Toyota barefoot Volkswagen and takes back the gold medal in the world classification of car manufacturers. The Japanese company announced that it had sold 7,49 million vehicles in the first nine months of the year, thus surpassing the Wolfsburg giant, which - also due to the Dieselgate effect - stopped at 7,43 million.
In terms of variation on an annual basis, the two groups recorded a decrease in registrations of the same amount (-1,5%). Volkswagen, in addition to the image damage caused by the scandal of the rigged emissions, discounts a slowdown in sales in China and Brazil, while Toyota pays for a 7,8% drop in registrations in Japan.
In the first half of the year, Volkswagen sold 5,4 million cars, compared with Toyota's 5,02 million.
Meanwhile, today the Financial Times published an EU report dated 2013 in which former environment commissioner Janez Potocnik had pointed to a discrepancy in terms of emissions between the results of car manufacturers' tests and road tests. The text shows that the problem had already emerged two years ago in Europe, but had been ignored.
In detail, Potocnik in a February 2013 letter to the then industry commissioner Antonio Tajani had indicated that many ministers of European countries believed that there was "a significant discrepancy" between the performance of cars in reality and the results of laboratory tests and that this was probably the "main reason" why air quality standards did not fall to the target values from the European Union.
