Volkswagen America is understood to have sent letters to California owners of diesel-powered Audis and Volkswagens asking them to bring their cars in to a dealership for a software upgrade.
The crisis engulfing disgraced car giant Volkswagen deepened as news emerged of the extent to which the company knew about the emissions-rigging scandal and further top executives faced the axe.
Audi R&D boss Ultirch Hackenberg, Porsche’s Wolfgang Hatz and VW’s US chief executive Michael Horn, who admitted “we totally screwed up”, were reported to be in line to lose their jobs at a meeting of the supervisory board on Friday.
The stricken car maker is under pressure to repair its bruised reputation by both the German government and its own shareholders. The economy and transport minister of VW’s home state, Lower-Saxony - which owns about 20pc of VW - said those responsible for allowing the manipulation to happen must be held to account.
News has also emerged that VW knew about the device cheat in the US and tried to cover it up last year, after American regulators started investigating.
What VW failed to explain was that the letters were part of a recall meant to satisfy government regulators who were looking into discrepancies between laboratory emissions test results and pollution levels emitted by the cars under normal use. At the time, VW insisted the problem was only a technical glitch.
VW has already admitted that 11m of its cars around the world might contain the so-called “defeat” devices, which can cheat emissions tests by detecting when a car is being tested and force the engine to emit fewer harmful gases.
The German government, meanwhile, revealed that the secret “defeat devices” were also built into the company’s cars in Europe as well as in the US, though it isn’t yet clear if it helped cheat the emissions tests, as was the case in the US.
VW has set aside €6.5bn to help cover the costs of any fallout from the crisis, including a recall, but industry experts and analysts believe this figure will need to be much higher as governments around the world launch investigations into the scandal.
German public prosecutors are conducting a preliminary criminal inquiry into the company, while the US Justice Department has also launched a criminal probe and the US Environmental Protection Agency could slap VW with penalties totalling billions of dollars.
The world’s biggest car manufacturer also faces the prospect individual and class action lawsuits around the world as well as further action from governments in France, Italy, South Korea, Canada, New Zealand and the UK, who are all looking into the matter.
The deception has even prompted some financial institutions to boycott VW. Scandinavia-based Nordea Bank has barred its traders from buying Volkswagen shares and bonds for six months.
Credit ratings agencies S&P and Moody’s have both placed VW on "negative creditwatch", as the automaker looks likely to incur "substantial’ penalties", following a similar move from Fitch on Wednesday.
Seat, the Spanish subsidiary of German group Volkswagen, installed the infamous pollution-cheating software in more than 500,000 cars made in Spain, daily newspaper El Pais reported, citing unnamed sources with ties to the company.
Shares in VW dipped 2pc on Thursday and are 26pc lower than before news of the scandal broke.
Source : telegraph.co.uk
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