New York’s attorney general laid out the extensive case of how Volkswagen covered up its diesel emissions scandal in a state lawsuit filed Tuesday.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman laid out the specifics of how Volkswagen spent a decade cheating emissions tests. Among the accusations is that the company’s former chief executive was among those who helped cover up evidence of the emissions scandal.
Scheniderman announced he would be making an announcement at 12:30 p.m. Tuesday about his investigation into the carmaker. He was set to appear with Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey.
A Reuters report indicated Healey and Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh would be filing their own lawsuits Tuesday as well.
Volkswagen admitted to installing “defeat devices,” or software that recognized when vehicles were undergoing emissions tests, in its “clean diesel” vehicles. That software allowed the vehicles’ computers to switch into a cleaner mode for testing that would turn off when vehicles were driven in normal conditions.
About 585,000 vehicles in the United States had the software, with roughly 11 million vehicles worldwide.
Last month, the EPA announced Volkswagen would have to spend $14.7 billion in a settlement for cheating the emissions tests. That settlement covers 482,000 of the vehicles in the United States with the software.
The lawsuit says Volkswagen’s top U.S. official, Michael Horn, misled the House Energy and Commerce Committee when he testified last year that “a couple of software engineers” were responsible for the scandal.
“Rather, it was the result of a willful and systematic scheme of cheating by dozens of employees at all levels of the company regarding emissions, after Volkswagen was unwilling to manufacture diesel vehicles that would meet federal and state standards in the United States,” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit says Volkswagen perpetrated the scheme for four reasons: increasing sales and market share in the United States, marketing the “clean diesel” vehicles to make the company seem greener and get better press, allowing diesel cars to come to the U.S. more quickly and allowing VW to conceal a number of engineering deficiencies.
That allowed more than 45,000 tons of nitrogen oxide to go into the atmosphere that otherwise wouldn’t have, according to the lawsuit.
“Volkswagen believed that its deceit would go undetected, and that even if caught, the consequences would be manageable,” it says.
The defeat devices were first installed in diesel Audi vehicles introduced in Europe in 1999, according to the lawsuit. To stop a “disagreeable” noise when a diesel engine Audi started up, VW engineers designed a new technology that would inject more fuel into the engine on ignition.
That additional fuel caused the vehicles to exceed European emissions limits. To solve that problem, the lawsuit says, VW installed software that would deactivate the new injection technology during emissions testing. That technology would end up in Audi 3.0-liter V6 vehicles from model year 2004 to 2008.
The first time defeat device software was brought to the U.S. was in the first generation of diesel vehicles Volkswagen wanted to sell in the U.S. In 2006, German engineers determined the Volkswagen emissions reduction system would clog the vehicles’ soot filters, which would break after just 50,000 miles. That’s far short of the 120,000 to 150,000 mile durability standard Volkswagen had to meet in the United States.
To get around the problem, Volkswagen installed the defeat device software on nearly 300,000 vehicles that it marketed as the first “clean diesel” cars in the U.S.
The lawsuit says numerous top executives, including the company’s CEO at the time, were aware of the scheme and lied to regulators about it.
“Despite being fully aware of the prohibitions in this country against defeat devices, Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche proceeded to roll out hundreds of thousands of diesel vehicles with 2.0 and 3.0 liter engines onto the American market from the 2009 through 2016 model years, all of which featured undisclosed and illegal defeat devices,” the lawsuit says.
“They concluded, in other words, that breaking the law and risking the imposition of fines was an acceptable cost of doing business.”
When a 2014 test by West Virginia University researchers discovered the cheating, the company went into overdrive to deflect and distract from the cheating, the lawsuit says. The company lied to regulators about the next generation of vehicles it was trying to get certified in the U.S., while misrepresenting the nature of the defeat devices in more than 400,000 vehicles already sold in the country.
By the time it became clear the scandal was going to break publicly, the company started destroying documents, according to the suit.
At least eight engineers deleted data about the defeat devices from the company’s records at the direction of the company’s legal department, the lawsuit charges.
It’s the second major suit filed against Volkswagen by government regulators since the scandal broke.
