3/3 Inside VW's campaign of trickery - by Jack Ewing (フォルクスワーゲンの虚偽と隠蔽)

What Mr. Winterkorn knew

But even according to Volkswagen's version of events, Mr. Winterkorn was in all likelihood informed that the underlying problem related to “software altered to influence emissions performance during testing.” According to Volkswagen, Mr. Winterkorn was not informed at the meeting that the software violated United States law. Mr. Winterkorn has said he did not learn of a defeat device until September 2015.
Volkswagen began to belatedly face up to the likelihood that the emissions problem would have legal consequences. In late July 2015, Volkswagen asked the Washington office of Kirkland & Ellis, a law firm with expertise in regulatory issues, for an opinion on the potential penalties.
In early August, the firm issued a five-page, single-spaced analysis which stated that Volkswagen would probably not be able to avoid paying civil penalties to the government. But the opinion also noted that the largest fine to date was $100 million imposed the previous November on Hyundai-Kia, the Korean carmaker. Hyundai-Kia had admitted overstating the fuel economy of 1.1 million cars and light trucks.
But there was an important distinction between Volkswagen's behavior and that of other companies caught cheating. In the past, carmakers had almost always acquiesced immediately when confronted with evidence of emissions violations and cooperated with regulators.
Volkswagen had taken a far different approach. By August 2015, the company had spent more than a year procrastinating, providing regulators with false, misleading or incomplete information. It had carried out a recall that did not deliver the promised improvements. The company had continued to sell cars with illegal software, including 2015 models.
And Volkswagen continued to obfuscate. On Aug. 5, Mr. Schmidt, who the previous March had moved to a job in engine development in Wolfsburg, and Mr. Johnson, who had replaced him as head of emissions compliance in United States, asked to meet with Mr. Ayala of CARB after learning he was scheduled to speak at an industry conference in Traverse City, Mich.
According to Mr. Ayala, Volkswagen booked a meeting room at the conference, which took place at a resort on the shores of Lake Michigan. Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Johnson arrived with a thick binder of technical information and spent two hours going over it with him.

It explained it all

After he returned to California, Mr. Ayala turned the binder with technical information over to his staff.
A week later, the compliance engineers came back to him with the results of their analysis.
The information provided by Volkswagen was nonsense.
Only one possible explanation was left, the engineers said.
“That was the first time I heard the word ‘defeat device,’” Mr. Ayala recalled. “It explained it all.”
CARB stepped up the pressure on Volkswagen, obtaining a 2016 model and making plans to test it, raising the risk of additional damaging discoveries.
Volkswagen executives realized they had run out of excuses. On Aug. 18, Mr. Johnson approached Mr. Ayala at an industry conference in Pacific Grove, Calif. The gathering took place at Asilomar, a conference center set amid dunes and pine forests adjacent to a broad sandy beach on the Monterey Peninsula.
Mr. Johnson admitted to Mr. Ayala that the Volkswagens contained a defeat device. Mr. Ayala was furious. Volkswagen had knowingly squandered California taxpayer dollars, and allowed polluting vehicles to stay on California highways.
“They wasted our time,”  Mr. Ayala said. “It had a very significant, very real impact on us all.”
A lawyer for Mr. Johnson, who has not been charged, declined to comment. In a statement, David Massey, a lawyer for Mr. Schmidt, said：“At its core, the government's case against Mr. Schmidt is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what happened on two occasions when Mr. Schmidt spoke to regulators in 2015.”
As word spread inside Volkswagen that the regulators knew about the illegal software, employees began trying to cover their tracks. At an Aug. 31 meeting, an in-house lawyer suggested that engineers in attendance should check their documents.
Several of those present interpreted the comment as a signal that they should delete anything related to the emissions issue in the United States. In the weeks that followed 40 employees at Volkswagen and the company's Audi division destroyed thousands of documents.
On Sept. 3, 2015, Volkswagen formally admitted to regulators that 500,000 diesel vehicles in the United States had two calibrations, one for test and one for normal operations - in other words, a defeat device. Mr. Winterkorn resigned before the end of month, while insisting he had no knowledge of the wrong doing.
The research begun with a $70,000 grant eventually cost Volkswagen more than $22 billion in fines and legal settlements, far more than the cost of eqiupping the cars with adequate pollution control equipment in the first place.