Volkswagen stock fell more than one percent after the release of the November sales numbers, which shows the Volkswagen Golf falling by 64 percent from the previous year, and the famed Beetle series of cars falling by a combined 39.3 percent from the previous year.
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The German automaker still faces an uphill battle to win back Japan’s auto buyers, but the decline in November was at least not as bad as the plunge in October, when sales dropped by half.
It wasn’t only diesel sales that fell, though.
The Ford Motor Co., the second biggest American automaker, said its sales rose 0.4 percent to 187,000 vehicles in November. Diesels normally make up around 20 percent of the brand’s sales.
It will cover around 198,500 Volkswagen models such as the Polo, Vento, Jetta, and Passat; 88,700 Skoda cars; and 36,500 Audi vehicles, including the A3 and A4 sedans that were sold between 2008 and the end of November this year.
The VW group’s worldwide sales had slipped 3.5% in October.
The scandal has widened, with the German automaker subsequently revealing that it had understated carbon dioxide emissions, including those for petrol engines, for up to 800,000 vehicles.
The lawsuit cited a report from Germany’s Bild am Sonntag newspaper in September that said VW’s internal probe had turned up a 2007 letter from Bosch that also warned against the possible illegal use of Bosch-supplied software technology.
New Zealand owners of Volkswagen vehicles are struggling to sell their cars because of the recent emissions scandal, says a lawyer representing some owners. But now many buyers have appeared to have taken advantage of deep discounts from VW on gas-powered cars and switched to those models instead of diesels, depleting inventories. Porsche’s sales were down 5 percent in November, while Audi’s sales were flat.
“Despite having two less selling days this November, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles US still recorded its best November sales since 2000 and our 68th consecutive month of year-over-year sales increases”, said Reid Bigland, head of US sales for Fiat Chrysler.
VW, in a statement, blamed the declines on the stop-sales orders.
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“It’s cheap to run ’em, it’s cheap to buy ’em and there’s more people with jobs, so more people need ’em”, Mark Wakefield, managing director and head of the automotive practice for consultant AlixPartners, told Bloomberg.
