Volkswagen is in a lot of trouble after regulators found that some of the company’s diesel-powered models were cheating on emissions tests. The company was using sophisticated algorithms, also called “defeat devices,” to cheat on these tests. The investigation still continues and it has been discovered that the company had a PowerPoint presentation ready as far back as 2006 explaining how to evade diesel emissions tests particularly in the United States.
This according to the New York Times which cites two people who claim to have seen the PowerPoint presentation which was discovered during the investigation in “dieselgate,” which will certainly prove to be very costly for the company.
Apparently Volkswagen made this presentation in response to the realization that it couldn’t meet the stricter diesel emissions standards of the United States without quickly wearing out filtering equipment.
So instead of fitting its cars with better systems which would have resulted in an increase in prices, the company reportedly made this presentation to brief employees how embedded software can be used to detect when an emissions test is being conducted so that engine parameters are automatically changed as a response to meet those standards.
As the investigation continues to find the people responsible for this and to hold them liable for dieselgate, if this presentation did exist for precisely this purpose, then it would mean that the company’s cheating was widely known within the company and that’s going to make it a lot harder to pinpoint people in the company who knew this was happening because, from the looks of it, quite a lot of them did.
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