VW admits: U.S. diesel rules had us stumped

Dirty Diesel should have been banned from vehicles decades ago

Determined to sell diesels in a market with the world's toughest emissions standards, Volkswagen faced a challenge that even its vaunted engineers found impossible to solve.

So they decided to cheat.

That much was made clear last week, as top VW officials in Germany fessed up in broad terms to the motives behind the mischief that has convulsed the company and scandalized the auto industry. But their two-hour presentation to reporters shed little light on what transpired between that fateful decision in the mid-2000s and the unraveling of the ruse three months ago.

To date, the responsible parties remain unnamed and the sequence of events unclear. VW said nothing about who knew and who should have known what was afoot. While attorneys and prosecutors around the globe probe those issues and others, Volkswagen says it will be several more months before it's ready to tell the public much more about how its illegal test-rigging software made its way from an engineer's brain to the engine control computers of 11 million cars worldwide. Autonews