Volkswagen’s dealerships in the US are reportedly offering unusually steep discounts in an effort to minimize the fallout from its diesel emissions scandal.
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Across the world, an estimated 11m vehicles are fitted with the cheat engines, including 1.2m in the UK.
Volkswagen admitted on Wednesday that 3 million cars in Europe equipped with 1.6 litre diesel engines will require hardware changes to disable the emission-cheating device in the heart of the emission-rigging scandal.
The EA 189 engines were central to Volkswagen’s marketing of “clean diesel” cars that were billed as offering fuel economy and emissions competitive with gasoline engines.
The new focus of the investigation is on versions of the company’s EA 288 engine sold over recent years, a Volkswagen spokesman said.
While extremely popular in Germany, diesel-engine vehicles made up only five percent of the USA auto market in 2007, when Martin Winterkorn left Audi to take over as chief executive officer at Volkswagen.
That decision is likely just one of many to come out of Volkswagen’s cuts to R&D.
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. According to reports coming in, it was last seen on 9th October and reported missing on 12th October.
All owners of the affected cars will be contacted by the automaker and vehicles will start being fixed in January 2016, at no cost to the owners.
The Brazilian recall is small compared to an estimated 11 million vehicles worldwide that may contain the banned software allowing them to temporarily reduce toxic emissions during tests.
“The way this is all coming out…is awesome”, Bernstein analyst Max Warburton said.
VW plans to recall about 8.5 million cars in Europe and 480,000 in the US.
Two people close to the matter told Reuters that Volkswagen has now also suspended Hanno Jelden, the head of powertrain electronics, a 22-year VW veteran with expertise in engine and transmission electronics as well as hard- and software control systems.
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At 1200 GMT, Volkswagen shares were up 0.9 percent at 101.25 euros.
