Dieselgate: US Supreme Court rejects Volkswagen's appeal over emission cheating

The US Supreme Court on Monday has rejected Volkswagen AG's appeal to avoid lawsuits filed by the officials in three states who sought damages caused by the dieselgate scam. The denial by US Supreme Court comes as a major blow to the German automobile giant.

Back in 2015, Volkswagen was caught using sophisticated emission cheating software to evade nitrogen oxide emissions in lab environments. Globally, around 11 million vehicles across different Volkswagen Group brands were affected by this scandal. The scandal first came under the scanner in the US. Volkswagen also misled the EPA, which started asking questions in 2014.

Not only the pre-installed emission cheating software, but the automaker also installed software updates after selling the vehicles. These updates were aimed at refining the software used to control emissions.

Speaking about the rejection of Volkswagen's appeal to avoid lawsuits in the US, the automaker has said that it is confident in the strength of its factual and legal defences, including that the software updates reduced emissions and will contest these claims vigorously as the cases proceed.

Since the dieselgate scandal came under the scanner, Volkswagen had to pay more than $20 billion with the US EPA. Also, the automaker had to pay compensation to the affected vehicle owners besides recalling and repairing the affected cars. Besides the US, in several other countries around the world, Volkswagen Group is still contesting lawsuits because of the scandal.

Interestingly, Volkswagen AG is not the only automaker that has been involved in such malicious practices of cheating emission norms. Several other carmakers such as Daimler AG, Fiat Chrysler (Now part of Stellantis NV) too are facing similar charges of cheating the emission norms by installing cheat devices that hide real-time emissions during lab tests.