Volkswagen to axe diesel cars in Australia

Volkswagen is within months of dropping the last turbo-diesel engines from its passenger car line-up in Australia.

But it insists the move is not directly related to the Dieselgate furore that has forced its parent company to recall about 11 million cars globally and pay out billions of dollars in fines and compensation for cheating on emissions software.

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

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

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

Volkswagen will erase diesel from its passenger car line-up in October when it launches the slimmed down 12-model MY19 Golf update, which features only turbo-petrol engines.

It has already dropped diesel from the Passat large car this year, deleted the Jetta line entirely and in 2017 replaced the CC four-door coupe with the petrol-only Arteon. It hasn’t offered a diesel Polo mini-car since 2014, a year before the Dieselgate controversy came public.

Volkswagen is also paring back its local SUV diesel availability. From October there will be no version of the standard five-seat Tiguan offered with diesel power. Instead here will be two oil-burners in the long-wheelbase VW Tiguan Allspace line-up.

It is also soon dropping the turbo-diesel model from the Passat Alltrack line-up, but that is expected to return as part of an update scheduled for 2019.

Diesel will remain the only engine choice offered with the third-generation Touareg large SUV when it launches next year and it continues to dominate VW’s commercial offerings, including the popular Amarok utility.

Bartsch paints the move away from diesel as the result of VW’s global push to reduce drivetrain complexity as it invests massively in an electric vehicle future.

It’s also the result of a backlog in the European Union’s WLTP real-world emissions testing, which was introduced in the wake of the Dieselgate scandal in an attempt to deliver more realistic fuel consumption figures.

“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,” Bartsch said.

“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.”

That WLTP logjam has also resulted in some petrol models being dropped from the local VW line-up, including the 110TSI entry-level MY19 Golf and Tiguan five-seater.

“It’s reality of being one of the small markets in the world that we just don’t get things as fast as we would like,” said Bartsch.

“WLTP will probably impact us to the tune of 4000 cars by the time we get to the end of the year.”