VW Dieselgate Engineer Sentenced To 40 Months In American Prison
David Tracy
Yesterday 7:30pmFiled to: dieselgate
James Robert Liang—one of the engineers who helped design the defeat device that fooled U.S. emissions regulators into thinking VW TDIs were cleaner than they really were—is the first VW employee to be sentenced in the U.S. for participating in Dieselgate. And boy is he going to pay dearly.
The sentence, announced today by U.S. District Judge Sean F. Cox from the Eastern District of Michigan, includes a 40-month prison term, two years of “supervised release,” and a $200,000 fine. The Department of Justice says in a press release that the sentence accounts for Liang’s cooperation in the investigation into Dieselgate, describing the reasoning for the decision by saying:
[Liang received this sentence because of his role in a] 10-year conspiracy to defraud U.S. regulators and Volkswagen customers by implementing software specifically designed to cheat emissions tests in hundreds of thousands of Volkswagen “clean diesel” vehicles sold in the U.S.
The 63 year old engineer—who pleaded guilty in 2016 to conspiracy to commit fraud—spilled quite a few beans as part of his guilty plea, saying that when he and some of his coworkers started the design of the EA 189 engine in 2006, they “realized that they could not design a diesel engine that would meet the stricter U.S. emissions standards.”
To fix this, the team designed a software that detected when a car was being tested on a dynamometer by U.S. emissions regulators, so that the software could dial down tailpipe emissions accordingly. But when the car wasn’t being tested (i.e. during normal driving that the typical consumer might experience), the exhaust spewed far more NOx emissions to keep up fuel economy and emissions component longevity.
The D.O.J. says that “VW tasked Liang with making the defeat device work by calibrating it to recognize specific U.S. emissions tests’ drive cycles.”
In 2008, Liang moved from Wolfsburg, Germany to VW’s emissions test center in Oxnard, California, where he became the Lead of Diesel Competence, and was tasked with launching “clean diesel” VWs in the U.S..
For eight years—2009 to 2016—Liang admits that he and other VW employees met with the EPA and California Air Resources Board to receive their emissions certifications for various diesel vehicles. In some of those meetings, Liang’s “co-conspirators” lied to regulators by telling them the cars complied with emissions standards and with the Clean Air Act, thus “falsely and fraudulently” certifying the cars.
Liang also admitted in his guilty plea that he knew the whole “Clean Diesel” marketing strategy that VW was using to sell cars was a big lie, and so were the high fuel economy numbers that relied on the cheating defeat device.
He even admitted that he helped VW employees “refine” the defeat device over the years, and that he helped them lie to regulators who raised questions about real-world emissions—this was after the International Council on Clean Transportation discovered NOx emissions in excess of 30 times the allowable amount.
For all of this, Liang is sentenced to federal prison for over three years. It’s a seemingly harsh sentence for an engineer whose job it is to find solutions to difficult technical problems, but perhaps not as harsh as the consequences of his actions
I used to be a fan of Volkswagen, but no more!
Your collective inability to acknowledge this obvious truth makes you all look like fools.
For Christianity, by identifying truth with faith, must teach-and, properly understood, does teach-that any interference with the truth is immoral. A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts
I'm not saying these folks shouldn't be held accountable via jail time - but it's hard to understand why this crime warranted such aggressive prosecution when apparently none of the Wall Street crimes leading to the Great Recession did.
Except in other countries, where the financial fraudsters were jailed.
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
~ Carl Sagan
Because the financial fraudsters here in the US can pay off their crimes with "political contributions".
This guy was just a cog in the wheel. There were plenty of balances that SHOULD have caught this, but corporate VW allowed it to happen. Too many people knew for any executives to say they didn't know. And again, it isn't the corner office guys going to jail here.
Death is Nature's way of telling you to slow down.
