after several days of high drama Martin
Winterkorn has resigned from
chief executive of Volkswagen the German
carmaker and broiled in a growing
scandal over the rigging of us emissions
tests the 68 year old said he was
clearing the way for a fresh start at
the company following revelations that
it cheated on laboratory tests in
America by using so-called defeat
devices software that detects when the
car is undergoing an official test the
revelations came about after researchers
in Europe in the u.s. alerted
authorities to suspicious nitrogen oxide
emissions results for some VW cars on
Friday
the US Environmental Protection Agency
announced its findings and ordered VW to
recall half a million vehicles the
following monday VW's US CEO issued an
apology at an ill-timed launch party for
the new Passat so let's be clear about
this our company was dishonest with the
EPA and the California Air Resources
Board and with all of you and in my
German words we've totally screwed up we
must fix those cars the cars we prevent
this from ever happening again and we
have to make things right VW has so far
set aside 6.5 billion euros to deal with
some of the fallout from the scandal
which it now says affects around 11
million vehicles worldwide but though
the CEO is gone there are still much to
concern investors who have sent the
shares down 30% so far this week there's
a bunch of things for Volkswagen
investors to worry about the first is
really the fine so the US regulator
finds as well as potentially fines for
the ten and a half million other diesel
vehicles that are around the rest of the
world there is also the issue of
lawsuits recalls and then taking a step
further back in looking long-term
there's the question of how this impacts
Volkswagens business going forward with
their margins are they going to be able
to go there are people still going to
buy them is are they going to have to
discount their cars to sell them
attention we'll also turn to other car
makers no other manufacturer of a size
VW has been formally implicated in the
scandal but climate groups have for some
time been pointing to the gap between
laboratory results and on the road
emissions
it's become clear that a lot of
companies in the auto sector were doing
their best to bend the rules of the
official laboratory tests which meant
that particularly diesel cars in Europe
have been emitting a lot more pollutants
than the official test said they were
but the Volkswagen deception using a
software device that would so blatantly
changed the output of the car between
the laboratory and the highway I think
nobody has been caught doing anything
like that
the revelations have rapidly turned into
the biggest crisis in VW 78 year history
and the situation still threatens to
escalate further with the company saying
more heads will roll over the scandal
some have even called it the car
industry's libel moment well it's an
extremely serious scandal because it
obviously involves deception and perhaps
even fraud at the top of a cup a very
large company and you can look at
scandals such as the LIBOR scandal in
the banking industry where you had
misbehavior that went on for years was
never discovered but when it was
discovered it really shocked everybody
that this something so serious should
have been going on and I think that the
Volkswagen case is certainly on that
level
rachelle all any of us is gonna remember
about the 2015 Frankfurt Car Show is the
way the chief executive of BMW collapsed
on stage was this an apt metaphor for
the state