Automaker Volkswagen has suspended a top executive in response to widespread public criticism over experiments in which monkeys were exposed to diesel¹ exhaust.

 

汽车制造商大众利用猴子进行柴油尾气测试引发公众广泛批评，该公司为此将一名高管停职。

 

The company said in a statement Tuesday that Thomas Steg, head of government relations and sustainability, was stepping away from his duties at his own request.

 

Steg had said in an interview published in the newspaper Bild that he had known about the experiment but did not inform the company's then-CEO, Martin Winterkorn. Steg said he rejected an initial proposal to use human volunteers and said that even after animals were substituted the experiment "should not have taken place."

 

The move follows a report in The New York Times that the now-disbanded EUGT commissioned the 2014 monkey test at the Lovelace Respiratory Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to measure how Volkswagen's diesel technology was succeeding in controlling harmful emissions².

 

Diluted³ exhaust gases from a late-model Volkswagen vehicle were fed into chambers⁴ where the monkeys were exposed for four hours. Afterward⁵, lung fluid samples were taken from the sedated⁶ monkeys, which were not killed for the experiment. The study did not deliver a definitive⁷ result.

 

The test was done with a vehicle that used illegal software to cheat on emissions tests, turning controls off when the vehicle was not being tested. That practice was exposed in 2015, leading to Winterkorn's resignation.

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