Volkswagen has landed back in the center of controversy after the automaker’s chief executive officer dismissed the company’s latest diesel emissions scandal as a “technical problem” rather than a flat-out lie.
VW admitted late last year that it installed cheating software in about 600,000 diesel-powered vehicle in the United States that allowed the vehicles to pass EPA laboratory testing but then spew up to 40 times the legal limit of greenhouse gases during normal driving. But despite that corporate admission, company CEO Matthias Mueller revealed in an interview with NPR that VW sees the discrepancy simply as a misunderstanding of U.S. rules.
NPR: You said this was a technical problem, but the American people feel this is not a technical problem, this is an ethical problem that’s deep inside the company. How do you change that perception in the U.S.?
Mueller: Frankly spoken, it was a technical problem. We made a default, we had a … not the right interpretation of the American law. And we had some targets for our technical engineers, and they solved this problem and reached targets with some software solutions which haven’t been compatible to the American law. That is the thing. And the other question you mentioned — it was an ethical problem? I cannot understand why you say that.
NPR: Because Volkswagen, in the U.S., intentionally lied to EPA regulators when they asked them about the problem before it came to light.
Mueller: We didn’t lie. We didn’t understand the question first. And then we worked since 2014 to solve the problem. And we did it together and it was a default of VW that it needed such a long time.
That proclamation could land Mueller in hot water with regulators. The California Air Resources Board recently rejected the automaker’s planned fix for its diesel-powered cars and Mueller is scheduled to meet with federal regulators on Wednesday to discuss VW’s plan for a fix. If a solution isn’t agreed upon soon, Mueller’s words could come back to haunt VW.
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