Volkswagen says core brand’s sales 2.4 percent lower in November

Unlike in the USA, there has been no confirmation Volkswagen cheated on European emissions tests. In case of new models, the fixes will presumably be software updates. Volkswagen had initially estimated that as many as 800,000 vehicles would be affected. Software engineered to lower the level of harmful nitrogen oxides only when a car’s emissions were being evaluated had been installed in some 11 million vehicles worldwide.

None of these problems, not even all three of them together, is a recipe for disaster. At the end of October, Volkswagen posted a .83 billion loss for its first quarter.

Since the scandal started, an increasing number of VW vehicle owners are getting frustrated as the bad news are piling up. Consequently, the VW cars equipped with the “defeat device” are fully compliant with the emissions standards when being assessed in a laboratory or testing station – this is when the engine is working in the test mode. The November decline means that about 8,000 fewer cars sold. The decline was, however, less pronounced than in previous months. At home, VW doesn’t face much of a trust issue: The U.S.is far away, and its regulators’ credibility is not necessarily higher among German consumers than that of one of the country’s best-loved industrial producers.

Brand Board of Management Member Jürgen Stackmann: “The effects of the tense situation on world markets continue”. Others would kill for its sales numbers.

At a press conference at the vehicle manufacturer’s headquarters in Wolfsburg, its chairman, Hans Dieter Potsch, tried to put the scandal behind them. “We still do not know whether the people who were involved in this issue from 2005 to the present day were fully aware of the risks they were taking and of the potential damage they could expose the company to, but that’s another issue we will find out”, he said. “It proves not to have been a one-time error, but rather a chain of errors that were allowed to happen”. Yet Mueller also made it clear that VW wasn’t going to sell off any of its brands.

“Temporary jobs are a tool of ensuring flexibility, that is not new”, he said. But apparently, Volkswagen wanted to minimize the frequency with which customers or dealers would need to refill the tank that holds the chemical. Although the company is not ready to identify culprits, the preliminary findings confirmed widespread suspicion that the scandal occurred because the company’s ambitions in the US collided with air-quality rules that were, and still are, more stringent than Europe’s.

“Although the current situation is serious, this company will not be broken by it”, he insisted.

Mueller said the crisis was an opportunity for VW to make long-needed structural changes.

Leonid Bershidsky, a Bloomberg View contributor, is a Berlin-based writer.