Porsche chief to take over at VW

As the Volkswagen emissions scandal continues to spiral downward, the executive board of the German automaker company is working full-speed to minimize the spread of damage.

Upon further investigation, it was discovered that when the 4-cylinder diesel cars detected they weren’t hooked up to widely used emissions testing equipment, they “emitted up to 40 times more pollutions than allowed under USA standards“, wrote NPR. The crisis wiped about 20 billion euros ($22.4 billion) off VW’s market value this week, forcing Chief Executive Officer Martin Winterkorn to step down on Wednesday as the scandal widened and opened the door for the exit of other top managers.

VW Group of America CEO Michael Horn is staying.

Rob Bogosian, principal of consulting firm RVB Associates, says Mueller will need to say something like this: “In this company, from this day forward, we will always behave with integrity”.

This is a view shared by Simon Chadwick, Professor for Sport Business Strategy and Marketing at Coventry University, who said sports deals would quickly come under scrutiny as Volkswagen set aside funds for those potential claims.

Many high-ranking executives are expected to be sacked in the process.

Mueller brings experience with several of Volkswagen’s 12 brands to his new job at the head of a sprawling automotive group with almost 600,000 employees worldwide.

Above all, I am stunned that misconduct on such a scale was possible in the Volkswagen Group, ” WInterkorn said in a statement.

Environmental group Greenpeace wrote to the Government to ask if it knew about the cheating of emissions tests before this month. The scandal then spread as European nations and Australia, among other countries, said they would launch probes into the diesel engines involved.

The Deutsche Umwelthilfe group said Friday that it had information that nearly all German manufacturers of diesel cars – including Daimler – exceed emissions limits by such a level that it has to assume illegal devices to reduce nitrogen oxide readings are in play.

The company has told officials that the vehicles in question included cars with 1.6-litre and 2-litre diesel engines in Europe, German transport minister Alexander Dobrindt said.

In an attempt to save his own position, Winterkorn stated this was all done without his knowledge, but in the end he did decide to resign “for the good of the company”.

The new CEO said Friday his main priority was to win back trust that had been lost among consumers. It said that it sticks to all laws and rules, and it isn’t aware of any measurements showing that its vehicles fail to keep to legal requirements.