Volkswagen Killing All Diesel Cars In Australia

Volkswagen will kill off all its diesel cars in Australia throughout the coming months in a move which it says is unrelated to dieselgate.

Motoring reports that the German car manufacturer will eliminate all diesel car offerings in October when the updated 2019 Golf is launched exclusively with turbo-petrol powertrains.

Earlier this year, Volkswagen dropped the Passat diesel from its range, eliminated the Jetta, and only sells the Arteon as a petrol model. What’s more, the Passat Alltrack turbo-diesel model will soon be dropped from the range, as will all diesel five-seat Tiguans.

The third-generation Volkswagen Touareg SUV will be sold exclusively as a diesel, however.

According to Volkswagen Group Australia chief Michael Bartsch, the decision to ditch diesels come as part of a plan from VW to reduce drivetrain complexity.

“One of the big topics with our colleagues in Germany is complexity and whether you had WLTP or not, the complexity would have been an issue.

“Even if you didn’t have the emissions issue, we still would have had to look at the complexity issue. We have lost and will lose variants as a simple matter of complexity. That has been accelerated by the WLTP issue, no question about that.

“And for Volkswagen the WLTP issue has been compounded by having to work through the vehicles that have been challenged under the emissions topic,” Bartsch said.

Diesel Volkswagen models have fallen out of favor in Australia in recent years. In fact, they accounted for just 22.2 per cent of national sales in 2017.