New sales of VW cars down 2 pct in Germany in November

FRANKFURT - Agence France-Presse

FILES - Employees of German car maker Volkswagen check cars at a assembly line of the VW plant in Wolfsburg, central Germany, on October 21, 2015. AFP Photo

The number of new Volkswagen cars registered in Germany declined by 2 percent in November, but VW remained the biggest-selling brand in its home country, official data showed on Dec. 2.  
  
New registrations of VW cars declined by 2 percent to 57,923 vehicles last month, the federal transport authority KBA calculated in regular monthly data, which also showed that VW’s share of the German market stood at 21.3 percent.     

Overall, the total number of new car registrations including all brands, both domestic and foreign, rose by 8.9 percent to 272,377 vehicles in November, KBA said.

VW is currently embroiled in a massive pollution-cheating scandal after it was forced to admit that it had installed software in 11 million diesel engines worldwide designed to skew the results of emission tests.

The scandal has sent shockwaves around the global automobile sector and plunged VW into its deepest ever crisis, which observers fear will hurt the group’s sales.

Among VW’s 12 different brands, new registrations of its top-of-the-range Audi marque rose by 3 percent in November, Porsche sales slipped by 0.4 percent, SEAT sales were down by 3.2 percent, but Skoda sales rose by 13.3 percent, KBA calculated.