VW CEO was told about emissions crisis a year before admitting to cheat scandal; Guardian, 3/2/16

Rupert Neate, Guardian; VW CEO was told about emissions crisis a year before admitting to cheat scandal:

"Volkswagen’s chief executive was told about the company’s illegal emissions crisis more than a year before it admitted it was systematically cheating on US regulators tests.

The German company admitted on Wednesday that its former CEO Martin Winterkorn was, in May 2014, sent a memo detailing how some VW cars were producing up to 35 times more nitrogen oxide emissions than allowed.

In the memo Winterkorn was told about an independent study that found VW cars were producing very high emissions in real life, but very low emissions under strict test conditions.

Up until now the company has said Winterkorn – who resigned after the scandal broke in September 2015 – was unaware of the issue, which was caused by an illegal “defeat device” software VW installed in US cars specifically to trick US regulators."

Complex Car Software Becomes the Weak Spot Under the Hood; New York Times, 9/26/15

David Gelles, Hiroko Tabuchi, and Matthew Dolan, New York Times; Complex Car Software Becomes the Weak Spot Under the Hood:

“We should be allowed to know how the things we buy work,” Mr. Moglen of Columbia University said. “Let’s say everybody who bought a Volkswagen were guaranteed the right to read the source code of everything in the car,” he said.

“Ninety-nine percent of the buyers would never read anything. But out of the 11 million people whose car was cheating, one of them would have found it,” he said. “And Volkswagen would have been caught in 2009, not 2015.”

Automakers aren’t buying the idea...

Volkswagen, through its trade association, has been one of the most vocal and forceful opponents of an exemption to a copyright rule that would allow independent researchers to look at a car’s source code, said Kit Walsh, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group for user privacy and free expression.

“If copyright law were not an impediment,” he said, “then we could have independent researchers go in and look at the code and find this kind of intentional wrongdoing, just as we have independent watchdogs that check vehicle safety with crash-test dummies.”"

The Potential Criminal Consequences for Volkswagen; New York Times, 9/24/15

Peter J. Henning, New York Times; The Potential Criminal Consequences for Volkswagen:

"It appears automakers have become the latest source of corporate misconduct after Volkswagen admitted installing software to fool emissions tests.

It comes after the General Motors settlement of a criminal investigation into how it handled defective ignition switches that caused at least 124 deaths. And when there is a video in which the head of Volkswagen’s American operations tells an audience in Brooklyn that the company was “dishonest” and “totally screwed up,” then it is only a matter of time before the company has to deal with multiple civil and criminal penalties.

The question is what types of proceedings Volkswagen is likely to face and how far up the corporate ladder prosecutors can go in seeking to hold individuals accountable."

Meet John German: the man who helped expose Volkswagen's emissions scandal; Guardian, 9/26/15

Rupert Neate, Guardian; Meet John German: the man who helped expose Volkswagen's emissions scandal:

"John German has barely had time to catch his breath all week between appearances on TV news channel and radio phone-in shows. He’s an unlikely media star, not a pop singer or reality TV contestant, but a grey-haired automotive engineer thrust into the global spotlight after he and his colleagues were credited with helping uncover one of the biggest ever corporate scandals.

“We really didn’t expect to find anything,” German said of his research that found Volkswagen had installed sophisticated software designed to cheat strict emission tests across the world. His simple test – checking the car’s emissions on real roads rather than in lab test conditions – led to the resignation of VW’s chief executive after the German company was forced to admit it installed “defeat devices” in 11m cars. The scandal has wiped more than €24bn ($26.8bn) off VW’s market value.

Many questions remain but one thing is clear to German: “It was not an accident,” he said. “A lot of work has gone into this.”"