Embattled German carmaker Volkswagen (XETRA: VOW3-DE) officially named Porsche boss Matthias Mueller its new CEO on Friday.
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“If you take 11 million vehicles over the course of eight years and do the math on their exposure to folks around the world”, he said, “the health effects are tremendous”.
The new CEO will also need to improve communications with dealers and customers, with many frustrated that Volkswagen has yet to say which models and construction years are affected by the crisis and whether cars will have to be refitted.
Volkswagen says it is reorganizing its North America business under Winfried Vahland, until now chairman of the board of directors at Skoda.
Volkswagen shares have plunged as much as 40 percent, wiping tens of billions of euros off its market value, since US regulators said on 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.
Earlier this week, it was discovered that millions of diesel-powered vehicles made by Volkswagen AG were equipped with software created to circumvent US emissions regulations.
“Rather than delay diesel introduction as others, including Honda and Mazda, did, Volkswagen decided to go ahead, but it appears that it was unable to reach emissions targets as it had hoped”, Nerad said.
So far, the illegal software has only been found on Volkswagen’s 1.6-liter and 2.0-liter diesel engines. “So we will introduce even tougher compliance and governance standards in the company”.
The European Commission urged all member states to investigate the use of so-called defeat devices by carmakers to cheat emissions tests and said there would be “zero tolerance” of any wrongdoing.
AVL List GmbH, tested cars for VW brands around the world, not just those intended for the USA market, the person said.
Later, Mr Dobrindt said 2.8 million vehicles in Germany were among those containing the software at the centre of the emissions scandal.
Campaign group Friends of the Earth welcomed the United Kingdom investigation and called for the provision of “all necessary resources” to carry out new tests “wholly independent of auto companies”.
Jeff Thinnes, a former vice president for Daimler-Benz, told ABC News that “often these types of major corporate transgressions start with the belief that [a company] may be able to circumvent the law”.
“The hairier the problem, the more excited these people will be”.
The supervisory board of Europe’s biggest automaker is meeting on Friday to decide a successor to chief executive Martin Winterkorn, who resigned on Wednesday.
The company could be heavily fined and hit with class-action lawsuits costing billions.
Norwegian authorities have launched an investigation to find out whether the Volkswagen emissions-rigging scandal affects the Nordic country.
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Volkswagen said in a statement on its website it was working to answer these questions.
