A longtime Volkswagen engineer pleaded guilty Friday in federal court to charges he helped design and implement a software system that enabled the German automaker’s diesel engines to defeat emissions tests.
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James Robert Liang, 62, of Newberry Park, California, entered the plea Friday in U.S. District Court in Detroit to one count of conspiracy to defraud the government through wire fraud.
The company has already agreed to pay up to $14.7 billion to settle both civil and consumer claims against it. Liang faced the first criminal charges of the scandal.
Liang moved to the United States in 2008 to help launch the new “clean diesel” engine in the USA 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.
The software would eventually be used on all of the almost 500,000 2.0-liter diesel engines sold by VW in the US market from 2009-2015, the Justice Department said.
If it detected the vehicle was undergoing a test, it told the auto to emit only enough nitrogen oxide to pass the inspection.
Volkswagen settled civil cases in June over cheat devices on two-liter engine diesel cars sold in the U.S. in an agreement valued at $14.7 billion that requires it to buy back or fix vehicles, and pay each owner up to $10,000. Liang told the court he and his colleagues realized the diesel engines would not meet US emissions standards, so they designed software to recognize when the cars were being tested.
More than half a million Volkswagen vehicles are affected in the US and nearly 11 million worldwide.
Prosecutors say Liang and the other engineers realized that could not design a diesel vehicle that both met the stricter USA emission standards and performed well enough to satisfy customers.
Friday’s plea deal suggests the Justice Department envisions a different approach this time, with Mr. Liang helping prosecutors pursue other individuals at Volkswagen. The team however, quickly realized that they could not design an engine that could meet the rigorous US emissions restrictions.
The software-which allowed cars to detect the conditions of a laboratory emissions test and alter engine parameters-was variously referred to by engineers as “acoustic function”, “cycle beating software”, and “emissions-tight mode”. He attended meetings with environmental regulators and answered questions about the engines’ test results, knowing that that were false, according to the court documents.
“[Liang] was indicted under seal on June 1, 2016, by a federal grand jury, and the indictment was unsealed today”, states the Justice Department in a press release. Within VW, it was referred to as the U.S. ’07 project.
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In July 2015, another employee emailed Liang seeking guidance on how to respond to US regulators, adding, in German, “the key word “creativity” would be helpful here”, according to the indictment.
