Volkswagen: “CO2-gate? Just kidding you.”

Emission - Picture courtesy FAZ.net

This morning, Germany’s usually well-informed Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung had a gem of a headline: “CO2 manipulation at VW vanishes into thin air.” According to the report, it was largely a false alarm. A few hours later, Volkswagen issued a statement, saying that the CO2 issue is “largely concluded.”

On November 3, Volkswagen informed an aghast public that roundabout 800,000 Volkswagen cars in circulation may produce more CO2 than stated on the paperwork. The Dailykanban reader knows that in Europe, CO2 emissions have an immediate effect on the car tax. A little NOx here and there can be overlooked, but the line is being drawn at understated taxes. In various EU countries, police raided Volkswagen offices. Volkswagen begged that the tax bills are sent straight to Wolfsburg, and not to each of the 800,000. And now, poof.

Says Volkswagen:

“The suspicion that the fuel consumption figures of current production vehicles had been unlawfully changed was not confirmed. During internal remeasurements slight deviations were found on just nine model variants of the Volkswagen brand.”

The affected cars are the 2016 models of

  • Polo 1.0l TSI BlueMotion 70kW
  • Scirocco 2.0l TDI BMT 135kWJ
  • Jetta 1.2l TSI BMT 77kW,
  • Jetta 2.0l TDI BMT 81kW
  • Golf Convertible 2.0l TDI BMT 81kW
  • Golf 2.0l TDI BMT 110kW
  • Passat Alltrack 2.0l TSI 4MOTION BMT 162kW
  • Passat Variant 2.0l TDI SCR 4MOTION BMT 176kW
  • Passat Variant 1.4l TSI ACT BMT 110kW

Volkswagen built extra reserves of EUR 2 billion to pay for the CO2 fallout. As “the negative impact on earnings of €2 billion that was originally expected has not been confirmed,” the money can be used elsewhere.

Now that the CO2 issue has vanished into thin air, after dieselgate was resolved with a coffee strainer and a few lines of code, all should be good at Volkswagen. Or not?

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