Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles aims to lower its CO2 emissions compliance gap this year, after its failure to meet 2020 targets led to regulatory fines for parent company VW Group.
VW Group has said it expects it will have to pay the EU a sum in the low hundreds of millions of euros for its emissions results in 2020, but it should avoid new fines in 2021 for passenger-car emissions thanks to new full-electric vehicles such as the Skoda Enyaq and Audi Q4 e-tron.
Its light commercial vehicles division, which will post a second straight year of losses in 2021 as it invests in electrifying its fleet, also sells passenger derivatives of its commercial vans. Roughly half of its European volume from the small Caddy model line and 40 percent from its medium Transporter family are subject to car emissions targets rather than those for light-commercial vehicles.
Holger Kintscher, Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles chief finance officer, said the unit was expecting to again miss its overall target this year. "We're expecting a decline in CO2-related headwinds, but they will still be in the triple digit millions of euros," he told reporters last week.
That money does not represent fines that will be paid to Brussels, but rather are internal transfers to VW Group largely as compensation for vans failing to meet passenger car fleet emission obligations.