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Volkswagen Group has been sued by hundreds of thousands of car owners in its home market to obtain financial compensation for deceiving consumers because of emissions fraud, and German consumer organizations have fought the lawsuit against Volkswagen on behalf of these consumers.

After negotiations between Volkswagen and the German consumer group broke down, Volkswagen proposed to skip the German consumer group and directly compensate diesel car owners, which is expected to pay 830 million euros (about 6.28 billion yuan) in compensation. Now, however, negotiations have resumed.

According to the latest foreign media reports, Volkswagen and German consumer organizations have agreed to resume negotiations, hoping to reach an agreement on a class action against Volkswagen for manipulating diesel emissions tests. German local court said on the 20th that the parties involved in the case have accepted the court's recommendation to reopen dialogue in an attempt to reach a settlement.

Back in 2018, Germany issued a new draft law that allows consumer organizations to file lawsuits on behalf of consumers, thereby freeing consumers from paying high legal costs. In September 2019, more than 400000 German Volkswagen owners signed a class action over cheating in the exhaust emission test of Volkswagen diesel vehicles, and German consumer organizations filed a complaint with the court demanding financial compensation from Volkswagen Group.

In response to the breakdown of the previous negotiations, Volkswagen said in a statement that although the settlement negotiations with consumer organizations failed, it should not be at the expense of consumers, because lawyers representing consumer organizations charged too much fees, reaching 50 million euros, is the reason why it is difficult for the two sides to reach a settlement.

German consumer groups said that the failure of the negotiations was due to Volkswagen's failure to guarantee the establishment of an expected compensation mechanism for consumers and would continue to strive for a settlement of the previous terms through the court.

Now the negotiations between the two sides have started again, and the lawsuit is expected to reach a final settlement. German consumer groups say they have not changed their demands that any settlement must be fair, transparent and verifiable.

The Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal was revealed in 2015, when Volkswagen admitted that it had controlled the software of some diesel engines to run only during regulatory tests and shut down during normal driving, thus avoiding excessive emission tests. but the actual emissions are all 10-14 times higher than the standard. It is understood that there are about 11 million Volkswagen diesel vehicles equipped with cheating software worldwide, including 8 million in Europe alone, including 2.4 million in Germany. So far, Volkswagen has updated its software for these vehicles.

Over the past four years, Volkswagen has been involved in a number of lawsuits and executives have been charged with imprisonment, leading to management unrest. Volkswagen has so far lost as much as 30 billion euros (230 billion yuan) due to emissions gates, and related losses and compensation are still in progress.

In 2020 alone, Volkswagen has received huge fines from many countries. In January, Canadian prosecutors approved a fine of about $150 million on Volkswagen. Regulators in Poland and Australia also imposed huge fines on Volkswagen. In addition, nearly 100000 car owners in the UK recently filed a class action lawsuit against Volkswagen Group, demanding that Volkswagen be held responsible for "emissions cheating" and "misleading consumers".

The emission cheating incident caused irreparable losses to Volkswagen Group, which continued to ferment, and let the public once again fall into the whirlpool of public opinion in the scandal.

The latest sales figures show that Volkswagen Group's global sales reached 836800 vehicles in January 2020, down 5.2 per cent from a year earlier. Among them, Volkswagen's sales in China fell 11.3 per cent in January, selling 343400 new cars, accounting for 41 per cent of its global sales.

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