VOLKSWAGEN BOARD - Statement from the executive committee of VW AG'S Supervisory board.

In a meeting on Wednesday, September 23, the Executive Committee of the Supervisory Board of Volkswagen AG discussed in detail the manipulation of emissions data of Volkswagen Group diesel engines and came to the following conclusions:

1. The Executive Committee takes this matter extremely seriously.  The Executive Committee recognizes not only the economic damage caused, but also the loss of trust among many customers worldwide.

2. The Executive Committee agrees that these incidents need to be clarified with great conviction and that mistakes are corrected.  At the same time, the Executive Committee is adamant that it will take the necessary decisive steps to ensure a credible new beginning.

3. The Executive Committee has great respect for Chairman Professor Dr. Winterkorn's offer to resign his position and to ask that his employment agreement be terminated. The Executive Committee notes that Professor Dr. Winterkorn had no knowledge of the manipulation of emissions data. The Executive Committee has tremendous respect for his willingness to nevertheless assume responsibility and, in so doing, to send a strong signal both internally and externally. Dr. Winterkorn  has made invaluable contributions to Volkswagen. The company's rise to global company is inextricably linked to his name. The Executive Committee thanks Dr. Winterkorn for towering contributions in the past decades and for his willingness to take responsibility in this criticall phase for the company. This attitude is illustrious.

4. Recommendations for new personnel will be presented at the upcoming meeting of the Supervisory Board this Friday.

5. The Executive Committee is expecting further personnel consequences in the next days. The internal Group investigations are continuing at a high tempo. All participants in these proceedings that has resulted  in unmeasurable harm for Volkswagen, will be subject to the full consequences.

6. The Executive Committee have decided that the company will voluntarily submit a complaint to the State Prosecutors' office in Brunswick. In the view of the Executive Committee criminal proceedings may be relevant due to the irregularities. The investigations of the State Prosecutor will be supported in all form from the side of Volkswagen.

7. The Executive Committee proposes that the Supervisory Board of Volkswagen AG create a special committee, under whose leadership further clarifying steps will follow, including the preparation of the necessary consequences. In this regard, the Special Committee would make use of external advice. Further details about this will be decided at the Supervisory Board meeting on Friday.

8. The Executive Committee is aware that coming to terms with the crisis of trust will be a long term task that requires a high degree of consistency and thoroughness.

9. The Executive Committee will work on these tasks together with the employees and the Management Board. Volkswagen is a magnificent company that depends on the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people. We consider it our task that this company regains the trust of our customers in every respect.

RESIGNATION STATEMENT - Prof. Dr Martin Winterkorn.

“I am shocked by the events of the past few days. Above all, I am stunned that misconduct on such a scale was possible in the Volkswagen Group.

As CEO I accept responsibility for the irregularities that have been found in diesel engines and have therefore requested the Supervisory Board to agree on terminating my function as CEO of the Volkswagen Group. I am doing this in the interests of the company even though I am not aware of any wrong doing on my part.

Volkswagen needs a fresh start – also in terms of personnel. I am clearing the way for this fresh start with my resignation.

I have always been driven by my desire to serve this company, especially our customers and employees. Volkswagen has been, is and will always be my life.

The process of clarification and transparency must continue. This is the only way to win back trust. I am convinced that the Volkswagen Group and its team will overcome this grave crisis.”

VW SCANDAL UPDATE - Statement from Prof. Dr. Martin Winterkorn - But honesty how can we trust them now

"The irregularities that have been found in our Group's diesel engines go against everything Volkswagen stands for. At present we do not yet have all the answers to all the questions. But we are working hard to find out exactly what happened. 

To do that, we are putting everything on the table, as quickly, thoroughly and transparently as possible. And we continue to cooperate closely with the relevant government organizations and authorities. 

This quick and full clarification has the highest priority. We owe that to our customers, our employees and the public. Manipulation and Volkswagen – that must never be allowed to happen again.

Millions of people all over the world trust our brands, our cars and our technologies. I am deeply sorry that we have broken this trust. I would like to make a formal apology to our customers, to the authorities and to the general public for this misconduct. We will do everything necessary to reverse the damage. And we will do everything necessary to win back trust – step by step.

