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Volkswagen Engineer Pleads Guilty in US Diesel Emissions Probe (fortune.com)
A Volkswagen AG engineer on Friday pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate in the Justice Department's probe into the German automaker's diesel emissions scandal -- the first person charged by U.S. authorities in the environmental probe, reports Reuters. From the report:James Liang, who has worked for VW VLKPF since 1983 and was part of a team of engineers who developed a diesel engine, was charged in an indictment made public on Friday with conspiring to commit wire fraud and violating U.S. clean air laws. The 62-year-old engineer from Newbury Park, Calif., appeared in U.S. District Court in Detroit on Friday and entered into a plea agreement that includes his cooperation with the government in its investigation. The indictment says Liang conspired with current and former VW employees to mislead U.S. regulators about the software that allowed the automaker to evade American emissions standards.
Going to Gitmo!!
WTF? why does some engineer get thrown under the VW bus?
Hopefully there is paperwork to show management had a hand in this; this kind of culture needs to stop. Mr. Engineer, wink... bonus...wink... standards... wink.
So if he is responsible for the creation "defeat device", is he responsible for the installation on every vehicle sold in the US?
120 characters ought to be enough for anyone
No one from top management pushed this down and forced their hands. He was just trying to save the company money! Always keep a paper trail.
...for whichever managers forced them to do it. Large scale scandals like this are ALWAYS the work of management forcing employees into impossible positions...break the law or get fired and blacklisted from the industry.
When your house, car. ability to eat and possibly marriage and kids are all at risk are you really going to be the one to blow the whistle?
If i lose my job i'm living under a bridge in less than 3 months...you can be god damn sure i take the position of "management says it's OK so it's OK"
I wonder what's actually happening here. No one in a high-profile civil case pleads guilty unless they have a real reason to. Is VW paying his family an exorbitant sum of money through a back-channel?
There's no way an engineer comes up with a scheme like this on their own. I know for myself that I'd be too much of an honest guy to go along with that. Yes, I know that makes me an idiot. But management is always involved in things like this, or at the very least is willfully blind. German companies are very meticulous, so I'm sure they have the exact email, timestamped to the millisecond, showing the management team telling the engineers to put the defeat device in.
Come on guys, can you really see any reasonable prosecutor pressing charges for this?
http://www.npr.org/2016/09/09/...
With all the corporate crime going on, it is easy to get your scumbags mixed up....
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Why throw this engineer under the bus? He was likely following orders.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
He needs the jail / prison health care plan till 65.
...I'll believe someone's getting punished when SENIOR MANAGEMENT is seeing jail time or fines in excess of several years' pay.
Hauling one nearly-retired engineer up in the dock doesn't mean shit.
-Styopa
WTF? why does some engineer get thrown under the VW bus?
Because they are the easiest to get to. Hopefully they'll work their way up the ladder. It's almost always hardest to get to the guys at the top and you usually have to start at the bottom and work up. He'll probably get a lighter sentence in exchange for giving up a bigger fish and then the bigger fish will get a deal to give up the next guy up the food chain. Eventually you get to the top but it takes a while and a lot of work.
There's no way an engineer comes up with a scheme like this on their own.
Even if he did there is no way to keep it a secret for long and it would be virtually impossible for management to not know about it. But engineering is pretty much a team sport with a product this complex and there would be no way it would be one rogue engineer. It simply doesn't work that way.
German companies are very meticulous, so I'm sure they have the exact email, timestamped to the millisecond, showing the management team telling the engineers to put the defeat device in.
More than likely this is true. It shouldn't be too hard to work their way up the food chain if the investigators are sufficiently motivated and funded.
US pushing Volkswagen case, EU pushing Apple case. NIce!
I might fall from a tall building,
I might roll a brand new car.
'Cause I'm the unknown stuntman that made Redford such a star.
For some reason, I've got The Fall Guy stuck in my head now.
When the fuck are we going to charge the bankers? Hang those fuckers high!
This scandal goes all the way up. The cheat crossed over to other badges, which are calibrated by entirely different teams. At the very least, some director who sits above all the badge bosses was involved in perpetrating this fraud.
Calibration engineers had to work on, and test, two sets of calibrations - the "cheat mode" values and the standard values. Somebody had to direct them to do this. This isn't just a Degiorgio being lazy and signing off on crap parts to clear his worklog - this is a systematic effort to spread the "cheat device" software across ALL of the brands. Tagging Liang as the primary perpetrator is like saying some Air Force Captain somehow managed to cause the Air Force, Navy, and Army to launch a nuclear war - Liang simply doesn't have the power to get that software calibrated on the other badges.
I'm guessing the engineer's family is being either well taken care of, or worse, threatened, to make him take responsibility.
Note how the VW emission scandal came to light thanks to US regulators. We often think of the EU being ahead of the game in this sort of thing, but European car emissions testers are private entities that compete for business. This creates an incentive to "cook the books" and give manufacturers an easy time. US regulators, on the other hand, are public entities and have no such incentive to be nice to the auto manufacturers. Hence, a stricter testing regime that uncovered a culture of corner-cutting and cheating that existed in VAG. Mark my words, VW will not be the last Euro manufacturer to have been found screwing with emissions data.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
How much VW are paying him to take the fall...
In order to provide the public with the most fuel efficient car they can they fudge some things on the emissions side. I for one would be happy to get a car with better fuel mileage. All these faggots who are saying they feel cheated by VW are ass turds sucking the government's big dick. If you really feel cheated just dump a bunch of diesel fuel on the ground next time you are filling up. That way you will get the same crappy mileage that you would have gotten if VW had not taken some liberties in order to get the best performance out of their machines.
-I burn tires in my back yard to mitigate any environmental cooling the EPA might by causing by all their unsafe emissions standards. Yes all the EPA regulations that have been carefully crafted by you fascists are being undone by me alone.
I thought Bosch was in this up to their necks? How come a poor near-retirement engineer at VW is the one on the hook? http://fortune.com/2016/08/19/...
So far, the US government has launched a massive campaign against VW, looting billions of dollars and severely damaging the company's until recently almost spotless reputation. However, there is plenty of evidence that most other car manufacturers, including the 2.5 US domestic majors, have been pulling similar tricks for years. Except from a few stern words from the German transportation minister and a few 'voluntary' recalls, there have been exactly zero consequences. No suits, no fines, no withdrawals, no buybacks, no criminal prosecution, no exaggerated claims from government officials, no media outcry. Nothing.
The other manufacturers seem to get away with it scott-free, even though the cheating is often relatively easy to detect and the NOx emissions are in many cases several times larger than from the VW EA189. The simply continue to deny even after getting caught, or they attempt to cover it up, and government authorities let it pass, or even help covering it up. Meanwhile, they all get to steal sales from the scapegoat, the only manufacturer that actually admitted and recalled the affected vehicles (except in the US, where the authorities are dragging their feet) and, ironically, makes the cars with the lowest real-world NOx emissions.
The anti-VW campaign has nothing to do with the environment and everything with economic interests. The Americans found something and exploited it to the maximum extent in every possible way, just like they did with Toyota's 'sudden unintended acceleration'.