September 9, 2016
Posted September 12, 2016
James Robert Liang, a Volkswagen engineer, pleaded guilty for his role in a nearly 10-year conspiracy to defraud U.S. regulators and U.S. Volkswagen customers by implementing software specifically designed to cheat U.S. emissions tests in hundreds of thousands of Volkswagen “clean diesel” vehicles. Liang admitted that beginning in about 2006, he and his co-conspirators started to design a new “EA 189” diesel engine for sale in the United States, and when they realized they could not design a diesel engine that would meet the stricter U.S. emissions standards, they designed and implemented a so-called defeat device to cheat the emissions tests. DOJ