Volkswagen Loses Global Sales Lead to Toyota Amid Diesel Scandal
- Volkswagen AG lost the lead in global auto sales to Toyota Motor Corp. after claiming the No. 1 spot three months ago, as the German carmaker braces for consumer blowback from a widening emissions-cheating scandal.
- Toyota said Monday it sold 7.49 million vehicles this year through September, topping the 7.43 million that Volkswagen reported earlier this month. Deliveries declined 1.5 percent for both Toyota and Volkswagen.
- The results include less than two weeks of sales reporting by Volkswagen after its admission to rigging diesel engines with software that deceived regulators about pollution levels. While the German automaker led Toyota in global sales through the first six months, it’s now readying repairs to 11 million vehicles worldwide and has stopped sales of diesel models in several markets as it brings engines into compliance. The company is also facing a slowdown in demand in China, its largest market, with its namesake brand declining 7.4 percent in the first nine months.
- “Toyota will be the No. 1 for this year,” Koji Endo, an auto analyst at Advanced Research Japan, said by phone. “VW may be facing sales difficulties due to the scandal toward next year in Europe and the U.S., and I don’t see the Chinese market coming back anytime soon.” Winterkorn’s Push
- Volkswagen’s emissions scandal led to the resignation of Chief Executive Officer Martin Winterkorn, who had pushed the company to surpass Toyota and General Motors Co. and become the world leader by global sales. GM’s deliveries dropped 1.9 percent to 7.2 million vehicles during the first nine months of the year.
- As Volkswagen stumbles, Toyota is now preparing to begin deliveries of its updated Prius hatchback. After almost seven years without a redesign, the company is promising a sportier ride for its top-selling hybrid, an improvement in fuel economy of about 10 percent and an even bigger boost for an Eco version of the model. Sales begin in Japan before the end of the year.
- Toyota planned to add about 1,400 workers at factories in Japan to ramp up production of the new Prius and its updated Land Cruiser sport utility vehicle, people familiar with the matter said in August. As one of the top-selling models within Toyota’s lineup built exclusively in the company’s home market, the Prius will help boost Japan exports. Toyota’s also betting improved acceleration and added safety features will lift demand for the $80,000 Land Cruiser, its most expensive SUV, in markets including the U.S.
Volkswagen Testing Takata Air Bags as U.S. Weighs Wider Recalls
- Volkswagen AG said it is collecting Takata Corp. air bags from its vehicles for testing and told the U.S. regulator that getting replacement parts would take more than a year if recalls are expanded.
- The need to develop and test new air bag inflators and a shortage of production capacity would contribute to the wait, Volkswagen said in the Oct. 15 letter to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The automaker listed VW, Bentley, Porsche, Audi and Lamborghini models sold in the U.S. using about 2.4 million Takata air bag inflators.
- The outlook for lagging parts supply was included in letters to NHTSA from Volkswagen and six other automakers made public last week. NHTSA had sent letters to the companies last month inquiring about their use of Takata air bags with ammonium nitrate propellant. Takata has said its propellant appears to be one of many factors contributing to air bag ruptures that have killed eight people and prompted recalls of about 19 million vehicles.
- A NHTSA order to expand Takata air bag recalls could deal another blow to Volkswagen as the manufacturer prepares to retrofit 11 million diesel vehicles worldwide that were rigged to meet emissions tests. The company is considering a combination of software and hardware repairs that could take more than a year, Michael Horn, Volkswagen’s U.S. chief executive, told a House committee this month.
- In its letter, Volkswagen proposed a meeting with NHTSA in early November to discuss “the Takata matter and the various concurrent inquiries and requests” involving the company.
- Volkswagen said it’s planning to retrieve side air bag inflators for analysis after one ruptured in a 2015 VW Tiguan sport utility vehicle. The company reported that incident to NHTSA in July. Its Audi division has collected 58 Takata air bag modules that are now being tested, according to the letter.
- There are no indications of a defect in Volkswagen vehicles, and the company said it isn’t planning a recall. Separately, Daimler AG and Jaguar Land Rover said they’re not testing air bags in their vehicles or planning recalls.
- Tesla Motors Inc.’s answers to NHTSA’s September letter were redacted from its response letter, which cites confidential business information. Spartan Motors Inc., a maker of fire trucks, said in its letter that the company hadn’t been made aware that it should be included in the recalls.
