VW News: Volkswagen Doesn't Have Enough Engineers To Meet New Emission Standards

[William Maley]

In a month's time, Europe will be switching from much maligned New European Drive Cycle (NEDC) to the Worldwide Harmonized Light Duty Vehicles Test Procedure (WLTP). Automakers are scrambling to get models certified under this new procedure. This presents a big problem for Volkswagen as they don't have enough engineers to make sure their vehicles to meet the new standards.

According to Reuters, Volkswagen lost a number of engineers that specialized in engine calibration ever since the company revealed they were using illegal software on their diesel vehicles to cheat emission tests.

“Engine development expertise has been lost,” said Volkswagen Group CEO Herbert Diess.

It is so bad, that Volkswagen believes it will affect their financial results for the second half of this year as they might not be able to get a number of vehicles out on the road. The company said there would a bottleneck of certain model variants between now and October.

Volkswagen is working hard to try and overcome this problem. They have plucked BMW engine development expert Markus Duesmann last week to try and get through this mess.

Source: Reuters

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[David]

Rats fleeing a ship that they did not want to be tied to. Totally understandable.

Good luck getting caught up. Profits will be hit for the next few years as they rebuild.

[riviera74]

Lack of engineers, huh?  Sounds like what GM's problem when Congress was discussing emissions standards back in the 1970s.  GM said: hire more lobbyists; whereas Honda said: hire more engineers.  Maybe VW needs to toss a few executives overboard and hire another 30 engineers to solve this problem.

[Suaviloquent]

hmm, isn’t VW pretty heavily reliant on diesels  still in Europe?

[Drew Dowdell]

13 hours ago, Suaviloquent said:

hmm, isn’t VW pretty heavily reliant on diesels  still in Europe?

Everyone is pretty reliant on diesels in Europe still. 

[David]

15 hours ago, riviera74 said:

Lack of engineers, huh?  Sounds like what GM's problem when Congress was discussing emissions standards back in the 1970s.  GM said: hire more lobbyists; whereas Honda said: hire more engineers.  Maybe VW needs to toss a few executives overboard and hire another 30 engineers to solve this problem.

So true, they say that the average company can hire 4-5 engineers for every executive they rid themselves of. Strengthening a company that becomes more innovative and creating jobs and new products.

I love that Dell Technology has continued to reduce the bloated overhead of EMC Executives as they continue to streamline products, grow engineering and bring new and better products to market.

[riviera74]

In an era where there is still a lot of M&A activity, executives should be made as redundant as the workers are once the factories shut down.  I would argue even more so, since executives rarely add any shareholder value anymore.