VW’s engine-development unit remained the focus of investigations, Poetsch said.
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Wednesday’s board meeting will also hear from the head of the company’s Audi brand on what steps he plans to take to fix luxury diesel cars fitted with software found to have enabled its engines to evade USA emissions limits. “Even though we can not prevent misconduct by individuals once and for all, in the future it will be very hard to bypass our processes”.
“Whether we will have a minor economic impact, depends on the results of the remeasurement exercise”, VW said.
“We are not talking about a one-off mistake, but a whole chain of mistakes that was not interrupted at any point along the time line”, he told reporters at Volkswagen headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany.
Matthias Mueller, the chief executive, said the company’s financial outlook was “tense” but “not dramatic”. Today, it confirms that only nine model variants have been affected.
“The suspicion that fuel consumption figures of current production vehicles had been unlawfully changed was not confirmed”, the company said in a statement. In addition, Volkswagen announced that it will create a new committee, responsible for authorizing new emissions software in the future. “As serious as this crisis is, it is also offering us an opportunity to drive much-needed structural change and we will use that opportunity”, Mueller said, via Reuters.
Just days later, Volkswagen admitted that the same software was installed on almost 11 million vehicles world-wide.
Signs of the mounting legal woes ahead were revealed on Tuesday, when 500 civil lawsuits against the company in the United States were assigned to a court in California, despite VW and the Department of Justice asking for the cases to be sent to Detroit.
“There is no reason whatsoever to get rid of these assets”, said Mr Mueller, who oversees brands from Ducati motorcycles to Scania heavy trucks and Bugatti supercars. He said he would apologize for the situation, but added: “I don’t think I will be going down on my knees there…”
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“The scale of VW’s problems appears to be declining”, said NordLB analyst Frank Schope.
