Dieselgate: Swiss car owner becomes first to win compensation

Around 180,000 car buyers and lessees in Switzerland are said to have been affected by the manipulations to VW diesel vehicles. Copyright 2016 The Associated Press

For the first time in Switzerland, a Volkswagen customer won an appeal court case against car dealer AMAG, obtaining the cancellation of the sale agreement and a compensation of CHF18,000 ($20,572) - plus estimated court and legal costs.

In Switzerland no Volkswagen customer has ever been compensated after the 2015 Dieselgate controversy. But this is about to change. A Geneva court has once more confirmed the liability of an AMAG importer and concluded that the Swiss owner of a Volkswagen diesel car was right when he cancelled his sale agreement, Swiss public television RTSExternal link reported on Thursday.   

The court had already reached this conclusion in 2021, but AMAG had appealed. In June, the trial in Geneva granted another victory to the Swiss customer, who will be the first in the Alpine country to get compensation.

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The court ruled that the vehicle was still too polluting according to the applicable standards, and the Swiss driver could have been fined for driving the car. But AMAG said in a statement that the judgement was based on “a legally incorrect expert opinion. Its erroneous results are not transferable to other vehicles.” Now the Swiss company does not rule out a further appeal to the Federal Court.

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But the lawyer of the plaintiff, Jacques Roulet, told RTS that there are potentially tens of thousands of Swiss drivers who drive VW diesel vehicles with manipulated engines that are not in compliance.

In 2015, the emissions scandal revealed how around 11 million of the German diesel cars were manipulated to show low emissions in official tests, but in normal use were significantly more polluting. Around 180,000 car buyers and lessees in Switzerland are said to have been affected by the manipulations.