A US judge has given Volkswagen AG (VW) one month to present a plan to fix diesel engine cars secretly outfitted with pollution cheat devices.
District Judge Charles Breyer, at a hearing in San Francisco, set a court date for the German automaker, and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to present the plan.
“By March 24th, when I plan to have the next hearing in this matter, I want a definite answer from Volkswagen and EPA whether or not they’ve achieved a resolution of these vehicles — a remediation of these vehicles — whether they can do so technologically and within the parameters that EPA believes acceptable to them,” Breyer said, according to a transcript of court proceedings obtained on Thursday.
VW faces potentially huge damages as a result of the scandal, after about 200 owners of VW, Audi and Porsche diesel cars filed a class-action lawsuit in San Francisco earlier this week.
The suit accuses the German automaker of major damages to the environment and to owners of more than a half million of the cars sold in the US.
The suit said owners of the cars have suffered losses on the vehicles’ value and have also suffered in discovering that they were emitting more pollution into the air than they thought they were.
The damage to the health of Americans generally from the extra toxic gases the cars have released into the air has been estimated at US$450 million.
Separately, the German company was embroiled on Thursday in a standoff with employees at its plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where labor officials say it has refused to recognize a union chosen by workers to represent them.
Chattanooga, with about 1,600 workers, is the only VW plant in the world without union representation, the United Auto Workers (UAW) said.
An umbrella organization for several US trade unions has challenged VW to live up to its corporate principles, after the company refused to negotiate with the union representatives chosen by the workers.
In December last year, workers in skilled trades at the Chattanooga plant became the first workers in the southern US to vote for union representation when 70 percent of them voted to join the UAW.
The election was supervised by the National Labor Relations Board.
The umbrella organization said VW’s refusal to bargain is not only a reversal of its pre-election commitments, but a violation of its own Declaration on Social Rights.
“To regain the trust of its stakeholders, Volkswagen must make corporate social responsibility more than just a slogan and a public-relations strategy,” it said in a statement.
VW is planning to use the Chattanooga plant to build a new sport utility vehicle, the Cross Blue. The facility is also critical to VW’s goal of repairing its damaged brand in the US.
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