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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the smoking-guns-pollute-less-than-diesels dept.

Hackaday reports:

In an interesting turn of events last week in a German court, evidence has materialized that engineers were ordered to cheat emissions testing when developing automotive parts.

[February 21], Ulrich Weiß brought forward a document[1] that alleges Audi Board of Director members were involved in ordering a cheat for diesel emissions. Weiß was the head of engine development for Audi, suspended in November of 2015 but continued to draw more than half a million dollars in salary before being fired after prior to last week's court testimony.

Volkswagen Group is the parent company of Audi and this all seems to have happened while the VW diesel emissions testing scandal we've covered since 2015 was beginning to come to light. Weiß testified that he was asked to design a method of getting around strict emissions standards in Hong Kong even though Audi knew their diesel engines weren't capable of doing so legitimately.

According to Weiß, he asked for a signed order. When he received that order he instructed his team to resist following it. We have not seen a copy of the letter, but the German tabloid newspaper Bild reports [Deutsch] that the letter claims approval by four Audi board members and was signed by the head of powertrain development at the company.

[1] Forbes has all content behind scripts and is AdBlocker-phobic. archive.li's copy


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:18AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:18AM (#473211)

    It's entirely possible that they were designed to be unrealistic.

    How do you know they weren't unrealistic precisely because of a deal arranged with the big car companies to be able to cheat them?

    If we could presume that companies are honest, politicians are hopelessly delusional, and we could have nice things, it would have become apparent the regulations were fantasy when cars could no longer be sold that still had any get-up-and-go. Nobody would be able to sell them, so there'd be no competitive advantage.

    Instead, we see that certain chosen companies were able to "meet" the regulations while selling cars with get-up-and-go.

    I won't believe for a second that was by accident.

    Perhaps this clamoring over "fake news" is--this incident being a very small but tangible part thereof--the Masters of the Universe realizing that they no longer have the level of control they had during the 20th century.

    Make no mistake, before somebody goes there, Trump is just another puppet of theirs, part of the push and pull they use to control us all at a subconscious level. Push and pull. The twin sports teams we think constitute democracy, two sides of the same coin ever spinning. Push and pull.