Volkswagen STORING 300,000 diesel cars in U.S. bought back after Dieselgate

Volkswagen has spent around £5 billion to buy back some 350,000 diesel-engined cars in the U.S. after the Dieselgate scandal. And it’s storing them all in 37 secure facilities around the country.

Volkswagen may have abandoned its ‘Clean Diesel’ mantra after the Dieselgate scandal revealed they’d been busy scamming emission tests around the world. And they’re doing it successfully, with a focus shifting big time towards electric cars, and much more emphasis on petrol engines instead.

But Dieselgate has cost VW an arm and a leg, with the cost of being compelled to buy back some 350,000 diesel-engined cars in the US alone costing the German firm more than £5 billion. But what do you do with 350,000 VWs you can’t sell and can’t, at least for now, export out of the US? 

It would seem, according to Reuters, that VW has the cars they’ve bought back stored in 37 facilities across the States in unlikely places from a dis-used football stadium in Detroit to a former paper mill in Minnesota. Not only are the diesel car being stored, but they’re also being maintained to make sure they remain a viable asset. Which won’t be cheap.

It appears that up until the end of 2017 VW had bought back 335,000 vehicles, scrapped 28,000 of them and resold 13,000. And now it’s waiting for US regulators to approve emissions modifications for the stored vehicles so it can either re-sell them or export them.

But it’s not over as a headache for VW, with the buy-backs expected to last until the end of 2019, and the need to store the equivalent of Volkswagen’s entire US sales in 2017 not likely to end much sooner.