The head of Volkswagen will meet with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy next week to discuss the company’s emissions cheating scandal, the agency said Thursday.
Matthias Mueller, CEO of Volkswagen AG, will travel across the Atlantic Ocean to meet with McCarthy on Wednesday in Washington, an EPA spokeswoman confirmed to the Washington Examiner.
A recall of the 600,000 Volkswagen vehicles equipped with the rigged emissions software has not been made in the United States. It’s possible that Mueller and McCarthy will discuss a recall plan as well as the billions of dollars in potential fines that the German automaker faces.
Cynthia Giles, assistant administrator for enforcement and compliance assurance at the EPA, said earlier this week that Volkswagen has “not presented an acceptable way forward” for a recall.
The German automaker is in hot water in the United States as the Department of Justice announced this week its U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit is investigating the company’s “defeat devices.”
A “defeat device” is millions of lines of software code that recognized when emissions tests were taking place and would limit the amount of nitrogen being released into the atmosphere. The company has admitted to installing the software in hundreds of thousands of “clean diesel” vehicles in the U.S. and millions worldwide.
When the vehicle was no longer in testing mode, the software would switch back to a regular drive mode that would spew up to 40 times more nitrogen than legally allowed into the atmosphere.
The lawsuit says Volkswagen equipped its 2.0-liter and 3.0-liter, clean diesel vehicles with the defeat device software. In total, about 585,000 vehicles are covered by the lawsuit.
Nitrogen pollution can cause smog and release fine particulate matter into the air. Those pollutants are linked to asthma and other respiratory illnesses that can cause premature death. Children, the elderly and people with pre-existing conditions see increased risk for harm when they are exposed to the pollutants.
Volkswagen estimates the defeat devices are in about 11 million vehicles worldwide. A recall effort has begun in Europe, but not in the U.S.
At a press conference last month, Volkswagen officials said the cheating began in 2005 because engineers could not figure out how to meet stricter U.S. emissions standards. The top company official in North America previously told a congressional committee the defeat devices were the result of “rogue” engineers.
However, company officials say a business culture that allowed employees to break the rules and a lack of accountability led to the scandal.
