Volkswagen to stop offering diesel cars in Australia

Volkswagen is to drop the last turbo-diesel engines from its passenger car line-up in Australia from October, motoring.com.au has reported.

The Golf range will be updated with petrol only models in October and will mark the last of its diesel offering for passenger cars for the Australian market.

Only the third-generation Touareg large SUV will remain with a diesel engine, when it launches next year. This is because it dominates VW’s commercial offerings, including the popular Amarok utility.

In Australia, Volkswagen Group brands (including Skoda, Audi and Porsche as well as VW) have had to recall 100,000 vehicles. What’s more Volkswagen is the defendant in a Federal Court action brought by the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC), as well as two class actions.

Volkswagen Group Australia chief Michael Bartsch told motoring.com.au: “Any decision about dropping diesel here is not driven by the emissions issue.”

“It is an issue of what we can get out of Germany.”

The WLTP testing procedure is also cited as a reason. Bartsch said: “One of the big topics with our colleagues in Germany is complexity and whether you had WLTP or not, complexity would have been an issue,”

“Even if you didn’t have the emissions issue, we still would have had to look at the complexity issue.

“We have lost and will lose variants as a simple matter of complexity. That has been accelerated by the WLTP issue, no question about that.

“And for Volkswagen the WLTP issue has been compounded by having to work through the vehicles that have been challenged under the emissions topic.

“So, in some ways it’s been a bit of a perfect storm.”