Report: Volkswagen suspends sales in the US amid diesel controversy
Last week, a major report struck the news sphere regarding Volkswagen, who was accused of a huge infraction involving the Environmental Protection Agency’s test of emissions quality on Volkswagen’s TDI diesel models.
Volkswagen AG was specifically accused of using altered software to allow certain turbodiesel models to “cheat” on their EPA emissions tests, leading to around 482,000 cars being recalled in the US market.
“These violations are very serious, not only because illegal defeat devices result in excess emissions many times the allowable standard, but also because VW was concealing the facts from EPA, the State of California and consumers,” commented Cynthia Giles, an assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance told AutomotiveNews.
The infraction is a direct violation to EPA’s California-based Clean Air Act. As a result of this finding, Volkswagen suspended the sales of its diesel models in the US and is currently being scrutinized to possibly face a fine of around $37,500 per car affected. Multiply that by the some 482,000 cars in question, and that amounts to a lot of fricken money.
A quick plug on the egmCarTech calculator amounts the total to being $18,075,000,000. That’s a number to even put a company like Volkswagen in a lot of doo-doo, as that’s more than half of the company’s net worth as a whole. Though the violation has yet to be finalized as the situation is still currently under investigation.
“I personally am deeply sorry that we have broken the trust of our customers and the public,” Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn mentioned in a public statement.
– By: Chris Chin
Source: AutomotiveNews