Automotive News: Inside VW's Campaign of Trickery
Inside VW’s Campaign of Trickery
New details emerge in Volkswagen’s broad conspiracy to cover up a campaign aimed at deceiving pollution regulators.
Volkswagen was a little more than a month away from the biggest crisis in its history when Oliver Schmidt, a high-ranking engineer for the carmaker who dealt with regulators in the United States, wrote a reassuring email to his superiors.
Mr. Schmidt had just met with Alberto Ayala, a deputy executive officer of the California Air Resources Board, the state’s air quality enforcer. For well over a year, Mr. Ayala had been pushing Volkswagen to explain why its diesel passenger cars polluted so much more in ordinary driving than they did in California testing labs.
Mr. Schmidt’s email, which has not been previously reported, was dated Aug. 5, 2015. Hours earlier, on the sidelines of an industry conference in Michigan, Mr. Schmidt had presented Mr. Ayala with a binder full of detailed technical information which purported to offer a solution to the emissions problem.
The meeting “went very well,” Mr. Schmidt wrote. He cautioned, however, that the information he presented might encounter “headwind” when it was examined by experts at the Air Resources Board lab in El Monte, near Los Angeles.
That was an understatement.
The experts soon concluded that the technical information Mr. Schmidt presented was yet another smoke screen — the latest in a series of maneuvers by the automaker to hide its misdeeds. A few weeks later, having run out of excuses, Volkswagen was forced to admit that the diesels it had sold in the United States since late 2008 had contained software designed to camouflage emissions that vastly exceeded legal limits. read more »
