Volkswagen managed to defy the odds on Tuesday and beat out its competition to claim the title as top automaker, despite an emission-cheating scandal hovering over the global auto giant.
In the first quarter of the year, VW reported that it managed to have the world’s highest sales, grabbing the crown from Toyota as the world’s leading automaker.
The German company managed to boost sales through expanding sales in China, as top rival General Motors showed sluggish sales in the Asian super power due to declining demand.
Toyota suffered a loss of 2.3 percent of global sales in the January-March period, selling 2.46 million cars. Detroit’s GM experienced a 2.5 percent drop in sales to land behind Toyota with 2.36 million cars sold in the first quarter, blaming slumps in Latin America and China.
But Volkswagen, while facing billions of dollars in litigation over its diesel emissions scandal, reported earlier in April that it saw nearly a 1 percent increase in sales, with a surprising 2.51 million vehicles.
The company’s sales boost comes with a pretty big caveat. The automaker announced its biggest loss ever last week in setting aside nearly $18.3 billion to cover the settlement costs of emission cheating.
The company was caught using emission-cheating software in its clean diesel cars last year in the United States. Investigations have spread since then in several countries where emission cheating had been suspected.
The software-based “defeat device” would only activate emission controls when the cars were being tested. During normal driving, however, the cars’ federal and state-required emission controls would be switched off.
