“What we definitely won’t do is make cuts at the expense of our future”, Mueller said in a press conference at the company’s Wolfsburg, Germany headquarters. It also announced Friday that it would cut capital spending by $1.1 billion annually, delay the next-generation of its Phaeton electric vehicle, pause building a new German design center and potentially alter plans for a paint shop in Mexico, USA Today reported.
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Later on Friday, VW will be outlining its plan to fix the vehicles in a proposal to the Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board, the AP reports.
Bosch, the tier one German automotive parts supplier, is reportedly under investigation in the United States of America for its potential role in Volkswagen’s dieselgate scandal.
Volkswagen has admitted understating Carbon dioxide emissions, and thus understating fuel consumption, for about 800,000 vehicles sold in Europe, and possibly more. The company also has withdrawn its application to get emissions controls approved on four-cylinder diesels for the 2016 model year, and the government is investigating whether VW cheated on those.
VW is engulfed in a huge pollution scandal that was initially centred on so-called defeat devices – sophisticated software fitted into diesel engines to skew the results of tests for nitrogen oxide emissions.
Before the emissions scandal hit, Volkswagen had said it meant to spend around €17bn a year through to 2019 on new vehicles and technology.
The investment plan was only for 2016, rather than the traditional five years provided in the past. “Anything that is not absolutely necessary will be canceled or postponed”, said the automaker’s new CEO Matthias Mueller after a high level meeting Friday.
Bernd Osterloh, VW’s powerful works council chief, said in a statement that the supervisory board would take another look at investment and capacity plans at its first meeting next year.
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Volkswagen wouldn’t comment Thursday on a possible fix. Worldwide, there are an estimated 11 million cars with affected EA189 engines, including nearly 100,000 in Australia. It said investment for the group’s two Chinese joint ventures, which are self-funded, would be steady at 4.4 billion euros annually.