- Suzuki Motor Corp. said its vehicles sold in the U.S. don’t use Takata air bag inflators with ammonium nitrate propellant. Volvo Group said it doesn’t use Takata air bag inflators in products sold in the U.S.
VW CEO Will Join Merkel on Trip to China Amid Emissions Scandal
by: Jack Clark
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For any other company that would be a wonky distraction from its core business. At
- When Google-parent Alphabet Inc. reported eye-popping earnings last week its executives couldn’t stop talking up the company’s investments in machine learning and artificial intelligence.
- Google, the two are intertwined. Artificial intelligence sits at the extreme end of machine learning, which sees people create software that can learn about the world. Google has been one of the biggest corporate sponsors of AI, and has invested heavily in it for videos, speech, translation and, recently, search.
- For the past few months, a “very large fraction” of the millions of queries a second that people type into the company’s search engine have been interpreted by an artificial intelligence system, nicknamed RankBrain, said Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist with the company, outlining for the first time the emerging role of AI in search.
- RankBrain uses artificial intelligence to embed vast amounts of written language into mathematical entities -- called vectors -- that the computer can understand. If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly, making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries. Unique Questions
- The system helps Mountain View, California-based Google deal with the 15 percent of queries a day it gets which its systems have never seen before, he said. For example, it’s adept at dealing with ambiguous queries, like, “What’s the title of the consumer at the highest level of a food chain?” And RankBrain’s usage of AI means it works differently than the other technologies in the search engine.
- “The other signals, they’re all based on discoveries and insights that people in information retrieval have had, but there’s no learning,” Corrado said.
- Keeping an edge in search is critical to Google, and making its systems smarter and better able to deal with ambiguous queries is one of the ways it can keep a grip on time-starved users, who are now mostly searching using their mobile devices. “If you say Google people think of search,” Corrado said. Multiple Tools
- RankBrain is one of the “hundreds” of signals that go into an algorithm that determines what results appear on a Google search page and where they are ranked, Corrado said. In the few months it has been deployed, RankBrain has become the third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query, he said.
by: Jack Clark
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“I was surprised,” Corrado said. “I would describe this as having gone better than we would have expected.”
- The addition of RankBrain to search is part of a half-decade-long push by Google into AI, as the company seeks to embed the technology into every aspect of its business. “Machine learning is a core transformative way by which we are rethinking everything we are doing,” said Google’s Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai on the company’s earnings call last week. Smarter Than Your Average Engineer
- So far, RankBrain is living up to its AI hype. Google search engineers, who spend their days crafting the algorithms that underpin the search software, were asked to eyeball some pages and guess which they thought Google’s search engine technology would rank on top. While the humans guessed correctly 70 percent of the time, RankBrain had an 80 percent success rate.
- Typical Google users agree. In experiments, the company found that turning off this feature “would be as damaging to users as forgetting to serve half the pages on Wikipedia,” Corrado said.
- Getting here wasn’t easy. The rollout of RankBrain represents a yearlong effort by a team that started with about five Google engineers, including search specialist Yonghui Wu, and deep-learning expert Thomas Strohmann. It took a long time to make sure the system was ranking things correctly.
- The effort expanded to dozens of people after Amit Singhal, the company’s senior vice president of search, gave the green light for it to be rolled out across all of Google search in early 2015.
- “It’s very carefully monitored,” Corrado said, nothing that Google periodically updates the system by feeding it a load of new data to help it better reason with new concepts. Key Products
- Google’s decision to deploy AI into search shows that companies are starting to entrust their most valuable businesses to systems controlled in part by machine intelligence. Facebook Inc. uses AI techniques to filter the newsfeed that comprises the personalized homepage of the social network and Microsoft Corp. is using artificial intelligence to increase the capabilities of its Bing search engine. Microsoft declined to be more specific about whether it’s using a similar approach to Google.
- “Search is the cornerstone of Google,” Corrado said. “Machine learning isn’t just a magic syrup that you pour onto a problem and it makes it better. It took a lot of thought and care in order to build something that we really thought was worth doing.”
VW Downgrade Underlines Climate Change Role on Ratings, S&P Says
- Environmental and climate risks are increasingly impacting corporate credit ratings as the example of Volkswagen AG’s downgrade this month demonstrates, rating agency Standard & Poor’s said in a report.
