The head of the American branch of Volkswagen is trying to shift the blame on ordinary engineers

Michael Horn tells why he is not guilty.

At the congressional hearing on Thursday, the head of the American branch of Volkswagen Michael Horn [Michael Horn] reported on the scandal with the deception of test equipment and the overestimation of the content of harmful substances in the exhaust of cars. According to him, the top management of the company knew nothing about this forgery, and all the blame lies with a few ordinary software engineers of the company.

Gorn was justified before the US commission of the Committee on Energy and Commerce. According to Gorn, three company employees were suspended from their positions due to an internal investigation related to the incident. At the same time, in his speech, Horn, explaining the origin of the forgery, occasionally spoke about the “pair” of employees, sometimes about the “three”, and then admitted that he did not know the exact number of people involved in this matter.
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Statements that a small number of rank and file employees turned the matter around have provoked strong skepticism among experts from this industry. The motive of such actions of employees is also quite difficult to explain.

Logan Robinson, a former consultant to the manufacturer of auto parts Delphi Corp. and a former chief lawyer at Chrysler, believe that the situation could have developed according to a different scenario — several engineers came up with a non-standard solution of the task set from above and coordinated it with the management, including higher education. a link. He considers it unlikely that two or three people organized such a project unnoticed, and even so that he worked for several years.

In addition, Horn in his explanations for some reason spoke exclusively of software modifications of control computers, while Volkswagen has already announced a large-scale recall of hundreds of thousands of problematic vehicles. Due to the wide variety of engine types and the availability of different modifications of the same engine, designed for different markets, it is not known in advance how many cars can be fixed by simply “rewriting the code” and how many will require technical rework.