This is the sales invoice for the "dieselgate" for Volkswagen in Spain

As you will well remember, in the last quarter of last year a major piece of news came to light about the Volkswagen Group and the polluting emissions of a good part of its models and versions. And we say major news not because it was good, but because of the impact it had across the whole planet.

While the German group admitted to having installed a device capable of recognising when an engine was undergoing an emissions test and modifying the electronic management to “be more efficient” during that test, many of us were horrified.

How will this affect the Group’s brands? Will customers and potential buyers lose confidence in VAG? These and many other questions were the ones we were asking ourselves. Penalties from various bodies have been emerging, and we have also learned that no European customer was going to be compensated. Volkswagen will have to pay extremely high sums in compensation in the United States.

One of the doubts that, on a personal level, was going around my head was whether all this commotion the Volkswagen Group has got itself into would affect sales in our country. I believed that in the first few weeks, while there were many investigations, the authorities would not want to get involved and customers would not pay it much attention.

In our country the scandal has had absolutely no effect. The fact is that I was wrong, but only partially, since all the media devoted several minutes of television and a good number of column inches in the print media during the first few days. Shortly afterwards there were resignations and figures for possible penalties, which could have frightened buyers. But looking at and analysing the sales results, almost a year after the scandal came to light, we have seen that no; in Spain the dieselgate has had absolutely no effect.

Observing the registration data for cars and the best-selling brands and models that have reached us today for last July and the year-to-date total, with the data in hand we realise that the level of sales remains stable, and slightly up for VAG.

Between January and July 2015, the Volkswagen brand (which, by bearing the Group’s name, could have been the most affected) registered 58,169 vehicles, while in the same period of 2016, with the scandal very fresh, sales figures were 56,526 cars. This represents a sales loss of 2.8 %, a slight and manageable percentage.

The difference is around 1,500 units from one year to the next. Do you know which model has lost the most sales compared with the first seven months of one year to the first seven months of the other? The Golf. The compact’s losses for Volkswagen year to date amount to more than 900 units (5 %), of which more than 700 were in this just-finished month of July. Interestingly, the C-segment has received major model updates, with the new Astra gaining momentum (13.2 % growth year to date) and the Seat León (up 4 % year to date) continuing to hit hard. The Golf has been with us for several years now without any changes or novelties.

Where are we going with this? The slight loss for Volkswagen (as a brand) in these first seven months need not be due to the dieselgate, but rather to several of its rivals having received updates, which tends to leave those that have not yet done so slightly behind.

If we look at Audi, Seat and Skoda, which also belong to the same Group, we see that the figures for Audi, so far this year, are 16.4 % better than in 2015; Seat has fallen 4.8 % (although we trust that with the new Ateca it will recover much of the losses for the rest of the year) and Skoda is up 4.1 %. In this way, Audi has gained 4,837 sales, Seat has lost 2,565 units, Skoda gains 626 registrations and Volkswagen has lost 1,643. Among these four brands, the largest by volume, despite the dieselgate, they have so far improved by 1,255 units year to date.

To sum up: in Spain, the emissions scandal at the Volkswagen Group has not caused any kind of sales losses for the Group in car sales.

Registration data obtained from ANFAC