- The rating company identified 299 cases where environmental and climate developments were a significant factor in influencing a revision or rating analysis, the company said on Oct. 21. It examined 38 industries since 2013, when it last changed its methodology.
- A rating move or outlook change occurred in 56 cases, with most changes being linked to the oil industry, regulated utilities and unregulated power and gas producers, it said.
- S&P downgraded Volkswagen to A- from A on Oct. 12, citing the company’s admission that it manipulated diesel engine emissions.
- “Alleged illegal behavior in the U.S., the inadequacy of internal controls, and the management of environmental and social risks were factors in our revised assessment of VW’s management and governance, which was the reason for the downgrade,” S&P said in the report.
- Rating changes can be positive, the report noted. S&P in April 2014 upgraded Tenneco Inc. to BB+ from BB citing “its leadership position in clear-air products, an area that stands to benefit from stricter vehicle-emissions regulation and accounts for two-thirds of the company’s revenues.”
Volkswagen to Audit Compliance With U.S. Death-Reporting Law
by: Jeff Green ,Margaret Cronin Fisk, Jeff Plungis
- Volkswagen AG, which reported death and injury claims at the lowest rate of any major automaker in the U.S. in the last decade, agreed to an independent audit of its compliance with a law requiring timely reporting of those claims.
- The company will coordinate with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, make the findings available to NHTSA and work with the agency on any recommendations, said Jeannine Ginivan, a VW spokeswoman, in an e-mailed statement Friday.
- The average reporting rate of the 11 biggest automakers during the past decade was nine times higher than Volkswagen’s, according to an analysis of government data by financial advisory firm Stout Risius Ross Inc. at the request of Bloomberg News. To ensure fair comparisons among carmakers of different sizes, the rates were calculated per million vehicles on the road. The automakers’ average was 306 per million, compared with 34 for Volkswagen.
- The reporting system “is a way for NHTSA to get the information it needs to make timely decisions on recalls,” said Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Washington-based watchdog Center for Auto Safety. “In Volkswagen’s case, it appears the underreporting is sufficient to require a fine.”
- Safety compliance issues would be an added challenge for Volkswagen as it scrambles to respond to fallout from its admission last month that it purposely cheated on U.S. diesel-pollution rules. The automaker faces regulatory investigations in the U.S., Europe, Japan and China and a criminal probe in the U.S. related to the emissions cheating.
- “In discussions with Volkswagen officials, NHTSA requested that VW perform a third-party audit as part of its effort to ensure compliance with safety reporting requirements,” Gordon Trowbridge, a spokesman for the agency, said in a statement. “The agency welcomes VW’s commitment to do so and will continue to coordinate with VW and other manufacturers to ensure that such reporting helps us in our mission to protect the traveling public.” Honda Fined
- This year, two of Volkswagen’s competitors, Honda Motor Co. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV’s U.S. unit, have said they underreported claims to the U.S. government, and Honda paid a fine.
- In January, Honda was fined a record $70 million for underreporting to the same NHTSA database. Fiat Chrysler’s U.S. unit last month said it violated the requirements of the same law. Both companies were reporting at a rate at least twice that of Volkswagen, according to the Stout Risius data compiled for Bloomberg.
- NHTSA approved Rodney Slater, former U.S. transportation secretary, as an independent monitor for Fiat Chrysler, the automaker said Friday.
- In July, Fiat Chrysler agreed to pay a record $105 million penalty after a government investigation into how the company handled 23 recalls involving more than 11 million cars and trucks. As part of that accord, Fiat Chrysler said it would hire an independent monitor to ensure it no longer delays safety recalls.
- NHTSA is focused on improving the system of reporting potential defects, both through monitoring automaker reports and making its analysis of the data more effective, Trowbridge said. The agency is implementing recommendations of an audit by the Transportation Department’s inspector general, including more actively following up on fatality reports and lawsuits and is seeking additional funding for more staff, he said.
Volkswagen Hires New Strategy Head as Diesel Scandal Lingers
by: Christoph Rauwald
- Volkswagen AG hired restructuring expert Thomas Sedran as new head of group strategy, adding another external executive to top management to help the German automaker recover from the diesel-emissions scandal.
- Sedran, a former executive at General Motors Co.’s European division Opel, will join VW on Nov. 1 and report to Chief Executive Officer Matthias Mueller, the Wolfsburg-based manufacturer said in a statement.
