Justice Department closes criminal probe of Ford emissions testing

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has closed a nearly two-year investigation into the process Ford uses to evaluate the emissions of its vehicles, the automaker disclosed in a new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Ford says it “cooperated fully” with the probe, but no action was taken.

Ford originally disclosed the investigation in April 2019, just a few months after it announced its own internal probe into concerns over the process. Those concerns, first raised by Ford employees, had nothing to do with the kind of deceitful “defeat devices” at the center of Volkswagen’s Dieselgate scandal. Rather, the employees believed there were problems with some of the analytical models Ford was using to calculate things like...

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