Volkswagen engineer admits to his part in a conspiracy to cheat U.S. emissions tests.
James Robert Liang, pleaded guilty on Sept. 9, Friday, to his involvement in a decade-long conspiracy in which Volkswagen defrauded U.S. regulators and its American customers by using software particularly designed for cheating U.S. emission tests, in what was promoted as "clean diesel" vehicles, which number in the hundreds of thousands.
The 62-year-old Newbury Park resident also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate the Clean Air Act and to commit wire fraud. Liang's plea bargain obliges him to cooperate with the U.S. government in its investigations.
"[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. "The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Sean F. Cox of the Eastern District of Michigan."
In the plea agreement, it was detailed that in 1983 Liang started working as part of Volkswagen's department of diesel development in Wolfsburg, Germany. In 2006, Liang, along with his co-conspirators, began designing the "EA 189" diesel engine to be sold to the U.S. However, after realizing that they couldn't produce a design that can pass U.S. emissions tests, Liang and his co-conspirators created and deployed the "defeat device," which is a software that identifies whether the automobile is getting driven normally down a road or undergoing an emissions test.
In 2008, Liang moved to California to help launch Volkswagen's "clean diesel" vehicle lineup. As Volkswagen's leader of diesel competence, Liang attended the company's meetings with the California Air Resources Board and Environmental Protection Agency. Liang's plea bargain reveals that during the said meeting, they lied about meeting emission standards and complying with the Clean Air Act. They also hid the defeat device's existence from U.S. regulators during these meetings. The car manufacturer repeated this fraudulent practice for the certification process of each model year until 2016.
Note that a 2014 ICCT-commissioned study titled In-Use Emissions Testing of Light-Duty Diesel Vehicles in the United States [PDF] showed that Volkswagen's "clean diesel" vehicles' road emissions were up to 40 times the number what was reflected on the dynamometer during the emissions tests. These findings are what prompted U.S. regulatory agencies to start probing the automaker.
Liang admits that he and his co-conspirators carried on lying even after these initial inquiries.
More than half a million Volkswagen vehicles are affected in the U.S. and almost 11 million worldwide. Below is a list of affected models, which was compiled by Car and Driver.
• 2009 to2015 Volkswagen Jetta 2.0L TDI
• 2009 to 2015 Audi Q7 3.0L V-6 TDI
• 2009 to 2016 Volkswagen Touareg 3.0L V-6 TDI
• 2010 to 2015 Volkswagen Golf 2.0L TDI
• 2010 to 2015 Audi A3 2.0L TDI
• 2012 to 2015 Volkswagen Beetle 2.0L TDI
• 2012 to 2015 Volkswagen Passat 2.0L TDI
• 2013 to 2016 Porsche Cayenne Diesel 3.0L V-6
• 2014 to 2016 Audi A6 3.0L V-6 TDI
• 2014 to 2016 Audi A7 3.0L V-6 TDI
• 2014 to 2016 Audi A8/A8L 3.0L V-6 TDI
• 2014 to 2016 Audi Q5 3.0L V-6 TDI
