Volkswagen is getting caught up in its own lies one too many times, it seems.
Last September, the German automaker was embroiled in a scandal surrounding the company's tactics to disguise its vehicles emissions from the U.S.'s Environmental Protection Agency.
Sneaking in a "defeat device" that's programmed to know when a car is being tested so the vehicle will automatically turn on its full emissions control systems, the car maker got caught by the EPA and was forced to recall over half a million of its diesel passenger cars.
Besides cheating the EPA, it's been revealed that VW is also over exaggerating its vehicles' fuel economy figures. In a German Sunday newspaper, the Bild am Sonntag reported that Volkswagen's upper echelon of corporate officers were well aware that their vehicles' fuel estimates were way, way off.
One Volkswagen model sold in Europe, the Polo TDI BlueMotion, boasts a 110bhp 1.2-liter 4 cylinder engine that can go as far as 60.1mpg up to 83.1mpg (depending on engine variant). The Polo TDI BlueMotion was subsequently pulled off the market according to what Volkswagen cites as low sales figures.
The Bild am Sonntag reports otherwise, however. What VW calls "subdued demand" the paper claims former CEO Martin Winterkorn's attempt to save the company from future trouble. The Bild suggests claims that the automaker failed to inform Polo TDI BlueMotion owners of the vehicles higher-than-stated fuel consumption numbers. In fact, the paper suggests that the stated numbers versus the real life gas mileage was off by as much as 18 percent.
To VW's credit, the German paper did not specify as to where it got its sources so their claims should be taken with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, VW did respond to the paper's damning claims against the car company by reiterating their reasons for withdrawing the removal of a specific model from the market.
"The offering of the BlueMotion TDI Polo was suspended in all markets due to subdued demand. We are currently testing all models built from 2012 for differences in CO2 levels from the listed values," a VW spokesperson said.
