FRANKFURT, Germany — Volkswagen on Friday tried to move beyond the emissions cheating scandal that has threatened to cripple it, naming Matthias Mueller, head of the company’s Porsche unit, as chief executive.
FRANKFURT, Germany — Volkswagen on Friday tried to move beyond the emissions cheating scandal that has threatened to cripple it, naming Matthias Mueller, head of the company’s Porsche unit, as chief executive.
He replaces Martin Winterkorn, who resigned Wednesday and took responsibility for the fraud, but said he was not personally involved.
“The same thing must never happen again,” Mueller said Friday in the company’s headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany.
He promised to overhaul the company’s management structure. Volkswagen also said Friday that it would revamp itself to give more independence to individual vehicle brands, addressing criticism that decision-making had been too centralized in Wolfsburg and too slow.
For the past week, Volkswagen, one of the global auto industry’s biggest corporations, has been dealing with the fallout of revelations that millions of its vehicles were enabled with software meant to deliberately trick diesel air-quality tests.
The deception enabled Volkswagen diesel cars to pass air-quality tests in a lab setting, but emit pollutants up to 40 times the allowable U.S. limits when actually driven. The ruse enabled the cars to have more power and better fuel economy than they would have been able to achieve. Volkswagen has admitted that the devices exist in 11 million cars worldwide.
Volkswagen said employees had been suspended in connection with the scandal, but did not name them. The company said it would hire an American law firm, which it did not identify, to conduct an internal investigation of the emissions deception. Berthold Huber, a labor leader who is the acting chairman of the company’s supervisory board, attributed the deceit to “developers and technicians” in the company’s motor development operations. The company indicated that further dismissals were likely to follow.
In the United States on Friday, federal regulators announced a rigorous new series of road tests to determine whether other automakers had used software to cheat on emissions testing.