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Bentley Bentayga bodies to be built in Bratislava

Volkswagen's plant in Bratislava, Slovakia, has come a long way. After getting its start in 1971 by subcontracting the production of Skoda-branded vehicles, the plant was purchased by VW in 1991, where it was quickly put to further good use as it began producing Volkswagen Passat models for export. More recently, Bratislava has become a bastion for SUVs, assembling the Audi Q7 and Porsche Cayenne, in addition to the VW Touareg. Color us unsurprised, then, to learn that the Bentley Bentayga, which will be built atop the same large SUV platform as its cousins from Audi, Porsche and VW, will also be used for at least part of the production of Bentley's first SUV. Surely, though, one of the hallmarks of the Bentley brand is that its cars are handmade in England. Won't the Bentley-buying populace feel slighted by production in Slovakia? Not to worry. As is the case with the Porsche Cayenne, all that will be produced in Slovakia is the Bentayga's body. According to a report from Automotive News, bodies for the Bentayga will be shipped from Bratislava to Crewe, England, where they will be finished into fully operational vehicles. In order to accommodate the additional work, VW will reportedly invest 500 million euros into the plant in Slovakia and hire hundreds of workers.

Porsche-Piech buy 10% stake in VW's holding company

In August, 2009, as the scuttled merger of Porsche and Volkswagen had gone bad and Porsche was backed up against the ropes, Porsche Automobil Holding SE (PAHSE) relinquished a ten-percent stake in itself to Qatar Holdings as well as options it held on 17 percent of VW shares. The sale meant that, for the first time since the founding of the company 61 years before, an entity outside the Porsche and Piech families had a say in the running of PAHSE.
Buying that ten-percent stake back returns full ownership to the two families, the holding company's sole possession being ownership of 50.7 percent of VW's common shares. The price paid wasn't disclosed, but at market rates the purchase would be worth close to $1.25 billion. Qatar intends to hold onto the 17-percent stake it has in Volkswagen.

VW air rule violation allegations 'stunning,' $18B fine unlikely

The big automotive news today was the US federal allegations that VW quietly and illegally installed software on approximately 482,000 diesel vehicles sold in the United States so that they would not return substandard results on government emissions tests. To say the least, this is potentially a very big deal. You can read the details of the government's allegations here. The problem seems to be with the NOx trap. Sam Abuelsamid, a former AutoblogGreen editor who is now a senior research analyst at Navigant Research's Transportation Efficiencies program, told me that there were some hints that VW's diesel emissions strategy had issues a while back. The vehicles affected by today's announcement are all equipped with the 2-liter, 4-cylinder TDI, he said. They all have the lean NOx (nitrogen oxides) trap, whereas all other current modern diesels use urea to treat NOx emissions. "When VW launched those vehicles, I went to the TDI launch program in Santa Monica and asked them if they were going to put the diesel engine into the Tiguan because that would be an ideal application," he said. "They said no, because it would be too heavy. Turns out, the NOx trap was enough to meet the emissions standards in the smaller cars, but not the Tiguan. That seems to be where the problem is, in the NOx trap. All the other big VW and Audi diesels, they use urea, just like BMW and Mercedes do." Abuelsamid added that, in California, to do an emissions test, testers don't stick a probe up the exhaust, as you would suspect. Instead, they just do a visual test to make sure nothing was tampered with and then plug a scanner into the OBD-II port to read the codes. The news today basically says that the cars were programmed to send out false codes, giving readings that testers are looking for instead of what's actually going on. "That's the background, as far as I know at this point," he said. This could be "a black eye on the auto industry." - John O'Dell Speaking at the AltCar Expo in Santa Monica just hours after the news first broke this morning, Edmunds.com's John O'Dell said the Fed's allegations were "stunning." The idea that VW might have gamed the system, he said, "underscores how important EPA clean air numbers are, that a company would allegedly stoop to this to try and meet them. Obviously, people are paying attention to that sort of thing.