Volkswagen’s emission cheating scandal had a big impact on the motoring industry, and new reports suggest that the German car maker may have had an accomplice.
According to Reuters/Bloomberg, U.S. lawyers claimed that Europe’s biggest supplier of auto components, Robert Bosch GmbH, had a big part in Volkswagen’s plan, developing the emission-rigging “defeat devices” in the late 1990s.
In a federal court filing in San Francisco, the lawyers invoked that the “ingeniously designed defeat devices” used Bosch’s technology.
The gizmos were crafted to “hide” as much as 40 times more pollution than allowed by the law when a car was subjected to a lab or smog test
“Bosch played a crucial role in the fraudulent enterprise and profited handsomely from it,” the court papers say. However, Bosch has yet to be charged with any wrongdoing, but German prosecutors are currently investigating whether the company was involved in VW’s emissions rigging scandal.
Although the court papers say that Bosch worked “hand-in-glove” together with VW to develop the defeat devices, the parts supplier reportedly warned the German car maker, in 2007, that it would be illegal to use engine management software. According to Bild am Sonntag, Bosch offered the software to Volkswagen exclusively for test purposes, but the technology was used on road cars instead.
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