On October 21, 2015 Volkswagen halts the sales in Europe of all models that feature diesel engines equipped with defeat devices meant to falsify emissions compliance, the latest in a global scandal expected to cost the German automaker billions of dollars. The company said that the measure affects a "very limited," though unspecified, number of vehicles.

Volkswagen has been in investigations that it intentionally cheated on diesel admission tests, specifically those pertaining to nitrous-oxide emissions. Several employees have been suspended or have resigned, and the automaker is currently developing one or more fixes for the 11 million vehicles worldwide affected by this issue.

The European stop-sale affects diesel models equipped with Volkswagen Group's EA189 four-cylinder turbodiesel engine. The EA189 was replaced by the EA288 in 2014, the latter of which been the diesel engine in US VW models since the start of the 2015 model year. Volkswagen told Reuters that this stop-sale only affects a small number of vehicles, and those cars would be sold once fixed. olkswagen's US dealerships are still under a recall of 8.5 million vehicles, despite claims that the newer engine meets current environmental standards.

Switzerland, which isn't a member of the EU but has close trading ties, last month banned sales of new Volkswagen cars with the engine that is affected.

To further bridge the gap between the goings-on in Europe and the US, Volkswagen finally added a vehicle identification number database on its Diesel Information site, which also has a video apology from Michael Horn, President and CEO of Volkswagen Group of America. Europe's site already has the VIN-based lookup tool.

The long-term economic fallout from the scandal for the company and its employees remains unclear.

Following a visit to Volkswagen's Wolfsburg plant Wednesday with the governor of Lower Saxony state, a minority shareholder, new CEO Matthias Mueller said that "at the moment we have no grounds even to consider short-time work,"