A Volkswagen engineer has pleaded guilty to criminal charges associated with last year’s fuel emission scandal.
James Robert Liang, who worked for the German automaker for 30 years, could be facing five years in federal prison for his role in the scandal. He has also agreed to cooperate with further investigations of other VW employees.
Liang, a German citizen, also must contend with a possible $250,000 fine associated with the guilty plea. He faces being deported once his prison term is completed.
VW acknowledged in September installing so-called defeat device in many of its most popular vehicles, including the Beetle and Porsche Cayenne, expressly to curb smog-producing nitrous oxide emissions. Nearly 585,000 vehicles in the U.S. had the software, with roughly 11 million vehicles worldwide.
The company’s fuel emission scandal will cost a total of $14.7 billion, $10 billion of which will go to the owners of the tainted vehicles, while another $2.7 billion to the Environmental Protection Agency for environmental mitigation. The company will plow another $2 billion investment into electric vehicle technology, which will be distributed within the next decade.
The beleaguered carmaker is staying mum on the indictment.
“Volkswagen is continuing to cooperate with the U.S. Department of Justice. We cannot comment on this indictment,” said VW spokeswoman Jeannine Ginivan.
Liang helped develop VW’s clean burning diesel engine while working in Germany.
He and his fellow conspirators, according to court documents revealed on Friday, realized they could not design an engine that could comply with U.S regulations, so they instead crafted a so-called “defeat device” to fool emission tests.
The device could detect when the vehicles were in a test, essentially triggering the devices to induce lower output readings during testing, but higher outputs during normal road use.
The Department of Justice filed a complaint in January — several months after the scandal was made public — alleging the German-based company’s actions violated the Clean Air Act because it sold vehicles with nitrogen oxide emission outputs far higher than initially reported.
Nitric Oxide pollution, the smog-inducing pollution that the devices muted, contributes to ground-level ozone and global warming, regulators say. Nitric Oxide pollutants are also tied to asthma and other respiratory diseases, according to the statement on the Justice website.
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