VOLKSWAGEN TO RECALL 8.5 MILLION CARS

German officials, Apparently frustrated with Volkswagen’s slow responses to diesel-gate are demanding a recall.

Starting in January, 8.5 million Volkswagen Group diesel-powered cars will be called back to dealers across Europe to receive fixes to their emissions systems that were fitted with emissions test-cheating software.

According to a Bloomberg report, the decision comes after the German Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA) rejected the VW Group’s proposal for owners to bring their cars into dealers for repairs on a voluntary basis.

A VW spokesperson told Reuters that it was recalling 500,000 of those 8.5 million “voluntarily” — it had previously stated that eight million cars in Europe had the faulty software.

Surely, VW would have preferred to handle repairs as customers chose to have them fixed, rather than in a recall. That’s because, even in recall scenarios, customers are slow to respond to repair notices issues by dealers. So, on a voluntary basis, it’s likely that pace would have been even slower, with some VW diesel owners might not have returned for a fix at all. This would likely have saved VW lots of time and money.So the KBA appears to have decided to force the hand of the world’s largest carmaker.

The recall constitutes just shy of one-third of the carmaker’s total car sales between the affected 2009 to 2015 model years. Included in that recall are 2.4 million VW diesels in Germany alone. The recall — now the largest in German history — will surely be a huge undertaking and will affect a large swath of the car-owning population. Unlike in the U.S., where diesel cars represent a small fraction of car sales, diesel comprises around half of new car sales in Europe.

How Volkswagen will fix the affected cars in the now-demanded recall is unclear. The world’s largest carmaker has previously stated it would present a plan to fix the cars in October.

However, that plan has yet to have been announced. California recently demanded that VW must present to the state a plan of attack by November 20. What will happen if the carmaker misses that deadline remains unclear