Blast From The Past - 1968 Vw Bus on 2040-cars

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Audi to keep hiring workers despite VW diesel scandal

Even while Volkswagen contemplates delaying or canceling projects to pay for costs related to the massive diesel emissions scandal, its stablemate Audi is hiring, according to Reuters. Audi certainly isn't immune to the diesel scandal, with around 2.1 million affected vehicles worldwide including 13,000-14,000 in the US, but the scandal so far isn't affecting staffing levels. "We are sticking with plans for strategic growth and are continuing to hire new employees as planned," Audi board member for human resources Thomas Sigi said in a German newspaper, according to Reuters. Sigi even suggested paying a "respectable" bonus to workers next year. Audi has some big projects on the horizon, too. Among them, the company intends to launch a production version of the E-Tron Quattro Concept in 2018, and for performance fans a new TT RS appears to be on the way. The new A4 should be a big contributor to global volume when its worldwide rollout is complete. Rather than allowing the diesel scandal to hurt all of its divisions, the VW Group instead wants to concentrate the fallout (and costs) on the VW brand, according to Reuters. Those expenses could be huge. Volkswagen is budgeting around $7.3 billion just to repair the 11 million emissions-cheating vehicles. Worldwide, maximum estimates put the whole mess at $87 billion. Related Video:

VW uses NorCal Forest to make e-Golf carbon neutral

On the one hand, it's just a forest. There are beautiful redwood trees and clean air, cool, quiet creeks and hidden wildlife. You know, a forest. The kind that have existed for millions of years. On the other, it's a carefully managed collection of natural resources that lets companies pay money to make their products more beneficial to the environment. Welcome to the Garcia River Forest. For our purposes, the Garcia River Forest is interesting because of its connection to Volkswagen. Its young redwoods are helping Volkswagen create something almost unheard of in the automotive industry: a (mostly) carbon-neutral car. The 10,000-foot overview of how this works is as follows: when you buy the electric car, part of your money goes to support three carbon offset projects. These projects (the one in the Garcia River Forest, the Big River And Salmon Creek Forests in California, and the McKinney Landfill in Texas) have put a price on the value of not letting more carbon get into our atmosphere. The calculations come in the form of credits per metric ton of CO2 and VW has paid enough money to cover the emissions it generates during the production and distribution of the e-Golf as well as the charging for around 36,000 miles of driving. VW worked with 3Degrees, a provider of carbon offset services, to calculate the amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that each e-Golf will be responsible for, from the factory to the driveway. The Garcia River Forest location is managed by The Conservation Fund (TCF). VW originally announced the carbon-neutral program back when it revealed US details for the e-Golf, in August 2013. Stuart Gardner, project manager at VW of America for the Golf family, told AutoblogGreen that the idea for the carbon offset came from the way VW understands plug-in vehicle buyers. "At Volkswagen, we strive to be leaders in e-mobility and developing alternative powertrains and we realize that, when someone buys an electric vehicle - the e-Golf, for example - they are doing more than just buying an electric vehicle," he said. "They are buying a lifestyle and they want to engage in this lifestyle." VW is not releasing the specific amount of the purchase price of each e-Golf that is directed to the Garcia River Forest (or any other carbon offset projects).

Volkswagen Golf Wagon caught completely uncovered

Without a lot of information to go with them, our camera-toting spies have captured some new images of a Volkswagen Golf wagon variant that is almost completely undisguised. In fact, the one piece of camouflage on the tidy wagon would probably have gone unnoticed to most casual viewers. Look closely at the rear three-quarter view of the car and you'll notice that the apparent taillight clusters are actually fakes - the outline of the real units is faintly visible behind the blue bodywork and the sticker-like fake taillights.
It's a good guess then, that this Golf wagon (called a Golf Kombi by our spy photographer) is a prototype that's pretty far along in the development cycle for Volkswagen. We can't be sure what impact this will have on the company's small wagon offering here in the US, but we'd be pretty surprised if something very like this didn't end up as the next Jetta SportWagen. We might well have more information on that front, after we visit Geneva next week.