In our Group, more than 600,000 people work to build the best cars for our customers. I would like to say to our employees: I know just how much dedication, how much true sincerity you bring to your work day after day. Therefore, it would be wrong to cast general suspicion on the honest, hard work of 600,000 people because of the mistakes made by only a few. Our team simply does not deserve that.

That is why we are asking for trust as we move forward: We will get to the bottom of this. We are working very hard on the necessary technical solutions. And we will do everything we can to avert damage to our customers and employees. I give you my word: we will do all of this with the greatest possible openness and transparency."

Volkswagen faces MULTI BILLION Dollar fine to start with for fiddling emissions pollution tests in the USA.

Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn may face a leadership challenge after it was disclosed that the automaker cheated on U.S. air pollution tests for diesel cars, analysts said.

VW faces fines of up to $18 billion and a backlash from consumers in the U.S. after the company admitted that software that it designed for VW brand and Audi diesel cars gave false emissions data.

Today, Volkswagen shares plunged as much as 23 percent to 125.40 euros in Frankfurt, extending the stock’s slump for the year to 31 percent. The drop wiped out about 15.4 billion euros ($17.4 billion) in value.

Arndt Ellinghorst, a London-based analyst for Evercore ISI, called the move "worthy of a back-street garage looking to get a used car through a mandated vehicle inspection." The issue may help to catalyze further management changes at VW, he said.

Winterkorn, whose contract renewal is scheduled for a supervisory board vote on Friday, now faces a serious challenge to his leadership, Ellinghorst said in an investors note today.

Analysts at Bernstein said the issue is a serious setback for VW. "This is not your usual recall issue, an error in calibration or even a serious safety flaw. There is no way to put an optimistic spin on this - this is really serious."

Trying to pin the blame on rogue engineers probably will not appease U.S. regulators, said Bernstein analyst Max Warburton. The best-case scenario is a multibillion-dollar fine, damage to its diesel market share and "pariah status in the U.S. with government, and possibly consumers," he said.

Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer, director of the Center for Automotive Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen, said Winterkorn should resign. Winterkorn should have known about the manipulation in his role of head of VW's r&d or, if he didn't, it shows that he does not have the automaker under control, Dudenhoeffer told a German newspaper. Either way, Winterkorn's role as CEO is no longer tenable, the academic said.

VW said on Sunday that the company is cooperating with an investigation by the EPA and has ordered its own external investigation. In a statement Winterkorn said: "I personally am deeply sorry that we have broken the trust of our customers. He said VW would do “everything necessary in order to reverse the damage this has caused.”

U.S. backlash

Earlier this year, Winterkorn won a power struggle with his former mentor and chairman, Ferdinand Piech, forcing Piech's ouster from the automaker. As investigators seek to establish complicity within the company, Winterkorn will need to walk a fine line to shield himself and VW from a backlash in the U.S., a market where VW, despite being the world's biggest carmaker, has struggled for decades.

The VW brand's struggle to compete in the U.S. was one issue Piech cited in his failed attempt to oust Winterkorn earlier this year. Clean, powerful diesel vehicles were supposed to be VW's ticket to growth, and the company has big plans for the U.S. It spent $1 billion on a factory in Tennessee in 2011, then said it would invest an additional $7 billion in North America by 2018.

VW brand and Audi sold about 482,000 diesel vehicles in the U.S. with illegal emissions control software designed to make their cars appear cleaner in testing than they are in the real world, according to the the EPA.

The software, included on VW and Audi vehicles from the 2009-15 model years with 2.0-liter turbodiesel engines, detects when a car is undergoing EPA emissions testing and turns on the vehicle’s full emissions controls.

The software then switched off the full emissions controls during real-world driving, the EPA said. Officials called the software a “defeat device” that allowed VW and Audi vehicles to fulfill emissions standards in lab testing, but emit nitrogen oxides at up to 40 times allowable levels in real-world driving.

VW said it has told U.S. dealers to halt sales of some of its diesel cars. Diesel models can account for 20 to 25 percent of the VW brand's U.S. sales each month. The ban is expected to put a major dent in the company's volume and slow its turnaround efforts in coming months.

The vehicles affected include the VW Passat, Jetta, Beetle and Golf, and Audi A3.

REPORT HERE

Bloomberg and Reuters contributed to this report

VW CEO Winterkorn to present new structure for automaker by October

Volkswagen Group CEO Martin Winterkorn has told senior staff that he will present a new structure for the automaker by October at the latest.

