More Volkswagen group news from Spain

SEAT announced on September 29 that it has stopped sales of all cars equipped with diesel engines at the heart of the emissions cheating scandal.

The company is currently calculating how many of the cars were sold in each national market, Seat said in a statement. According to the statement, the brand has decided to ‘temporarily suspend’ sales and deliveries of any Seat car equipped with the EA189 diesel engine of which 700,000 were produced by Seat.

“There only remains a small stock of vehicles with this kind of engine in Spain, just a little more than 3,000 cars, and we’ve told showrooms to put these cars aside,” a Seat spokesman said.

Volkswagen has now admitted that as many as 11 million vehicles worldwide have engines installed that carry the software capable of cheating emissions tests, they have only indicated a breakdown of 5 million VW, 2.1 million Audi, 1.2 million Skoda and 1.8 million light commercial vehicles, so there is still more to be revealed.

The new Group CEO, Matthias Mueller, has said that the number of cars affected may be lower than 11 million as the program is only activated in some of them.

To add to the worries of Seat, Spain’s Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism said on the same day that it had now received an undertaking from them to return fuel-efficiency subsidies on vehicles that had broken rules.

It said that the Spanish government, which offered subsidies of €1,000 for energy-efficient car purchases, had required that the manufacturers rather than the consumer should repay the money and now awaits details of the number of cars affected.

It is only recently that Seat won an order to supply up to 4,000 cars, many fitted with diesel engines to various branches of the Italian police force and the company is a supplier of vehicles to the National Police, Guardia Civil and a large percentage of taxis here in Spain.