The company’s shares plunged as much as 40 per cent, wiping tens of billions of euros off its market value, since U.S. regulators said last Friday it had admitted to programming diesel cars to detect when they were being tested and alter the running of their engines to hide their true emissions.
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Swiss authorities have banned the sales of Volkswagen diesel engine cars that may have been fitted with emission-testing cheating devices.
Neither the EPA nor Volkswagen have said how long it will take to fix the almost half-million cars in the US with defeat devices.
It stressed that only cars created to meet Eur05 emission standards were affected and not the Eur06 engines.
Matthias Mueller, the new chief executive officer of Volkswagen AG (VW), reacts during a news conference in Wolfsburg, Germany, on Friday, September 25, 2015.
“My most pressing task will be to restore confidence in the Volkswagen Group – through an unsparing investigation and maximum transparency, but also by drawing the right lessons from the current situation”, Mueller vowed. On Friday, Volkswagen’s board named Matthias Müller, head of the company’s Porsche unit, as its new chief executive.
“Volkswagen has committed a bait and switch”, said Gretchen Cappio, a Partner at Keller Rohrback in Seattle who is representing Bahr and about three dozen other Volkswagen customers across the country.
The board also condemned the actions that led to the scandal involving faked emissions tests on diesel vehicles.
It’s been estimated that 11 million cars worldwide could be affected in the scandal.
Under his watch, Volkswagen will “develop and implement the most stringent compliance and governance standards in our industry”.
Compared the U.S. European regulations have given a cleaner emission and mpg rating to vehicles. The Department of Justice is investigating.
The sources, who asked not be identified, said research over several years showed a difference between emission levels recorded in the laboratory and those found in real-world driving conditions. Martin Winterkorn resigned from the position earlier this week in the wake of the giant emissions scandal that has left the company in a precarious financial position.
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The scandal broke in the United States, where VW faces possible fines of more than $18 billion, but diesel cars account for only a small part of the market there.
