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El Reg reports
Former engineer James Robert Liang took a plea deal with the US federal government to cooperate with its ongoing investigation of how the German car maker cheated American emissions tests and passed off its "clean diesel" engines as meeting state and government clean air standards.
While VW executives have claimed that the use of a defeat device to artificially limit emissions during tests was the work of a "couple of software engineers", Liang's plea deal shows that the conspiracy dates back roughly a decade and has roots in the team that designed the engines.
In other words, Liang claims the design team was in on it, not just a couple of bad apples.
Liang told the government that in 2006, engineers knew the EA 189 diesel engine would not be able to meet clean air emission standards on its own. Rather than attempt to redesign the engine, he and other members of the design team deliberately cheated the testing system.
[...] He said that the device was used to get the clean air certification on VW's "clean diesel" models from 2009 to 2016, and that the group continued to lie about the emissions output of the engines even after the US government began its investigation.
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(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday September 13 2016, @05:02PM
Only the extremely gullible would ever have believed that just a couple people were in on any cheat. Not only was the entire engineering team in on it, but so were a whole bunch of QC people, and damned sure management was there overseeing everything. Doesn't much matter whether the assembly line is subject to 1% or 100% inspections - you KNOW that QC knew it was being passed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @05:21PM
Didn't sister companies also cheat? They probably didn't just take the VW designs as-is, but had to dig into them to modify them for their models. It would have to be a high-level plot to coordinate it across brands.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @05:32PM
Only the extremely gullible would ever believe such a thing as clean-diesel was possible. How humanity made it this far is always a mystery to me if putting the word "clean" in front of something easily persuades 50% of the populace that the product is good for the environment.
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Tuesday September 13 2016, @08:10PM
Clean Diesel, Clean Coal, Clean Ethanol_fueled, it's all about the same.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DECbot on Wednesday September 14 2016, @01:02AM
And here I thought that Ethanol was pretty clean when burned.
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