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Volkswagen Plans 30,000 Job Cuts Worldwide (bbc.com)
Volkswagen has announced plans to cut 30,000 jobs worldwide with about 23,000 of the losses borne in Germany. From a report on BBC:VW, still dealing with the aftermath of the emissions-cheating scandal, aims to rejuvenate its core brand, and develop new electric and self-driving cars. VW says it will create 9,000 jobs as part of investments in new products. The cuts should bring annual savings of $3.92bn by 2020. VW and unions have been hammering out a plan to revive its fortunes since June. Volkswagen chief executive, Matthias Mueller, said it was "the biggest modernisation programme in the history of the group's core brand." "The VW brand needs a real shake-up and that is exactly what the future pact has turned out to be," he added. The car giant -- which employs 610,000 people in 31 countries -- wants to increase the brand's profit margin from 2% to 4% and to do this it will need to improve productivity at its German plants by 25%.
With the possible exception of Daimler, who merely sold cars with cheating engines bought from Renault-Nissan, I am not aware of a volume car manufacturer that hasn't been caught cheating emissions or is under very serious suspicion of doing so since the VW scandal broke.
VW acknowledged the issue, suspended everyone who could have had something to do with it, started a recall programme and it currently produces the diesel cars with the lowest NOx emissions in practice. None of the other manfucturers have even admitted that they are or were cheating, even though some are right now delivering cars producing more NOx on the road than the VW EA189 even though they are officially meeting Euro 6 on the test bench. Some, like GM, which already had a long history of cheating emissions, have even tried to cover up their cheats.