VW emissions scandal: Golf recall announced (April 2016)

Owners of Volkswagen Golfs with the EA189 2.0-litre TDI BlueMotion engine will shortly receive a letter asking them to make an appointment with their nearest dealer so that a “technical solution” can be implemented to “remedy defects”.

Amid concern that a fix for engines implicated in the scandal could negatively affect their performance and/or fuel economy, Volkswagen has assured owners that the work to be carried out in this case “does not result in any changes to the fuel consumption levels, performance data or noise emissions”.

The recall announced will affect 15,000 owners across Europe, but more Golf models will subsequently be recalled, along with other cars in the Volkswagen line-up such as the Volkswagen Passat and Volkswagen Amarok. It's expected that around 1.1 million cars in the UK will eventually be brought in for work owing to the ‘dieselgate’ scandal, including those made by other brands in the Volkswagen Group like Audi, SEAT and Skoda.

The Volkswagen Group is thought to have set aside around £5bn to cover the cost of recalling cars implicated in the scandal. While owners in Europe won’t be offered compensation, as was first mooted, the work to fix affected cars will be free of charge.

The VW Group published a timetable for fixing the three engines fitted with defeat devices (the EA189 1.2, 1.6 and 2.0-litre diesel engines), which indicated the work would be finished by the end of this year. More recently, however, Matthias Muller, CEO of the Volkswagen Group, has admitted that the work may overrun into the first quarter of 2017 because of difficulties in finding fixes for dieselgate cars.