- The appointment is Volkswagen’s second in a month of someone bringing in expertise from a competing carmaker as Mueller overhauls a highly centralized management structure following revelations that a line of diesel engines was equipped with software designed to fool official emissions testers. The company recruited Christine Hohmann-Dennhardt, the legal-affairs and compliance chief at Daimler AG, to take an identical job in an unusual deal that involved negotiations between the manufacturers’ chairmen.
- Volkswagen is reorganizing as Mueller readies a recall of as many as 11 million vehicles worldwide while proceeding with a strategy to give brand and regional managers more decision-making power. Departures have included Mueller’s immediate predecessor as CEO, Martin Winterkorn; sales chief Christian Klingler; and Winfried Vahland, the head of the Skoda brand who decided against taking a new post overseeing Volkswagen’s North American business, in addition to a half-dozen suspensions of engineers in connection with a probe into the software rigging.
- Sedran, 51, previously worked as a consultant at Roland Berger and restructuring specialist AlixPartners before being appointed in 2012 to run Opel strategy in 2012. He served as interim CEO of the Ruesselsheim, Germany-based division after the abrupt departure of Karl-Friedrich Stracke and oversaw European operations of GM’s Chevrolet and Cadillac brands starting in mid-2013. He holds an MBA from the University of Hohenheim and a doctorate from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Germany Braces for $3.4 Billion Tax Shortfall on VW Crisis
by: Elisabeth Behrmann, Angela Cullen
- The towns that became synonymous with Volkswagen AG’s rise to the pinnacle of the auto industry are feeling the pinch of the diesel-emissions scandal, freezing spending on projects such as playgrounds amid the carmaker’s abrupt fall from grace.
- Wolfsburg, the northern German town founded in 1938 to build the “people’s car,” is halting 30 projects, including the new playgrounds, an ice rink and road work totaling 17 million euros ($19 million), in anticipation of lower tax revenue from the company employing half its 125,000 population. Nearby Braunschweig and the Bavarian town of Ingolstadt, home to VW’s Audi brand, have also reined in their budgets.
- “Even if our town is free of debt and we were able to put provisions aside, we’re expecting a significant drop in commercial tax revenue,” said Wolfsburg Mayor Klaus Mohrs, who has also implemented a hiring freeze as he can assess the extent of the fallout. “We’re putting every project up for scrutiny.”
- Communities across Germany, where the automaker has 271,000 employees, are bracing for the impact of the scandal on their budgets. Germany’s Institute for Economic Research estimates that VW’s commercial and corporate tax payments over the next two years will be 3 billion euros lower as a result of the diesel emissions cheating scandal. It’s especially acute for towns where VW has large numbers of employees because there’s also a concern that jobs may soon be on the line.
- Along with those working directly for VW, many more depend on the 12-brand automotive company as the fallout threatens suppliers and services from Stuttgart in the southwest to Leipzig in the east. About 75,000 jobs in Germany depend on diesel technology, Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel told reporters in Berlin last week.
- The fallout is spreading to other industries, with many producers and traders of metals such as copper and aluminum seeing “significant risk” from VW’s crisis, according to a survey of members of German metal trader association VDM. Forty-seven percent said they expect a weaker fourth quarter, while 9 percent believe it will be stronger.
- VW’s engine plant with more than 7,000 workers in Salzgitter, about 57 kilometers (35 miles) southeast of Hanover, has already cut one weekly shift in anticipation of falling demand. Management is also considering reducing the temporary workforce, Bernd Osterloh, works council chief and a supervisory board member, told newswire dpa this week.
- “We don’t know what consequences the crisis will have,” Chief Executive Officer Matthias Mueller said in a speech earlier this month regarding possible job cuts. “But we’ll fight to keep them as small as possible. We’ll do everything to keep employment levels in the company.” Double Whammy
- German municipalities derive funding through commercial tax from local businesses as well as levies on land. They’re also allocated a portion of the income and sales taxes individuals pay. Any job cuts would be a double whammy because on top of the lost revenue, those without a job would need unemployment benefits.
- “Wolfsburg can probably deal with a tax shortfall with a number of measures like delaying investments,” said Gerhard Lippert, a spokesman at the Lower Saxony branch of the German Taxpayers Federation. “If the town can get through this without job cuts remains to be seen.” Hanover, Salzgitter and Emden, where VW has a factory, are also at risk, Lippert said.
