VW Executives If any vehicle failed to meet emissions targets, a team of engineers from Volkswagen headquarters or luxury brand Audi’s base in Ingolstadt was flown in, the person said.
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Volkswagen acknowledged last week it had deliberately deceived officials about how much its diesel cars polluted. “My most urgent task is to win back trust for the Volkswagen Group – by leaving no stone unturned and with maximum transparency, as well as drawing the right conclusions from the current situation”, Müller, 62, said in a statement.
However, VW didn’t explain that it hoped to satisfy government regulators, who were growing increasingly sceptical about the reason for discrepancies between lab emissions test results and real world pollution. If VW was liable to customers who paid an average premium of $2,000, the company would owe another $22 billion.
According to the Audi spokesman, around 1.42 million Audi vehicles in Western Europe are fitted with the device, with 577,000 in Germany.
The German company has set aside €6.5bn (£4.7bn) in its third-quarter accounts to help cover the costs of any fallout.
The staff changes at the Volkswagen Group are far from being over as now it seems Audi’s development chief Ulrich Hackenberg along with VW’s R&D boss Heinz-Jakob Neusser and Porsche’s development head Wolfgang Hatz are being penalized by the supervisory board amid the dieselgate.
Hatz has been in charge of Porsche R&D since 2011 and has previously been the figurehead behind Volkswagen’s engine and transmission developments.
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AVL List spokesman Michael Ksela confirmed that the company supplied equipment for the Oxnard, California site. These stealth software makes the vehicles appear “clean” during emission tests, but not so in actual driving.
