Volkswagen is moving towards for record group sales this year as the “strong trend” in deliveries is going to continue with November and December figures, CEO Matthias Mueller said.
Registrations at the world’s largest automaker including the Audi and Porsche nameplates leapt 8.2 percent in October to 940,800 cars, broadening the 10-month gain to 3.2 percent or 8.75 million.
“All brands have most recently developed highly,” Mueller stated on Wednesday at a staff event in Wolfsburg. “And I rely on that also the two remaining months will confirm the strong pattern. And that we will have the ability to finish the year 2017 on a new record.”
In 2016, the first complete year after VW’s emissions test-cheating “Dieselgate” scandal, group sales boosted 3.8 percent to a record 10.3 million automobiles, assisted by a double-digit boost in China and gains in Europe.
But Mueller slammed that a post-Dieselgate drive to enhance accountability and become more transparent was making sluggish progress.
“On the issue of culture change, development is in part still dragging,” Mueller stated. “In lots of places we are still too slow, too bureaucratic and too hierarchical.”
VW brand chief Herbert Diess, who has consistently encountered the automaker’s top labor representatives regarding cost cuts, informed Germany’s Handelsblatt newspaper that differences with the unions continue even a year after a hard-fought turnaround strategy was agreed.
“We are in part divided on how rapidly the entire thing (reforms) must take place,” Diess was quoted by Handelsblatt as saying.
