COMING CLEAN
Sales of rigged cars halted as auto company seeks recovery from scandal
Volkswagen says it’s close to a fix for rigged car engines,
Volkswagen AG is close to announcing a fix to emissions systems that cheated on pollution tests, as sales of vehicles with the rigged diesel engines get halted in a growing number of countries.
Cars with the affected diesel engines are being pulled from markets including Spain, Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium, while prosecutors in Sweden consider opening an investigation on potential corruption. For vehicles already sold, Volkswagen is looking to inform customers soon about the steps it will take to repair the vehicles.
“It’s going to depress their market share for a while, maybe even up to one to two years,” said Richard Gane, an automotive specialist at supplychain consultancy Vendigital. “This is going to run and run.”
Almost two weeks after it publicly admitted to cheating on diesel emissions tests in the U.S., Volkswagen has yet to provide a comprehensive breakdown of the car models and markets affected.
Information has emerged piecemeal in the scandal over a type of diesel engine installed in as many as 11 million vehicles worldwide. The number includes about 5 million VW brand cars, 2.1 million Audi models, 1.2 million from the Skoda unit and 700,000 from the Spanish Seat nameplate.
To reach out to customers, Volkswagen is looking into setting up websites in various countries so drivers can check on actions locally.
The company has already set up a site in the U.S., where the scandal started.
The German government has set an Oct. 7 deadline for Volkswagen to say how it’ll bring some 2.8 million diesels in its home market up to standard, threatening to pull the cars off the road if the carmaker fails to do so.
As Volkswagen seeks to recover, the executive committee of its supervisory board, made up of union officials as well as shareholder representatives from the Porsche family and Lower Saxony, is meeting Wednesday to discuss the latest results from the investigation, a person familiar with the situation said.
Volkswagen chief executive officer Matthias Mueller, who was appointed on Friday, said a project team devised a plan over the weekend and the company will start informing customers in the coming days that the emissions of their vehicles will need to be improved. The fix will be presented to regulators for approval in October.
“We have a long road and a lot of work ahead of us,” Mueller said in a speech to Volkswagen’s management late Monday, confirming that the company hired law firm Jones Day to assist with its internal investigation. “To this end, thoroughness is more important than speed.”
Still, pressure is building on the company to come up with a solution. Swedish prosecutors at the National Anti-Corruption Unit are evaluating whether they have jurisdiction to start their own probe, said Alf Johansson, a chief prosecutor at the unit. In the Netherlands, the government is exploring regionwide recall of the vehicles.
“We would like you to consider the possibilities of a European recall,” Dutch State Secretary Wilma Mansveld said in a letter to the European Commission on Friday. “This has to ensure that all faulty software is removed from the market and replaced by proper software that allows proper emission reduction.”