Volkswagen to buy back cars with emission ‘irregularities’

Even before Volkswagen’s rigging of diesel-engine emissions tests came to light in mid-September, the Wolfsburg-based automaker, Europe’s largest, was losing ground in the region to competitors offering a wider range of sport utility vehicles.

FCA’s overall sales rose 7.7%. The U.S. Environmental Safety Agency states Volkswagen equipped 482,000 automobiles with software program in that turned off emissions controls & enhanced performance when the automobiles weren’t being tested.

Committee chair Louise Ellman said: “The Volkswagen scandal has raised serious concerns about whether vehicle type approval testing is fit for goal”.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few weeks (See what I did, there?), you already know about the diesel emissions scandal that’s rocked Volkswagen to the core.

Group sales, also including brands such as Czech division Skoda and luxury nameplate Audi, fell 3.5 percent to 831,300 cars, the seventh straight monthly decline, VW said.

Deliveries of Volkswagen group cars were down by 0.5% in October, but the German manufacturer remains the European leader with a market share of 25.1%. So any problem with diesels is likely to have a more striking effect in Europe.

The United Kingdom market, Europe’s second-biggest, actually shrank, by 1.1%, in October.

Retrofitting cars with SCR systems could cost several thousand dollars apiece, leading to suggestions that VW may have to buy them back.

The software is present in around 11 million diesel-powered vehicles globally, including in vehicles manufactured by other VW-owned firms such as Audi, SEAT, and Skoda.

In a statement, Porsche said it has “decided to voluntarily discontinue sales of model-year 2014 through 2016 Cayenne Diesel vehicles until further notice”, and that the company is “working intensively to resolve this matter as soon as possible”. Therefore, in order to prevent such “inconsistencies”, as there are called by VW, EPA will improve its testing procedures of new cars by evaluating them under real-world driving environment, The NY Times reports.

Volkswagen said it was still trying to determine which older cars are affected.

Volkswagen announced it has discovered what it calls “inconsistencies” in the carbon dioxide emission levels of a number of engines, Automotive News reports.