Last month the automaker identified the up to 11 million vehicles as eing the ones equipped with an older EA 189 diesel engine.
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“If Volkswagen Group did not cheat on its emission tests, consumers would not have paid a large sum of money to buy the cars that failed to pass the tests”, the plaintiffs said.
A Volkswagen Canada spokesman said cars with this engine are being tested by regulators here for the “cheat device”, which switches on emissions controls for nitrogen oxide in testing conditions but switches them off during real-world driving.
On October 21, 2015 Volkswagen halts the sales in Europe of all models that feature diesel engines equipped with defeat devices meant to falsify emissions compliance, the latest in a global scandal expected to cost the German automaker billions of dollars.
The revelations about VW’s manipulation of its diesel engines have sparked one of the biggest scandals in the history of the automobile sector.
Two of the “best and brightest” Volkswagen engineers who discovered that VW wouldn’t be able to deliver a clean diesel engine that would meet U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standards are in the middle of a company probe into the installation of software created to cheat the system, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
Volkswagen said the current generation of the EA 288 was unaffected, but did not provide any more details in its statement and was not immediately available for further comment.
The more vehicles that include illegal software, the higher the costs Volkswagen could face for refitting them, as well as for potential regulatory fines and lawsuits.
“The way this is all coming out…is awesome”, said Bernstein analyst Max Warburton.
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“But American officials said they were already aware of the second group of engines and that the total number of cars affected was unchanged”, the Times said. Car-shopping site Edmunds.com predicted Thursday that Volkswagen brand sales will be flat in October, but said industry sales could jump as much as 11.5 percent over last October. It added on Wednesday that about 3mn of those would need hardware changes – a more costly upgrade than the software changes needed for the other affected vehicles. This class action seeks to recover damages against Defendants for alleged violations of the federal securities laws under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the “Exchange Act”).
