VW executive: Any fix for auto owners could take year or more

Horn admitted to being advised about emission problems in the spring of 2014, but said he was not informed about deliberate cheating or the defeat devices until early September of this year, when the company met with the Environmental Protection Agency.

“By making and selling vehicles with defeat devices that allowed for higher levels of air emissions than were certified to the EPA, VW violated multiple important Clean Air Act provisions”.

The automaker has not said exactly when it will submit a new application to the EPA for diesel-vehicle certification.

Horn also cleared other senior officials of the German automaker of wrongdoing, saying that the trickery was “not a corporate decision” and that “a couple of software engineers… put this in for whatever reason”. After the pollution examinations, the software would shut down which then caused the 11 million cars worldwide to discharge harmful gases.

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

However, while numerous affected consumers have voiced concerned that changes made to the cars would affect their fuel efficiency or power, Horn assured the committee that the updated cars will deliver the same miles per gallon that they were originally advertised with, and that any power reduction would only result in a loss of 1 or 2 miles of top speed.

But Horn, taking “complete responsibility” for the scandal, said, “these events are deeply troubling”.

German police authorities raided Volkswagen’s headquarters on Thursday, confiscating files and hard disks in their investigation into a massive pollution cheating scandal, reports AFP.

Altogether, buyers of Volkswagon cars and the company itself may have benefitted from more than US$50 million in these subsidies under the 2005 Alternative Motor Vehicle Tax Credit, in its 2009 and 2010 models, the committee said.

He added that he didn’t know of an emissions issue previous year, unaware of what a “defeat device” even was in 2014.

The shocking revelations have wiped more than 40 per cent off Volkswagen’s market capitalisation, but the direct and indirect costs are still incalculable as the company risks fines in several countries and possible damages from customers’ lawsuits.

They say they are trying to find out who was responsible for the alleged manipulation and how it was carried out.

The group has set aside 6.5 billion euros in the third quarter over the affair, but that would only likely cover repairs of affected vehicles.