VW Emissions Scandal Starts to Affect Car Sales

The Volkswagen emissions scandal continues to cause trouble for the German automaker, with hefty payouts and recalls, but now, car sales have slowed as trust in the automaker starts to dwindle.

The scandal originally started when the automaker was found to have used software on nearly 11 million diesel vehicles globally to cheat emissions testing. In September, VW admitted that the software vastly understated the actual amount of nitrogen oxide that the vehicles were producing.

Last week, Bernd Osterloh, VW’s work council chief told reporters in an interview that there was “caution in buying. The CO2 issue has triggered a greater crisis of confidence than the nitrogen issue.” This comes after the automaker made a statement earlier this month that VW manipulated the CO2 emissions in 800,000 vehicles, most of which were sold in Europe.

But perhaps even more problematic, Volkswagen went on record claiming that the emissions scandal affected both diesel vehicles also gas-powered models. In October, global sales for the automaker dropped by 3.5 percent, while in Germany, sales managed to increase by 0.5 percent.

With the slowing of sales, job security for plant workers has been called into question, but Osterloh went on to say in the interview that “Employment is safe provided we are selling cars. If we sell no cars, it will get relatively difficult. We will have to look at incoming orders of the next days, weeks and months.”

Source: Reuters

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