BackVW says emissions cheating was not a one-time error
The wrongdoing began in 2005, when the company decided to make diesel cars the focus of its US marketing
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Wolfburg, Gemany: The chairman of Volkswagen said on Thursday that the decision by employees to cheat on emissions tests was made more than a decade ago, after they realized they could not meet US clean air standards legally.
Hans-Dieter Potsch, the chairman of Volkswagen’s supervisory board, said the cheating took place in a climate of lax ethical standards.
“There was a tolerance for breaking the rules," Potsch said here on Thursday during his first lengthy news conference since the company admitted in September that 11 million cars with diesel engines were rigged to fool emissions tests. The fallout from that decision has confronted Volkswagen with “the biggest test" in its history, Potsch said.
Potsch and Matthias Mueller, the chief executive of Volkswagen, presented the results so far of an internal inquiry that is still underway. Although the company is not ready to identify culprits, the preliminary findings confirmed widespread suspicion that the scandal occurred because the company’s ambitions in the US collided with air quality rules that were, and still are, more stringent than Europe’s.
And the company’s disclosures on Thursday, along with interviews with industry experts and some former executives, help connect some pieces of a sequence of decisions and events that played out over the course of 10 years,
“It proves not to have been a one-time error, but rather a chain of errors that were allowed to happen," Potsch said on Thursday.
The wrongdoing began in 2005, Volkswagen said, when the company decided to make diesel cars the focus of its US marketing. Volkswagen saw diesel, which it promoted as offering superior fuel economy and acceleration, as a way to set itself apart from competitors.
In the years that preceded a marketing push that began with the 2009 model year, there was an intense internal debate about what kind of emissions technology to use, according to a former executive who was involved and asked not to be identified because he did not want to offend Volkswagen.
Some Volkswagen managers argued in favour of using a technology called selective catalytic reduction, or SCR. That method uses a urea chemical solution, sold commercially as AdBlue, which neutralizes nitrogen oxide emissions without a penalty in fuel economy or performance.
Those managers argued that only SCR technology would allow Volkswagen to keep pace with ever stricter limits on emissions of nitrogen oxide, which have been linked to lung ailments.
Some of the Volkswagen executives who advocated an SCR system were sidelined or pushed out of the company. Instead, beginning with the 2009 model year, Volkswagen sold cars in the US that had 2-liter diesel motors equipped with so-called lean NOX traps. (NOX is shorthand for nitrogen oxide.) The device sponges up nitrogen oxide particles and typically costs several hundred dollars less than an SCR system.
The NOX traps do not require a chemical that must be refilled. But they tend to be less reliable at controlling emissions, according to a study published in October by the International Council on Clean Transportation, an environmental group that played a pivotal role in uncovering Volkswagen’s cheating.
Volkswagen eventually phased in SCR systems in models sold in the US. Larger vehicles like the Touareg SUV and Audi Q7 had them from the beginning of Volkswagen’s diesel push in 2009. The Passat sedan got an SCR system in 2012.
But the Golf, Jetta, and Beetle did not get the chemical systems until 2015, according to certification documents filed with the Environmental Protection Agency.
Volkswagen on Thursday continued to maintain the company’s account that the cheating was the work of a relatively small number of people. It said that nine people had been suspended as a result of the scandal, one more than had previously been disclosed. But the company said it could not disclose any names until the evidence was “watertight."
Mueller and Potsch conceded that the deception reflected organizational shortcomings. © 2015/The New York Times
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