U.S. Court Exposes Volkswagen's "Tailgate" Plotting and Execution

According to new information released in a new lawsuit filed in New York and Manchester, Volkswagen developed a total of six generations of cheating software to help it successfully pass emissions tests. Not only that, the company also on the east window after the incident need to pay the economic cost of estimation, in the discovery is still profitable, the company began in the emission test cheating, straight "tailpipe door" scandal broke out!

Through cool-headed calculations, careful deliberation, and continuous and deliberate planning, Volkswagen executives and engineers falsified the data in the cheating software, deceiving American car buyers and the U.S. authorities. This article reveals how the "Tailgate" scandal began.

New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Manchester State Inspector General Maura Healey announced on Tuesday that authorities have filed five civil lawsuits against Volkswagen in what has become one of the biggest scandals in the auto industry in 130 years.

Volkswagen agreed last month to pay a sky-high $15.3 billion in damages to learn about multiple consumer lawsuits and regulator suits, but there's much more to the story than that. The court unveiled Volkswagen's top five sins: the company's collective participation in the fraudulent scheme, ignoring the severe damage to the U.S. environmental climate caused by its diesel vehicles' excessive tailpipe emissions, lying to regulators, spending millions of dollars on false advertising campaigns, and negatively responding to the compensation program

The ongoing pleadings have devastated the company's credibility. In the wake of the revelations, the entire company (from executives to rank-and-file employees) admitted that it had been falsifying U.S. emissions tests for years, not just for Volkswagen-branded models, but also for Audi and Porsche models with diesel engines. Some of the models with diesel engines were found to have nitrogen oxide emissions that were more than 40 times the permissible value under the regulations.

Volkswagen executives carefully evaluated the cost to the company of being caught cheating on emissions tests. They reviewed and compared cases and fines from previous automakers that had violated U.S. environmental regulations and emissions standards, and they projected that if they were caught, they would have "only a medium, costly risk," with fines within an acceptable range. Volkswagen executives drew on a high fine in a previous violation case involving South Korea's Hyundai/Kia Motors, which amounted to "a mere $91 per car". They added: "Fines of this magnitude are far from shaking the share price of large global companies such as Volkswagen. "

Volkswagen has previously faced a lawsuit over claims that the company described as "suspected fraud against U.S. car buyers." The case occurred last summer, and California regulators were about to publicize the scandal, but VW employees removed the incriminating evidence, and the case was closed.

Volkswagen then spent millions of dollars on a U.S. advertising campaign designed to sell "eco-clean" powertrains (using towels and coffee paper filters in the ads to prove the cleanliness of their exhaust), but in reality, they knew it was all a lie.

According to the source, "Based on Volkswagen's (Defendants') preliminary estimates of more than 45,000 tons of illegal nitrogen oxide emissions from vehicles sold in the United States, economically disadvantaged people living near highways (neighborhoods) regularly experience asthma and other respiratory illnesses due to inhalation of excessive nitrogen oxides.... . "

The cheating methods employed by Volkswagen are well known. In a nutshell, its built-in software can talk about when the vehicle will undergo an emissions test or enter a regulator's lab to be checked. When it's confirmed that it's going to be tested, the computer adjusts the emission settings so that it's below the U.S. allowable range at the time of the test. When the car is back on the road, the engine switches back to regular mode, which is over the limit, and that's how the cheating device works!

Volkswagen has produced six generations of cheating devices in the past 10 years. The VW engineers who wrote the software noticed a situation where the steering wheel would not move when the vehicle under test was on the power meter, whether accelerating or decelerating

The New York case provides us with more insider information, revealing exactly when VW was involved in the test cheating, and it describes in detail how the six generations of cheating equipment cheated on diesel models under the three major brands, Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche. Not only that, but VW is taking further protective measures to ensure the company doesn't get caught cheating on tests. Annual inspections in New York and other states have failed to obtain actual exhaust emission values. They simply rely on the OBD program to see if VW models are running at "clean" exhaust emissions.