"We are preparing the company for the coming 10, 20 years," Winterkorn told 1,000 high-ranking VW employees at a meeting in the company's home town of Wolfsburg, Germany, on Thursday, with another 4,000 viewers at nearly 60 of the company’s 118 facilities worldwide watching by videocast.

“It is time to further develop our management model and rearrange structures. We must become faster, more efficient and more agile,” he said, according to Automobilwoche sources. Automobilwoche is a sister publication of Automotive News Europe.

Winterkorn made no reference to the changes under consideration but a supervisory board member said last month that the company will hold a special meeting in June to discuss further changes to its leadership structure, such as possibly aligning individual brands more closely.

Winterkorn said problem areas within the company are being tackled such as the company's flagging U.S. business, the delayed launch of a budget car for China and low profitability of the core VW brand.

"We will redouble our efforts everywhere where we are still punching below our weight. We have long since started tackling our tasks with the full support of the supervisory board," he said.

The CEO welcomed the coming arrival of former BMW executive Herbert Diess, who takes charge of the core VW brand on July 1. "He is the right man in the right position at the right time. I look forward to working with him," he told the meeting, according to sources.

Winterkorn said he still cannot understand why former VW Chairman Ferdinand Piech criticized his leadership but thanked Piech for his "enormous" contribution to the automaker.

A VW spokesman confirmed a management conference had been called Thursday on short notice.

Winterkorn's comments come as he returns his focus to business after a showdown with Piech led to the former chairman's shock ouster two weeks ago.

VW has pledged to make annual cost savings of 5 billion euros ($5.6 billion) at its passenger-car brand by 2017 as it seeks to close a profitability gap with global leader Toyota.

Henning Krogh

Report Here

BREAKING NEWS - VW Chairman Ferdinand Piech resigns with immediate effect.

Volkswagen Group Supervisory Board Chairman Ferdinand Piech unexpectedly resigned on Saturday after losing a showdown he provoked with CEO Martin Winterkorn.

Piech, a dominant figure at VW for more than two decades and the grandson of the inventor of the VW Beetle, also resigned as a member of the supervisory board and any other mandates within the Volkswagen Group with immediate effect, VW said.

A panel of senior supervisory board members at Volkswagen said a loss of trust was to blame for the sudden departure of Piech.

"The members of the steering committee came to a consensus that in light of the past weeks the mutual trust necessary for successful cooperation was no longer there," the six-member panel said in a statement.

The leadership crisis at VW burst into the open this month when German weekly magazine Der Spiegel quoted Piech, the 78-year-old patriarch of the family that owns 51 percent of voting rights in VW, as saying he had "distanced" himself from Winterkorn.

The comment came at a time when VW is slashing costs and revamping operations to boost profitability. It has struggled in the U.S. and posted lower profits at its core autos division.

Tensions between Piech and Winterkorn appeared to have eased a week ago when senior supervisory board members backed the CEO, leaving Piech isolated in a five-to-one vote and forcing him to to agree to a joint statement supporting Winterkorn.

But sources said at the time he would have faced calls for his own resignation had he not backed the CEO.

Deputy Chairman Berthold Huber will temporarily assume leadership of the board until the election of a new chairman, Volkswagen said, adding that Piech's wife, Ursula, had also resigned from her posts at the group.

Huber said VW needed to end the uncertainty among employees caused by the leadership crisis.

Weil, the premier of Lower Saxony, which owns 20 percent of VW, said Piech's resignation was necessary to create clarity about the carmaker's leadership.

Said Weil: "I regret the resignation of Ferdinand Piech, but it was unavoidable in the end."

Piech's cousin, Porsche Automobil Chairman Wolfgang Porsche, who owns 50.7 percent of voting rights in VW Group, in a statement Saturday thanked Piech "for his decades of extraordinary and highly successful service to the Volkswagen Group."

Also in the statement Porsche said: “We deeply regret the developments of the last few days ... Our great loyalty to the Volkswagen Group and its 600,000 employees remains unchanged and we assume our responsibility as a principal shareholder."

REPORT HERE

VW to build next gen Phaeton, even though it losses money & VW is slashings overall costs.

