Volkswagen ends diesel in US

It has taken a $US15 billion bite out of Volkswagen to convince the German car-maker to kill off its diesel passenger car plans for the US.

Once a quarter of the Volkswagen brand’s US sales, diesel passenger cars have been under a stop-sale order in the US since the Dieselgate scandal reached its zenith late last year.

Still, there had been intense speculation that Wolfsburg still wasn’t prepared to dump it from its strategic plans for North America and would reintroduce it once the furor had died down.

But Volkswagen brand boss Herbert Diess hosed that down yesterday amidst his future plans conference, insisting diesel-powered Volkswagen passenger cars would never return to North America.

With Volkswagen turning to electrification, promising to sell at least a million electric cars a year by 2025, Diess hinted to German business newspaper Handelsblatt that it was done with diesels.

That came in spite of Diess telling journalists at September’s Paris motor show that Volkswagen wasn’t ready to abandon the compression-ignition fuel in the US.

That fuel, and Volkswagen’s inability to engineer a way for it to burn cleanly and produce less than the legal maximum NOx emissions, cost Volkswagen lawsuits in most US states and settlements with 475,000 owners, along with the federal and Californian governments.

Just last week, the Volkswagen Group’s US boss, Hinrich Woebcken, told reporters at the LA auto show that diesel would not "come back in the same magnitude as we've seen it up to now".

"Emissions standards in following years are getting tougher and tougher," Woebcken said.

"Why don't you put the money and investments ... to comply with these standards, why don't you put the money on the spot where the future is?" he asked, speaking of VW's new focus on electric vehicles.

Audi still insists it could bring the fuel back to the US, particularly in the larger Q7 SUV, in spite of being caught up in both the four-cylinder Dieselgate scandal and another, more limited 3.0-litre V6 TDI emissions-cheating scandal of its own making, which spread to Porsche and Volkswagen.

"Once we hopefully get past everything, I see an opportunity for potentially, probably, to offer it on one model, and that model would probably be the Q7 SUV," Audi of America President Scott Keogh told Reuters.