Company rolls out web page for affected cars

Owners want to know if refit will affect performance

• Two weeks after it admitted to cheating diesel emissions tests, Volkswagen AG provided the first information on Friday allowing customers to find out if their vehicles are affected.

The German carmaker, which has said it will have to refit up to 11 million cars and vans containing illegal software, rolled out a website page that tells owners who input data about their vehicles whether they will have to bring them into the garage.

Volkswagen is under huge pressure to get to grips with the biggest business crisis in its 78-year history, which has wiped more than a third off its share price, forced out its longtime CEO and rocked both the auto industry and German establishment.

The head of its U.S. business has been called to testify before lawmakers next Thursday, and Germany’s KBA watchdog has set an Oct. 7 deadline for it to come up with a refit plan.

While the company started providing information on Friday, customers will not yet know whether the refits will leave their vehicles with diminished fuel economy and performance — problems that could potentially multiply lawsuits against the Volkswagen and further sully its reputation.

Volkswagen, Europe’s biggest carmaker, said earlier on Friday it was taking time to come up with solutions because automatic and manual vehicles and models with different engine categories needed different fixes.

In a sign of the complexity, Belgian car importer D’Ieteren said it had not

There’s been no news whatsoever from VW, from the dealer, any letter, any call, nothing

heard any technical details about the refit yet, and that Volkswagen had committed only to having a plan set by the end of this month.

In the meantime, customers and dealers have been seething.

“There’s been no news whatsoever from Volkswagen, from the dealer, any letter, any phone call, nothing whatsoever,” said Giacomo Corrado, who lives outside San Francisco and leases a diesel Golf.

The company’s shares, which dropped to a four-year low of 90.70 euros ($134) earlier in the day, closed down 4.3 per cent at 92.36.

The scandal has exposed inadequate regulations, particularly in Europe where the importance of the car industry to jobs and exports has given it a powerful voice in policy-making. “Consumers are rightly aggrieved and frustrated. Politics must no longer tolerate this situation in such an important consumer market,” said Klaus Mueller, head of the Federation of German Consumer Organizations.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which announced Volkswagen’s cheating in diesel emissions tests on Sept. 18, provides detailed information on vehicle performance in tests. Published data from German counterpart KBA, upon which some other countries rely for tests on Volkswagen vehicles, does not break down the test performance of individual models.

Asked whether there was any way, other than asking the manufacturer, for people to find if a specific model complies with EU rules, a KBA spokesman said: “I don’t think so.”