In order to ensure that it could put its cheating equipment into vehicles to pass New York State's inspection and maintenance tests, Volkswagen needed to do further cheating, which it did," the source said. The company first programmed the OBD system to report incorrect information when it was inspected, indicating that the car's emissions system was functioning properly and that the values were up to standard. "

In a way, this staggering fraud is usually hard to escape the persistent investigations of professional investigators, and Volkswagen, an industry giant notorious for this case, was finally poked and prodded by a group of engineers from the University of West Virginia in a case of falsified test data on its diesel engines. During a drive between Los Angeles and Seattle, they found that Volkswagen's diesel sedans emitted 35 times more nitrogen oxides than legally permitted.

According to the Attorney General, after the truth was revealed, Volkswagen executives launched a 17-month-long false advertising campaign, saying nothing about the real reasons for the grossly excessive nitrogen oxide levels in real-world driving, while repeatedly misleading and confusing regulators and the public.

Volkswagen had to defend itself against the California Air Resources Board (CARB), an agency created in 1967 by the Ronald Reagan administration to regulate the environmental sector.

VW executives then realized that things were on fire and a bit out of control. The incident concerned a major car sales deal: the company was set to launch new VW models in the U.S. market for the 2016 model year, but the problem was that all of them were equipped with sixth-generation cheating devices

In a 2014 conference call with CARB, Volkswagen deployed a team of technical managers to provide an inaccurate technical explanation for the high levels of nitrogen oxide emissions in the tailpipes, without mentioning the real cause of the problem, and told the regulator that the company would "optimize" the vehicle's tailpipe performance in hopes of completing a software recall. Volkswagen engineer James Liang said in his lawsuit against Volkswagen

James Liang, a VW engineer, said in the complaint that he was involved in designing the previous generation of cheaters after 2006. In 2014, the company sent him to Canada to plan and test the device, with the goal of confusing CARB and VW dealers into believing that all the problems could be easily solved by recalling vehicles and upgrading the software.

Until mid-July 2015, the new model remained in the dock area,, waiting for CARB to declare it compliant with emissions standards before it could be cleared for the U.S. market. But CARB demanded more information from Volkswagen, not just about the condition, but to test the 2016 model. At this point, Volkswagen knew it couldn't obfuscate this time. If the tests were conducted, this shocking fraud by the company would come to light

In a meeting with CARB on September 3, 2015, six VW executives were forced to admit to the illegal fact that they used cheating equipment to pass the tests. It wasn't until September 18 of last year that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued an announcement that it would take legal action, and then the "Tailgate" data fraud scandal erupted, causing dramatic repercussions around the world.

A number of VW executives have been indicted, most notably Martin Winterkorn, who was involved in the development of the first generation of cheating devices during his tenure as CEO of Audi from 2002-2007. He served as Volkswagen's CEO for a time between 2007 and his resignation on September 23, 2015. Prior to his resignation, Winterkorn recorded a video statement about the "abnormal performance" of diesel engines and claimed that the company would respond "as openly and transparently as possible as openly and transparently as possible."

A few weeks earlier, a senior lawyer had recommended that the names of a number of employees involved in the case be released so that they could not destroy or delete the files. It was confirmed that fewer than eight employees were involved in designing the cheating software, and they deleted the relevant records from the company's computers afterwards (incriminating evidence)

The attorney stated, "We have restored the Department's evidence. "

Meanwhile, Volkswagen gained notoriety after authorities conducted a thorough investigation of the company's management board, in which nine male directors were charged with fraud, and, concealing technical defects. Soon after that, the matter of VW executives' astronomical salaries broke out, and in 2015 alone the salaries of various directors amounted to 70 million dollars

Through the investigation, it is not difficult to find that Volkswagen from the beginning to participate in the planning and implementation of test data fraud, with the intention of passing the displacement test. Afterwards, it denied the facts many times, and finally the "tailgate" broke out and ended with astronomical compensation.