A Louisiana company and its owner were recently sentenced for selling devices that defeat the emissions control systems on diesel trucks.
Power Performance Enterprises Inc. (PPEI) and its president and owner, Kory B. Willis, were sentenced in federal court in Sacramento, California, for violating and conspiring to violate the Clean Air Act by tampering with the monitoring devices of emissions control systems of diesel trucks.
U.S. District Court Judge John A. Mendez for the Eastern District of California sentenced Willis to serve 10 months of home confinement as part of a three-year term of probation and ordered Willis and PPEI to jointly pay $1.55 million in criminal fines.
PPEI was ordered to complete a five-year term of probation.
Willis and PPEI pleaded guilty in March 2022. In total, Willis and PPEI have been ordered to pay $3.1 million in criminal fines and civil penalties related to Clean Air Act enforcement.
“The software that Mr. Willis and PPEI manufactured and sold reversed the effects of emissions control requirements for vehicles driven on our country’s roads, posing unacceptable risk to the health of our citizens,” said Assistant Attorney General Todd Kim of the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division. “This sentencing shows that we will take strong action to enforce the Clean Air Act and ensure that mandated emissions controls remain operating on vehicles to protect public health and the environment.”
According to court documents, from PPEI’s incorporation in 2009 until 2019, PPEI and Willis were among the nation’s most prominent developers of custom software known as “tunes,” and in particular, “delete tunes.” Generally, tunes can alter a diesel truck’s fuel delivery, power parameters and emissions. Delete tunes allow vehicles to remove or disable emissions controls, while appearing to run normally, resulting in vastly increased emissions of air pollution.
Willis and PPEI reached the top of the illegal delete tuning market, tuning over 175,000 vehicles according to Willis. Willis also stated that PPEI was the biggest custom tuning company in the world, servicing over 100,000 customers and tuning more than 500 vehicles a week.
According to internal PPEI records, PPEI typically sold well over $1 million dollars of product per month. According to calculations by the EPA, the estimated emissions impact of PPEI’s sales of delete tunes between 2013 and 2018 alone are expected to cause over 100 million excess pounds of nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions over the life of the diesel trucks equipped with those products.
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