Crowd gathering to hear VW executive’s testimony

It could take more than a year for Volkswagen to fix all its cars with diesel engines rigged to evade emissions tests, the company’s US president and chief executive Michael Horn said during a congressional hearing today.

USA regulators aren’t the only ones going after Volkswagen.

Horn was set to tell members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee that the company would accept “full responsibility” for fitting software on diesel cars that fooled regulators into believing the vehicles were compliant with emissions regulations. On the road, the cars spewed up to 40 times the legally allowed amount of nitrogen oxide.

“This was not a corporate decision”.

Rep. Chris Collins/(R) New York: “I can not accept VW’s portrayal of this as something by a couple of rogue software engineers”.

In the spring of 2014 when the West Virginia University study was published, I was told that there was a possible emissions non-compliance that could be remedied.

Upton is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

A Volkswagen spokesman in the US said he didn’t know what the device did, but the company said that such devices sense engine performance, road speed “and any other parameter for activating, modulating, delaying or deactivating” emissions controls.

He apologized for the use of the software, saying “we have broken the trust of our customers, dealerships, and employees, as well as the public and regulators”, adding: “We have totally screwed up.”

The embattled German carmaker, trapped in an expanding scandal over its intentional cheating of Environmental Protection Agency emission standards with a so-called defeat device, has at least temporarily abandoned plans to include diesel models in its 2016 lineup.

When asked if he felt personally betrayed by the scandal he said: “I’ve work 25 years of this company and I thought integrity and not cheating was a given with this company”. Horn told lawmakers that Generation 2 vehicles could begin to receive fixes around the middle of next year.

He said the United Kingdom has started its own testing programme which will seek “to get to the bottom” of what the situation is for VW Group cars in the UK.

Volkswagen’s USA boss has offered a “sincere apology” for the emissions scandal and vowed “this will never happen again”.

The software reportedly was able to detect when a diesel vehicle was undergoing emissions testing, automatically switching to a more environmentally friendly mode in order to deceive testers.

Europe’s largest auto company now faces a criminal investigation and up to £11.6billion ($18bn) in fines after it admitted 11million vehicles worldwide are affected by the crisis.