Volkswagen’s US boss Michael Horn offers a ‘sincere apology’

A contrite Horn said his company had broken the trust of his customers, and would take “full responsibility for our actions”.

In the US, a timeline for the fix of 325,000 cars with first-generation TDI diesel engines was not outlined. He also said that to his “best knowledge today”, no one in company’s US operations knew about the defeat device until last month, after a group of scientists at West Virginia University brought the issue to light.

Second generation engines number around 90,000 in the U.S. and will have fixes ready by around the middle of 2016.

“This includes accepting the consequences of our acts, providing a remedy, and beginning to restore the trust of our customers, dealerships, employees, the regulators, and the American public”, Horn will say, according to his written testimony.

Working to recover from a widespread cheating scheme to evade emissions regulations, Volkswagen named the top manager of its Porsche subsidiary to head the German automaker.

Volkswagen’s US CEO testified Thursday that the decision to use emissions cheating software was not made at the corporate level.

Horn told lawmakers he knows of three people who have been suspended, but can not share names due to German law.

Repairs might take 5 to 10 hours on the older cars needing hardware changes, Horn said.

“Emissions software in four-cylinder diesel vehicles from model years 2009-2015 contained a “defeat device” in the form of hidden software that could recognize whether a vehicle was being operated in a test laboratory or on the road”. “I agree it’s hard to believe”, he said when pressed by Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), about whether senior management was aware of the “cheating” device installed on TDI powered vehicles since 2009.

The world’s biggest carmaker by sales has launched investigations into who was behind the scam, which involved more than 11 million diesel cars. “At that time, I had no understanding of what a defeat device was”, Mr. Horn said, referring to software code that put the engine in emissions-compliance mode only when it appeared the vehicle was being emissions-tested.

Only when the EPA and California regulators refused to approve VW’s 2016 diesel models for sale did the company admit earlier what it had done.

The company’s new chief executive Matthias Mueller said earlier this week that VW, which has already set aside €6.5bn to cover the costs of the scandal, was reviewing all its investment plans.

“We’ve learned from this episode, for sure”, Grundler said. Blaming it on a couple of rogue engineers isn’t passing the smell test, at least on Capitol Hill.

The vast majority of non-compliant vehicles sold in the USA market will require larger catalytic converters or a selective catalytic reduction (SCR) retrofit to meet emissions standards.

“Bottom line”, Grundler said, “is that we are going to be unpredictable”.