car Enthusiasts love them: The camouflaged testbiler, as more or less deliberate will be ‘spotted’ by spionfotografer under testseancer, long before the final car is ready to go into production.
the Cars are unfinished, and they end up, therefore, most often their short life on skrotpladsen. Except at the Volkswagen. Here one has in the course of 12 years sold thousands of testbiler to customers who allegedly did not know that they bought an unfinished product.
This writes the German magazine Der Spiegel.
Volkswagen even went to confession back in september and admitted to the German transport authority, KBA, that they had sold the 6700 cars without the right approvals between 2006 and 2018. The magazine has, however, gained access to internal documents, showing, that up to the 17,000 cars have been sold as new models in both Europe and north America.
After the grant has transportmyndigheden ordered Volkswagen to recall the cars involved, and the process, the group is now started.
the Group, who are still struggling with the aftermath from the worldwide dieselskandale, however, may not be allowed to escape so easily. KBA is at the same time started to investigate whether Volkswagen has acted criminally and should have a fine for the violation.
according to a follow-up article from Der Spiegel be up to 5000 euro per. involved car – which may bring the total fine to € 20 million. euro.
Both the fine and the number of cars involved is very far from dieselskandale-level – here were the 11 million cars have been manipulated, and the scandal has cost Volkswagen more big milliardbøder in both the UNITED states and Germany. Nevertheless, the unveiling is not good for the group’s image, if you ask the German consumer association VZBV.
– The fact that these VW models built between 2006 and 2018, ( … ), Volkswagen has not understood a thing, even three years after the dieselskandalen was known, says Klaus Müller, head of the VZBV, the German Handelsblatt.
the Case can be more precarious for the group, if it turns out to be true, that VW’s new chief executive, Herbert Diess, was made aware of the sale way back in July 2016 – but kept it a secret for two years. It reveals Der Spiegel in a third article on the matter.
If you as the manufacturer will want to avoid to scrap the many and almost finished testbiler, it can according to VW be completely legitimate. The only requirement is that you can document what the car lacks in comparison to a repetition model.
According to Spiegel has VW, however, not followed this procedure with the involved cars and, therefore, there is no one who know for sure what is wrong with the cars.
the Handelsblatt citing a spokesperson from the group to say that the shortcomings may range from a simple software update of the navigation system to the more serious deficiencies that should have sent the car directly to the scrap.
– We regret these circumstances and deeply apologize, it sounds from the VW to the Spiegel, and the group will now purchase a wide variety of cars back.
The other manufacturers in the group has allegedly not followed the same practice as the VW.
