VW cuts car prices for customers affected by emissions scandal

German carmaker Volkswagen may offer discounts on new cars in the country if owners are involved in older models affected by the emissions scandal that has just been exposed, the DPA news agency reported.

Car production line inside the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg, Germany. (Source: AFP/VNA)

Europe’s largest carmaker has estimated that the cost of resolving the emissions scandal, including the recall of 8.5 million Volkswagen cars in Europe, will be more than 30 billion euros ($33 billion). Therefore, Volkswagen is trying to find ways to cut costs and stabilize sales to cope with the crisis.

Encouraging Volkswagen owners to buy new cars from the company could help the German auto giant boost sales and ease pressure on Volkswagen dealers to quickly fix the problem.

According to sources from Volkswagen and its dealers, this discount strategy will be aimed at owners of Volkswagen vehicles with 1.6-liter diesel engines, because these vehicles require higher hardware upgrade costs than software fixes on other models.

The discount only applies in Germany, where about 2.4 million Volkswagens fitted with emissions-cheating software have been sold.

According to the British Financial Times (FT) on October 25, EU officials were informed about the emissions cheating tricks of car manufacturers since 2013, but ignored this fraudulent behavior.

The newspaper cited a letter from European Union (EU) Environment Commissioner Janez Potocnik to EU Industrial Policy Commissioner Antonio Tajani in February 2013, in which Potocnik reported growing concerns that emissions measurements appeared to have been manipulated to comply with quality standards, ignoring the fact that actual emissions were significantly higher than designed.

Last September, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) discovered that Volkswagen used cheating software on 500,000 diesel-powered vehicles.

This software is adjusted so that when the vehicle is being tested for emissions, it will turn on the exhaust control system at full capacity, but automatically turn it off when the vehicle is running under normal conditions, so that the actual emissions exceed the prescribed limit.

Volkswagen has admitted to installing the software on 11 million of its vehicles, and this is one of the biggest scandals in the history of the auto industry, with the above fraud being fined up to more than 18 billion USD./.

According to Vietnam+