The Budd-e has Internet connections to smart home devices and can be charged to 80 per cent of its battery capacity in about 15 minutes, VW says. It’ll sport a top speed of 93 miles per hour, but since it is a concept vehicle it may never reach the road.
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The BUDD-e concept van was later unveiled, which is essentially a long-distance electric microbus.
Another VW unveiling was the e-Golf Touch with a “next generation” infotainment system that it says shows technologies showcased in 2015 are now close to production as it brings gesture and voice control to mass production vehicles.
The unveilings followed an apology from Diess for the diesel emissions scandal that is now engulfing the company worldwide.
The U.S. Department of Justice announced on January 4 that acting on behalf of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, it had filed a civil complaint at a federal court in Detroit, Michigan against “Volkswagen AG, Audi AG, Volkswagen Group of America, Inc., Volkswagen Group of America Chattanooga Operations, LLC, Porsche AG, and Porsche Cars North America, Inc”.
But the EPA didn’t sound as optimistic, issuing a statement Thursday (NZ time) saying that talks with VW so far “have not produced an acceptable way forward”.
Deiss said that 8.5 million Volkswagen cars were affected in Europe and that these cars should all be fixed in 2016.
But getting a fix approved by regulators in the United States to bring the offending cars in line with the rules has proved much more hard for Volkswagen due to stricter rules about NOx emissions in the US.
Volkswagen is withholding internal emails from a group of USA state attorneys general investigating the German automaker’s use of illegal diesel emissions software, a source briefed on the matter said Friday.
Fixes could be complicated and take several years.
“The complaint alleges that Volkswagen equipped certain 2.0 liter vehicles with software that detects when the auto is being tested for compliance with EPA emissions standards and turns on full emissions controls only during that testing process”. The devices detect when a vehicle is being tested and lowers engine performance to reduce pollution.
The head of the German consumer associations’ federation, Klaus Mueller, said that a buy-back option would offer a “pragmatic and quick solution” for vehicle owners in Germany, as well.
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The company has already been sued by US Department of Justice for a whopping $46 billion as their vehicles “cause emissions to exceed its standards”, but also that it also led to a violation of the Clean Air Act “by selling, introducing into commerce, or importing into the United States motor vehicles that are designed differently from what Volkswagen had stated in applications for certification”.