With Volkswagen having embarked on a big cost-cutting drive, industry experts are baffled why the "people's car" maker plans to spend millions of euros upgrading a money-losing luxury sedan.

The 76,000 euro ($86,000) Phaeton, a pet project of Chairman Ferdinand Piech, has never met VW's original sales target of 20,000 cars annually. Analysts say the upper-premium car, which cost more than 1 billion euros to develop and came out in 2002, should be axed.

But sources at VW told Reuters that the company is now planning a more advanced version of the Phaeton -- even though the first-generation car was ranked by Bernstein analyst Max Warburton as one of the three "most loss-making European cars of modern times."

The plans appear all the more perplexing to analysts as VW has pledged to make annual cost savings of 5 billion euros at its passenger-car brand by 2017, as the world's second-biggest carmaker by sales seeks to narrow the gap with global leader Toyota.

'Painful action'

Announcing the "efficiency program" last July, CEO Martin Winterkorn promised "painful action" to revive the core brand where profit margins have been languishing due to a proliferation of models and parts.

"It's no longer all about bigger, higher, further," the CEO told managers at a Dresden strategy conference in December. "Now it's about being leaner, faster, more efficient."

His comments echoed VW's plans to reduce the number of costly parts and drop some non-profitable variants from the German group's 310-model lineup as Europe's largest automaker shoulders costs of future growth and investments in lower-emissions technology.

Revamping the Phaeton will seems to contradict the CEO's cost-cutting drive, said Evercore ISI analyst Arndt Ellinghorst, adding that switching production of the model to VW's MLB modular platform could cost as much as 650 million euros.

"Economically speaking, it's the most irrational project," London-based Ellinghorst said. "Piech and Winterkorn simply cannot let go of their fondness for luxury products."

A new glass-walled factory, R&D outlays and low sales volume led VW to lose 28,000 euros on each Phaeton sold between 2002 and 2012, Warburton wrote in a September 2013 note.

Unfazed by the losses, VW aims to pit the next-generation model against the Mercedes' 80,920 euro S-class flagship, sources said, adding the car may hit dealerships in 2017-2018. A plug-in hybrid version is also planned.

VW confirmed it was planning a successor to the Phaeton but declined to comment on the details or costs. It also declined to comment on analysts' loss, cost and sales estimates for the existing version, but said the sedan helped to show off its technical prowess.

The company does not disclose sales data for individual brands, only production numbers, which show it produced 5,812 Phaetons in 2013 -- the most recent annual figures published.

High-end battle

Stefan Bratzel, head of the Center of Automotive Management think tank near Cologne, said another high-end luxury sedan may overstretch the VW brand, traditionally a mass-market division which in November released a more upmarket Passat.

A new Phaeton could also affect sales of VW's other premium offerings, especially the Audi's flagship A8 sedan, which may share MLB underpinnings with the VW-badged model, he said.

"It doesn't make much sense strategically," Bratzel said. "The business case is equally questionable."

A new Phaeton would struggle against its premium rivals, analysts say. Sales of the model will average no more than 11,900 cars a year in 2017-2020, up from 6,300 this year, according to estimates from research firm IHS Automotive.

That compares with annual averages of 85,000 units for the Mercedes S class, 64,000 for BMW's 7 series and 41,000 for Audi's A8 in the four-year period, according to IHS data.

Buyers will never warm up to the notion of an upper-premium sedan made by the "people's car" brand unless they get a huge discount, a former VW Group executive told Reuters.

"This is the inherent problem, which puts the car's price positioning and profitability at risk," he said.

The Phaeton is the brainchild of Piech, the mastermind of VW's global expansion and its former CEO, who is well known for outmaneuvering both rivals and allies.

Sacred project

A former Audi North American chief, Axel Mees, was forced to leave the company in 2004 after criticizing the Phaeton project and Piech in public, a source at Audi said.

Meanwhile, Michael Horn, VW's new U.S. boss is chasing a lofty sales target of 800,000 VW brand cars by 2018, more than double last year's tally.

Horn will be tasked with relaunching the next Phaeton in the U.S. after VW pulled the model from the world's biggest premium-car market in 2006 because of poor sales.

Horn struggled with the answer when asked by Reuters at the Detroit auto show what potential he sees for the model in the country.

"That's a dangerous question," he said. "It's an image bearer with no relevance for volume."