certification process for each new model year between 2009 and 2016, VW employees continued to claim the diesel vehicles complied with the U.S. Clean Air Act – despite the results of an independent study that showed auto emissions were up to 40 times higher on the road than shown during testing. The software was created to recognize when the cars were being tested on a treadmill-like device called a dynamometer. In one email exchange, dated September 2013, an employee told Liang about preparing one of the vehicles for a test, saying in German, “If this goes through without problems, the function is probably truly watertight!” The software then calibrated the engine to run cleaner than it would in real world driving, according to the indictment.
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Even after VW deployed the “defeat device” without attracting attention from regulators, engineers faced another issue in keeping the illegal software a secret.
