The consequences of Dieselgate are still being felt, but here is another scandal on the horizon for the German company. In advanced news by Der Spiegel, Volkswagen sold 6700 pre-production cars as used between 2006 and 2018 . How can this be a problem?
Pre-production cars are basically test cars, but they are also used as display vehicles in salons, or in media presentations. Its role is one of qualitative verification. , both of the vehicle and of the production line itself — which can lead to changes in components or in the assembly line itself —, before the actual series production begins.
Due to their purpose, pre-production cars cannot be sold to final customers — they can have the most varied types of defects, whether qualitative or even more serious — and are not usually certified or homologated by regulatory bodies.
In reality, your destiny is usually your destruction — see the example of these Honda Civic Type R…
Subscribe to our Youtube channel
6700 pre-production cars sold
Der Spiegel reports that an internal audit determined the existence of 9,000 units with “unclarified construction status”, built between 2010 and 2015; the German publication raises this number to 17 thousand experimental units (pre-production) built, but between 2006 and 2015.
Volkswagen now admits that's a total of 6700 pre-production cars that were sold between 2006 and 2018 — around 4000 vehicles were sold in Germany, with the rest having been sold in other European countries as well as the USA.
Volkswagen last September informed KBA — the German federal transport authority — that it ordered a mandatory collection of vehicles. These, however, should not be repaired. As some of these vehicles may clearly differ from those produced later in series, Volkswagen proposes to buy them back and withdraw them from the market.
Only Volkswagen brand vehicles seem to be involved, with no references to any of the other brands of the German group. German authorities are now discussing how to deal with the matter — Volkswagen claims that pre-production cars can be sold but must be authorized to do so — with the final verdict likely to result in a fine of thousands of euros for each unit affected. .
Source: Der Spiegel