Martin Winterkorn should have seen this coming in his rearview mirror on the way out.
USA Today is reporting that German prosecutors launched an investigation Monday into the ex-Volkswagen CEO amid the auto manufacturer's emissions cheating scandal. The Volkswagen scandal has additionally spread to the automaker's luxury brand Audi, which said Monday that 2.1 million of its cars worldwide have been affected by the emissions cheating as well. According to a CNBC report, 1.42 million Audi vehicles in Western Europe had deceptive software installed, in addition to 577,000 in Germany and 13,000 more in the U.S.
Last Tuesday (September 22), Volkswagen admitted that 11 million of its vehicles had software manipulated, allowing it to cheat in United States emissions tests. Those vehicles were emitting dangerous pollutants of up to 40 times U.S. standards. The next day, Winterkorn resigned as the auto manufacturer's CEO, but his tenure at the top will be scrutinized along with what's sure to be a number of government investigations into Volkswagen.
The automaker ended its challenging week by announcing Porsche chief Martin Mueller as the new CEO of Volkswagen, but not before more controversy struck. That's because, Germany's transport minister reported that Volkswagen also rigged emission tests on roughly 2.8 million diesel vehicles in Germany as well, according to a Reuters report Friday.
With every day that passes by and more bits of information being revealed, the public is seeing how entrenched Volkswagen is with this messy scandal. Mueller has plenty of work to do to reverse and clean up VW's image.
