

Volkswagen launched the biggest model offensive in the brand’s history in 2017 under its “Transform 2025+” strategy. Vehicle deliveries already made significant gains during the course of the year. Volkswagen also set a new delivery record for December, handing over 594,100 vehicles, an increase of 5.6 per cent to customers worldwide. At 136,400 new vehicles, deliveries in Europe were 1.6 per cent higher than the previous year. At 42,000 units, deliveries in Germany in December rose by 8.4 per cent. Orders in Germany continue to show a noticeable upward trend, in part attributable to positive momentum from the environmental incentive. Now read this side too ! ~ the carmaker Volkswagen has suspended its head of external relations and sustainability after admitting that he had known about experiments in which monkeys were locked in small chambers and exposed to diesel exhaust. Thomas Steg, a former government spokesman, who worked for German chancellor Angela Merkel and her predecessor Gerhard Schröder, is the first person to be relieved of his duties as VW said it was “drawing the consequences” of the scandal which has rocked both the government and industry. The company initially tried to distance itself from the institute which commissioned the tests, the European Research Group of Environment and Health in the Transport Sector (EUGT), a car lobby group funded by Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW. But it is now known that VW managers were informed about the testing before and after it was carried out. Steg has been pinpointed as a senior manager who knew that the experiments were going on, with internal papers seen by German media suggest he had known about them in 2013. He joined the company in 2012, one of many top managers to have taken a direct route from politics, in what is commonly referred to as a revolving door policy said to highlight the mutual interests of the two worlds. Other top bosses have been trying to distance themselves from the scandal since news of it broke at the weekend. Initially reported in the New York Times, the tests, carried out in May 2015 by the New Mexico-based Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute (LRRI), involved locking 10 Java monkeys in small airtight chambers for four hours at a time. The animals were left to watch cartoons as they breathed in diesel fumes from a VW Beetle. The ultimate aim of the tests was to prove that the pollutant load of nitrogen oxide car emissions from diesel motors had measurably decreased, thanks to modern cleaning technology. VW is already under close scrutiny over “dieselgate”, in which the carmaker manipulated tests on about 11m cars worldwide to make it appear they met emissions tests when in reality they exceeded levels many times over when used on the road. The company said on Monday a small internal group had mistakenly pushed for the animal tests to be carried out and that they did not reflect VW’s ethos. But industry observers said the excuses held little water, as the experiments had been well-documented and the results presented to managers at BMW, Daimler and VW, all of whom belonged to the EUGT, which has since been disbanded. In a second round of tests, the animals were forced to breathe in the fumes of a Ford F-250 used for the purposes of comparison, because the car was an older model with apparently less sophisticated filter technology. Sad ! cruel ways of humans !! With regards – S. Sampathkumar
30th Jan 2018.