- In Wolfsburg, VW employs more than 60,000 people to make the Golf hatchback, Tiguan sports utility vehicle and van-like Touran. The picture is similar in Ingolstadt, a town of 131,000 north of Munich where about 40,000 people work at the local Audi factory.
- Ingolstadt, with an annual budget of about 500 million euros, is setting aside 15 percent of its funds as a precaution, according to a town spokesman. In Braunschweig, authorities have decided to limit spending on vehicle maintenance and staff training for now.
- The scandal "mustn’t lead to any disadvantages for workers," who are not to blame for wrongdoing at VW, Gabriel said at a labor union conference on Sunday. "It’s not their fault that someone established a wrong corporate culture there."
Ex-Porsche CEO: VW Trial Prosecutors Are ‘Helping Hedge Funds’
by: Karin Matussek
- Former Porsche SE Chief Executive Officer Wendelin Wiedeking rejected charges he lied about the company’s plan to acquire Volkswagen AG in 2008, telling Stuttgart judges that prosecutors are effectively functioning as agents of hedge funds suing over the failed takeover bid.
- Wiedeking addressed the court on the first day of trial Thursday after prosecutors laid out charges he and former Porsche Chief Financial Officer Holger Haerter misled the markets half a dozen times, including withholding details about options used to quietly buy shares before disclosing the bid for what was then the automaker’s larger rival.
- The effort, which later collapsed amid the credit crunch of the financial crisis, initially burned hedge funds by driving up the cost of Volkswagen shares, as short sellers increased their positions to repay borrowed stock in bets that VW would fall. Wiedeking said the charges were only designed to help investor lawsuits seeking as much as 5 billion euros ($5.7 billion).
- “With these charges, prosecutors are obviously trying to help hedge funds to turn the tides in their unsuccessful civil suits," Wiedeking said. "The idea that there was a hidden plan to take over VW all along is absurd."
- Prosecutors claim Wiedeking and Haerter lied when Porsche denied five times in 2008 that it was seeking to acquire VW. They also deceived markets in their surprise Oct. 26, 2008 statement which disclosed that Porsche held 74.1 percent of VW and had now decided to acquire a 75 percent stake and control of the company under German law. Price Hedges
- The two men had decided already seven months earlier to go ahead with the plan to acquire 75 percent of VW, prosecutor Aniello Ambrosio told the court. As early as 2005, Porsche had deals with Maple Bank GmbH to hedge against VW share price movements. In the months after March 2008, Haerter negotiated with several banks about financing the acquisition of a dominant stake in VW, he said.
by: Karin Matussek
- “The company’s communication strategy was aimed at veiling the intention to acquire VW,”’ Ambrosio said.
- Both Wiedeking and Haerter said all five denials mirrored what had been decided at the time. While part of the reason to issue the Oct. 26, 2008, statement was to inform short sellers about the holdings, it was only on that Sunday that the management board, consisting of only the two men, decided to go for the full 75 percent controlling stake.
- "I was on vacation and we made the decision by phone," said Wiedeking. "Now, you may find it strange to make such a decision by phone, but during” the time of the Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. bankruptcy, “this wasn’t unusual."
- Haerter, who also denied the charges, said it was his duty as CFO to gather relevant information for any future steps the company may want to take, including whether banks would finance a takeover at all. Spectacular Failure
- The takeover plan backfired spectacularly in the wake of the financial crisis, drying up loans that Wiedeking and Haerter needed to finance the deal. The takeover bid collapsed and Porsche itself had to be rescued by VW, which bought Porsche’s manufacturing operations, leaving behind only a holding company with the sports-car maker’s legendary name.
- Wiedeking and Haerter only announced their intentions on Oct. 26, 2008, because Volkswagen shares had fallen 50 percent over two weeks, complicating their options strategy. Under the deal, Porsche’s payout burden increased as VW shares fell, decreasing its cash from 4.2 billion euros to 326 million euros within days, according to another prosecutor, Heiko Wagenpfeil. Deceptive Statements “The statement was deceptive,” said Wagenpfeil. “At the time, Porsche wasn’t able to keep up the strategy anymore."
- Both defendants denied the company would have come under financial threats had the VW shares fallen further. Haerter said under the options deals, Maple also eventually had payments due to Porsche so that no collapse would have been imminent at the time.
