West Virginia’s attorney general has vastly expanded a lawsuit against Volkswagen Group to include a series of car brands and German corporation Robert Bosch.
Patrick Morrisey’s amended lawsuit now targets VW brands Porsche and Audi. It charges that all three companies used Robert Bosch technology to veer around regulations governing fuel emissions.
The collusion, according to a press statement from Morrisey, allowed the German automaker to falsely advertise its “clean diesel” engines, when in fact the diesel engines emitted vast amounts of nitrogen oxide (NOx), which was initially discovered by West Virginia University.
Morrisey contends West Virginia customers believed the advertisements and paid as much as $1,000 to $6,855 extra for the technology.
“My office remains committed to holding each entity responsible,” the attorney general said Tuesday in the statement. “I believe our continuing effort will protect consumers and the citizens of our state better than the proposed federal settlement. West Virginia helped first discover this problem – we need to ensure that the solution works for our state.”
VW admitted in September to installing so-called defeat devices in hundreds of thousands of diesel-powered vehicles in the U.S.
The so-called defeat device curbed the smog-producing NOx emissions of several of its most popular vehicles, including the Beetle and Porsche Cayenne. It is believed that the smog-inducing gas causes ground-level ozone and global warming, as well as asthma and other respiratory illnesses.
The attorney general is seeking $5,000 in civil penalties for every false advertisement in violation of the state’s Consumer Credit and Protection Act.
August has been a busy month for Morrisey, who filed a lawsuit Monday against what he called the “unlawful” new regulations heaped on oil and natural gas producers.
The attorney general argued the new rules unnecessarily burden natural gas producers and leave the door cracked open for future draconian limits on existing oil and gas operations from the Obama administration.
“This is yet another example of unlawful federal overreach jeopardizing West Virginia jobs and working families,” Morrisey said in a press statement Tuesday. “The rules are a solution in search of a problem and ignore the industry’s success in voluntarily reducing methane emissions from these sources to a 30-year low.”
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