Volkswagen has postponed the final decision whether to build a car plant in Turkey, a company spokesman said, cited by Reuters. The announcement comes amid international criticism of the country’s military operation in Syria and concerns about potential reputational fallout.

Prosecutors in Stuttgart, Germany are set to fine Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler between €800m and €1bn for diesel-related violations, German magazine Der Spiegel said in its online edition on Friday. According to the media, German motor vehicle authority KBA had discovered cheating software fitted to Mercedes-Benz C-Class and E-Class vehicles and already ordered the carmaker to recall 280,000 vehicles.

The German manufacturer Volkswagen announced this Monday that it has postponed its decision on where to build its new multibrand assembly factory in Eastern Europe, where some of the German group’s car models would be produced. Still, the group, has been given the greenlight by the Board of Supervisors of the project and its management to start final talks with the contenders for the investment, which is being estimated at approximately €1bn.

German prosecutors charged former Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn and four others with fraud in the emissions cheating scandal that has helped turn many Europeans against diesel engines and accelerated the push toward electric cars.

Volkswagen's premium brand Audi wants to cut costs by $17bn by 2022, a German business magazine reported on Thursday, citing Audi executives. According to the information, the cost cuts are aimed at help helping finance projects such as a shift to electromobility at Audi, but they will as well result in a 3 percent decrease in Audi's staff per year, or around 14,000 jobs by 2024.

Volkswagen Group and Ford Motor are expected to unveil an alliance on Tuesday that would reportedly combine forces on commercial vehicles and is likely to expand into joint development of electric and self-driving technology. Even though the details of the partnership are still a mystery, the move is aimed at saving the automakers billions of dollars.

In 2017 VW Group posted a monster sales year with 10.7m vehicles delivered, making it one of the largest automakers in the world. But not the largest. That honor went to the Renault-Nissan Alliance, whose acquisition of Mitsubishi helped place it at number one. In 2018, however Volkswagen has struck back with 10.83m vehicles delivered worldwide, a new all-time record for any automaker.

Volkswagen is readying its production facilities to make 50m electric cars over the next several years, the automaker’s CEO Herbert Diess told Automotive News in an interview published 12 November. The announcement comes as Volkswagen continues to move past the 2015 Dieselgate emission scandal and follows the UK ban on new diesel vehicles altogether.

Volkswagen announced on 16 October its subsidiary Audi had agreed to pay an €800m fine issued by German prosecutors in order to clear another hurdle in its path to drawing a line under the three-year-old Dieselgate scandal that has cost it billions of dollars.

The European Commission has opened an in-depth investigation into whether German automakers BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen Group (Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche) breached EU antitrust rules by colluding to avoid competition on the development and roll-out of technology to clean the emissions of petrol and diesel passenger cars. The move marks a fresh blow to the scandal-hit industry three years after the notorious 'Dieselgate' scandal.