The critical first High Court hearing in the class-action lawsuit being brought against Volkswagen for its actions in the Dieselgate scandal will kick off today (Monday) with a hearing over whether the company’s two-litre diesel engine was fitted with a defeat device.
Lawyers will argue the case over two weeks, with a judgement expected in spring 2020. Ahead of the trial, Slater and Gordon, leading the class-action lawsuit, described the hearings as “a decisive point”.
“VW has had plenty of opportunity to come clean, make amends and move on from this highly damaging episode,” said Gareth Pope, head of group litigation. “But instead it’s chosen to spend millions of pounds denying the claims our clients have been forced to bring,” he added.
Volkswagen said that it will continue to “defend robustly our position in the High Court”. In a statement to Autocar it added: “Volkswagen Group maintains that there has never been a defeat device installed in any of its vehicles in the UK."
The company said the specific legal point under consideration is “whether the legal definition of a defeat device is met in certain circumstances.”
If Volkswagen's lawyers win, the case is unlikely to progress further. If the ruling goes against them, the case will move to a second phase that is unlikely to play out until late 2020 or 2021. If VW is ultimately found guilty, it could be ordered to pay hundreds of millions in compensation.
It has also emerged that there is a dispute over how many owners are represented in the lawsuit. Slater and Gordon claims '100,000 motorists', but VW argues that the number is 86,000.
The number of motorists represented has fluctuated and gone down in recent months as duplicate and irrelevant claims are weeded out. Some Jeep and Jaguar owners had to be taken off the list, Autocar has been told.
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Dieselgate customer care
My VW 1.6 (Golf etate automatic TDI worked perfectly until NOx service action. The car was 4 years old and had done only 16,000 miles and had a full VW service history. Within a few months - the first time I drove it on the motorway I had problems with 'limp mode etc. VW AG (UK) pretended to know nothing of what I was talking about. I had heard about the dieselgate scandal but I didn't connect it to my car. I naively contacted VW AG (UK) customer services asking why the VW garage were not fixing my car and instead looking for other work to do on the car eg: recalibrate the gearbox etc? The car was going in and out of limp mode (losing power) when on the motorway and overtaking. After my second letter to customer services I advised that my letters wouldn't be responded to simply put on file. I turned to the Internet to find out what was going on with my car. When the ar completely broke down in france it transpired that it was an injector that had failed. I have since gone thorugh 2 more injector failures. The car has now completed 36,000 miles. Although I was plagued with problems since the NOx 'fix' and had the car serviced by VW exclusively they refused to help me with costs after their 2 year 'fix warranty' expired. When I said I wasn't prepared to pay for the £600 injector (plus labour plus 80.00 diagnostic) they charged me 20% handling cost on the injector - £120.00 plus £80.00 diagnostic charge.
I collected the car from the VW garage and drove it in limp mode firing on only 3 cylinders to repair it myself. I now carry two breakdown bags including a laptop with VCDS and two spare injectors. I complained to the department of transport etc who recommended that I consider taking civil action against VW. The car is now 8 years old - 36,000 miles only as mentioned. I service it myself now and I would never buy another VW AG product. This is not because of the dieselgate scandal but because what happened afterwards.... the corporate dishonesty of VW AG having disregard for my safety and other road users and their preferring to pretend they didn't know what I was talking about. They were the people that could have helped me but preferred to seek to exploit me rather than accept there had been lots of post fix problems especially with 1.6 TDI engines. They are still denying any wrongdoing now.
oh!
this is still going on? things do get dragged out! are the others who were caught being treat similarly, or is it just vw?
Justice ain''t swift