- The trial starts as Volkswagen fights a new scandal over revelations that the automaker cheated on emissions tests. While VW is insulated from the case, the surviving Porsche corporate entity is still its biggest shareholder.
- Porsche is an associated party to the Stuttgart case. It could forfeit any financial gains from the alleged actions if Wiedeking and Haerter are found guilty. Criminal market manipulation carries a sentence of as long as five years.
- Porsche’s lawyers told the court the they won’t make a separate statement on the charges.
VW Crisis Makes ECB Company Bond Purchases Harder, Barclays Says
by: Sally Bakewell
- The Volkswagen AG emissions-cheating scandal will make it harder for the European Central Bank to extend its asset-purchase stimulus plan to corporate bonds, according to Barclays Plc.
- The crisis at the German automaker would be a “significant consideration” if the ECB planned to add corporate debt to its 1.1 trillion-euro ($1.2 trillion) quantitative easing program, according to Zoso Davies, a credit strategist at Barclays in London.
- “The recent scandals are a reminder that no matter how well you did your investigative work, you could not have known what was coming,” Davies said. “In the near term, it will be very hard for the ECB to add corporate bonds to its asset-purchase program without also at the same time explaining how it’s going to mitigate the risk from another corporate scandal.”
by: Sally Bakewell
- The ECB expanded its stimulus plan in July to include bonds of state-backed borrowers such as Italian utilities Enel SpA and Snam SpA. While it previously said the list of eligible agencies may be broadened if needed, policy makers have refrained from buying debt of private corporations because of concerns about liquidity.
- President Mario Draghi signaled on Thursday the ECB may extend QE, which began in March and is due to run until September 2016 or until inflation is on a sustained path back toward the goal of just under 2 percent.
- The Bank of France removed two notes secured by VW auto loans from a list of asset-backed debt it was seeking to buy under the program amid the emissions scandal, two people familiar with the matter said last month.
- A spokesman for VW, which said last week it will recall about 8.5 million vehicles, was not immediately available for comment the scandal’s impact on QE. ECB officials declined to comment.
Merkel Calls for Full Transparency From VW in Emissions Scandal
by: Patrick Donahue, Christoph Rauwald
- German Chancellor Angela Merkel called on Volkswagen AG to move quickly to clarify what happened in the emissions cheating scandal as the automaker’s top labor leader said VW should consider reducing the number of models on offer as costs from the crisis balloon.
- "There has to be swift transparency so that credibility can be restored," Merkel said Wednesday at a labor union event in Frankfurt, adding that Germany’s reputation as a good place to do business was also on the line.
- Bernd Osterloh, works council chief and a VW supervisory board member, told German newswire dpa that the board will provide more details as soon as a special committee completes a review of the matter. Osterloh also said that management should look again at a 2014 plan from labor leaders to focus on more profitable models and reduce the 12-brand behemoth’s complexity to lower spending.
- New Chief Executive Officer Matthias Mueller said this month that, while VW doesn’t need a revolution, he’s delaying or canceling non-essential projects to cut costs following the disclosure that VW cheated on U.S. emissions tests. The automaker last week announced a recall of 8.5 million diesel vehicles in Europe, and Mueller says the fallout from the scandal will cost more than the 6.5 billion euros ($7.4 billion) already set aside.
by: Patrick Donahue, Christoph Rauwald
- Volkswagen said Wednesday that it told European dealers to stop selling diesel vehicles with the engine type at the heart of the scandal, adding that the number of affected cars is “very limited.” Osterloh said in the interview that most models currently at dealers use newer engines that don’t contain the cheating software, and that the automaker has seen no evidence thus far that the crisis is impacting October sales. Missing Files
- As the fallout widens, the number of workers on leave in connection with the probe has increased to five. Frank Tuch, the automaker’s quality control officer, was the latest to be suspended, according to a person familiar with the matter. A VW spokesman declined to comment on the personnel matters.
- Lower Saxony Premier Stephan Weil is meeting Wednesday with workers at VW’s headquarters in Wolfsburg. VW is based in Lower Saxony and the state owns 20 percent of the automaker’s voting rights.
- The state government filed a complaint with prosecutors after documents related to VW’s diesel cheating disappeared from Lower Saxony’s chancellery. Authorities are investigating to determine whether the files were stolen or simply lost, said Kathrin Soefker, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office in Hanover. The missing documents didn’t contain sensitive information, said Michael Juerdens, a Lower Saxony spokesman.